Transcripts For CSPAN2 Ross Douthat The Decadent Society 20240713

Good afternoon and good evening. Welcome. Happy fat today. Thank you all for spending your tuesday with us. Im joe, executive director and the institute here has been here for over three years now. Ow ross has been an important member of the Institute Since our founding he has been our sedia fellow and has helped coordinate some of our events and more contentious events, you may have seen ross was involved in, right . Anyway, we are super pleased ross is joining us today on the day of the release of his latest book. All of you know ross is one of most important commentators on American Culture today and he writesod for the new york time opinion page and written more than a few books at this point and they released a couple of them have the title of how we became something and you may want to steer clear of that or explain at some point but anyway, the format will be that i will engage ross in a conversation about the book and i had the pleasure of reading it and it was an interesting book. In my judgment is not the typical conservative harangue on the way things are but takes a nice tact to explore what is going on in our culture. Once he and i have exhausted each other we will then open up the conversation to the rest of you so there will be people here with microphones. If you have a question please raise your hand and they will approach you and dont be alarmed. Bigger question and ross will engage you. Of course, as i always do i implore you to raise a question two people the more time ross has to respond on dont make a speech make it a nice pointed question. Thank you all for coming. [applause] lets begin the book is called the decadent society with decadence. What is decadence in the book . So, this is yes. This is working. Ecfirst, and q for coming. Joe, thank you for doing this. It is a pleasure to be back and to be in a situation where i am not moderating between the two embodiments of warring factions of modern american conservatism, as delightful as that was. But i have promised that midway through we will have some sorte of wrestle mania style faceoff and give people their moneys worth. Decadent, basically the book, the concede around decadence is lifted from a definition offered about 20 years ago of the term by the great cultural critic [inaudible] who wrote a book called from dawn till decadence. He basically made the argument that we should think of decadence not in terms of this catastrophic, moral corruption, not in terms of luxury goods and weekends ats las vegas and the perks and the faculty lounge here at t cua and that outrageos stuff but as a clinical term that describes a civilization that has achieved a certain level of Wealth Development and proficiency and finds itself in effect stock. And this is without clear lines of advance. It is a formal way of putting it, stock is the oped columnist distillation. In the book our gloss on [inaudible] to safe the, decadence properly understood refers to stagnation, drift and repetition at a high level of a civilization development and the argument then is that this term very reasonably applies to america, the west in the developed world encompassing the pacific rim since the late 1960s, early 1970s and for, you know, for the sake of convenience but also, i think, for the sake of what it evoked i start the book with the moon landing as this kind of particular peak of american and western achievement that was expected at the time to be not a peak but a beginning and the opening of, and kennedys phrase, a new frontier and instead it turned out that our capacities were more limited than we had hoped in space a tiny bit bigger and colder and less innumerate to once there was not a soviet threat to compete with and the space age petered out and that frontier was closed and at that point we entered in what i was scrubbing as decadence. Identified four areas, for indicators almost, that support the claim that we are in this period of decadence and you named a few of them but repetition, stagnation, and economic and technological stagnation, Political School arose is one and sterility. When you talk about identified one of those an example of why it as you do in the book for those who have not read it. Sure, the easiest one to start with is political sclerosis. That is one i think everyone in the western world and especially in the u. S. Recognizes and agrees upon that over the last few generations it has become a lot harder to effectively govern western countries and to effectively reform or transform or build new or unbilled government programs. So, an age when it was possible to elect a president and have a Dramatic Program of reform from frank than roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson really down through Ronald Reagan has given way to an age when president s are lucky if they can pass one major piece of legislation across their presidency. If they succeed, as a vomited with obamacare, they may pay a palooka price that lasts the duration of their presidency and overall politics is dominated by various stalemates, by polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities. Majorities. And we have in the United States congressional application, and an increasing form of government consists of basically negotiation between the executive branch and the Judicial Branch which a lot of actual american policy is made. In europe, somewhat different version, we have the institution of the European Union which has advanced to the point advanced to a point where it is ineffective too big to fail. It is all kinds of problems but no one except the wild and crazy english are willing to actually take the step of leaving, even the sort of fearsome populist nationalist of Eastern Europe dont plan to leave the eu. But meanwhile its inefficient. It creates common currency, all kinds of economic problems that are obvious to everyone but it can either move forward or back. Cant shrink back towards more sensible arrangement. It cant move forward towards thet kind of actual european superstate many of its architects envision. Itit has this stalemate. So thats what im describing as sclerosis, and as this that i think thats the easy one, the one people nod along too. The others are a little bit more debatable. So stagnation, economic stagnation is not as sort of thoroughgoing a reality of sclerosis. You still do a period of Economic Growth. We have managed a respectable pace of growth under basically since the Great Recession in 2008 but overall you see a pattern of real d celebration, lower rates compared what was the norm prior to the 1970s, and you have those growth rates achieved basically through a kind of perpetual borrowing. Where you can get the 2 growth with massive deficits whereas in the 1950s the 1950s you could at 4. 5 growth with what then were sometimes complained aboutet as massive deficits but were notas really deficits at all. So in effect, and to think those deficits may be more sustainable than some conservatives think but they are sustainable in effect its a rich society pain itself to maintain a former progress paying. Its own fundamentals dont really justify. Talk also in stagnation of the technological stagnation. You refer in the book back to the future to simplify this to give use. A walk through that. This is an argument i am basicallyen stealing from a grop of economists and not economists who over the lastec ten years he made the case that in spite of the iphone in your pocket and all the races of the internet, Technological Progress since the apollo era has been pretty disappointed. This as an argument tyler cowan of george mason is made, an argument peters teal famously made with a slight but how we expected flying cars come to lorient winging their way into the future and its that we got the 140 characters on twitter which is now 280 characters so in fact, there is no great stagnation. [laughing] and Robert Gordon at and econot at university of chicago or at northwestern was written a sweeping the house and page book the rise and fall of american growth, and the point they all make is its not the Technological Progress has ceased obviously. The internet era has demonstrated aot lot of incredie breakthroughs in communication, information transmission and simulation. Its more that Technological Progress has become wanted to mitchell. Its i all tacked and nothing el. Areas like transportation, energy, agriculture, even the built in and private dont you o become a progress that we took for granted between 18401970, lets say. Further, when Tech Companies leave the world attack and try to revolutionize realworld industries, those of the companies that often end up being the supposed unicorns that turn out to be a fraud or failures. The attempt to bring big tech to bear on a very oldfashioned with solving problem of how to conduct easy blood tests . But it doesnt work and end up with multibilliondollar company if operating or we were trying to revolutionize office space, a similar story. So thats i think the core of that piece of the stagnation is again progress hasnt ceased but its progress along a very particular dimension that concedes back into a larger pattern of decadence because it leads people to spendnd more and more time in Virtual Reality and simulations of reality, and to retreat from both certain kinds of Economic Activity but also to bring us to another forest, retreat from family formation, romance, sex, childbearing which is what, which is the aspect of decadence that i call sterility basically. There you have a wonderful comparison of Margaret Atwood involving a sterile landscape which i thought was really, really brilliant. Lets start to think critically about what you wrote. What would count as counter indicators . Your giving a kind of, you provide indicators, metric, excuse me. Im sorry. Sorry. Thank you, michael. You provide indicators by which to identify us as a decadent society. What might canadas counter indicators . In other words, signs of life that [inaudible] one of the key indicators to suggest that we are not, in fact, living through a time of immense technological transformation is the fact that productivity growth, and Economic Management tries to get at how technology is affecting the way people work has been stagnant and kind of pathetic for a long period of time in the early 21st century. That was not true, however, in the late 1990s in the initial flush of the internet revolution. There was, in fact, a surge of productivity growth in the developed world from, lets say 19962001. That suggests, i was alive then, i was a teenager and it really was this sort of brief window where there was this sense of sort of the possibility of really dramatic growth returning. Had that continued i think the argument im making today would, i be making different argument, that that window was a nondecadent exception that didnt didnt have the cascading effects the people expected it to. Or another example, right . I mentioned sterility. The defining feature of demography and the western world again since the baby boom, sie 1960s and 70s, is sub replacement for fertility. People having too few children to replenish the population. This is true everywhere that for a long time america was something of an exception. So down to the early 2000s american conservatives especially liked to say because america has retained a more dynamic economy and western europe, not sort of socialist and sclerotic and it is retained a certain amount of optimism about the future and intense religious practice if thats what our birthrate is still above replacement. Were still a country oriented towards the future in a way that france or sweden or increasingly japan arerd not. And that since the United States was not decadent by my definition, as long as its birthrate was exceptional over the last ten or 15 years our birthrate has ceased to be exceptional and we are now indistinguishable sub replacement fertility levels. Those are two examples of how its not under my attempt to create a statistical understanding of decadence, there are things thatpe could happen and have happened that would be not decadent and if they happen tohe get it would count as at least a shift, a change. But the other point i i would e is that its not, im not trying to examine eachs of these forces as sort of forces that are just existing on their own. Every society has some decadence ended. Whats distinctive about our moment isat the way these forces are converging so that slow Economic Growth feeds political unhappiness and distress in government which makes it harder to pass effective political policy programs which in turn slows Economic Growth further, and then drives down birthrate because people dont have any, dont feel like they have economic capacity capacity to in turn aches to find older and more risk averse which makes it hard to make political changes. You follow me. But theres a a sort of convergence of these forces that makes our moment more decadent, not fully decadent whatever that would mean, but more decadent than periods in the past and only had one of these forces at work. It is something that i wondered as i proceeded through the book. At times it could be the United States at times it can seem like it would be the west. In the time seems almost global. In terms of your description but i wondered whether, aside from expanding it, to include more and more, people who might be this week who are the victims of upsets that are now leading to decadence. It might be exclusive, finer grained you go. And excluded, certain communities. It might say, we are not an agent tech, we are actually an age of prosperity or ascendance. Because, africanamericans, and the United States. President was recently elected. More more representation, and what extent white thinking about that refinery analysis. Ross i guess i will work backwards. So take a case study of africanamericans. I think and this is of course a highly debatable proposition but i think that there was more progress for africanamericans and American Life in the period of running from 1942 men monday or 1940 to 1980 are. Like that. Then there has been in the periods sense. In that sense i think, africanamericans have participated to some extent and decadence as i am describing. So this is very little enacting american employment late reach a low at the moment and obviously the election of the first black american president , is obviously a break through but if you look at the gaps in the household with, the blackwhite income gap in the test score gaps, all of the sort of things that the reformers who are thinking are interested in racial equality are interested in changing changing, you get a lot more change and a lot of those cases. In the era of the Civil Rights Era in particular but really the whole zone from the great migration through the king assassination into the 1970s. So that sense, at least in some socioeconomic way, there is a kind of participation and decadence there. And i think, a little more of an open question and culture. Obviously certain lenders minute big increase in africanamerican representation and pop culture and sentiment but i also think that sometimes that too, is overstated and i think theres a little bit tough forgetting of the very recent passing, if you go back to 1980s, the biggest stars in america at that moment were africanamericans and run the most bill cosby, not something that started because for celebration at the moment but bill cosby eddie murphy, is not the case that snow africanamerican representation. In the rise of the africanamerican popculture figure really dates to the 60s and 70s and 80s. Western developed world. Or is a global phenomenon . I feel very confident arguing there is a deceleration and stagnation that japan, south korea and the United States share in common. What is happening with the co the rising powers of the world, china, india and so on. Developi . China, india and so on . You could make a case that the decadence of the west will enable the nondecadent developing world past us or a nation sentry, that is implicit. At the same time there are ways in which you look at demographics, the demographics of china is in the same low trap, and there are ways china is converging with the west and is the government decays there is a convergence in all our garlicky, it is not the same as the politburo but there is a convergence in stratified low fertility all log guardian and higher cases of wealth, not a case of china leapfrogging past us and what happens with the coronavirus raises a host of questions we can talk about in the apocalyptic portion of the evening. I had a question about that but we can save it. Another thing i enjoyed about your book is it wasnt the end of book. It doesnt say we are in this decadent society and only a matter of time before it is over. It is sustainable decadence. You get shirts made with sustainable decadence. And then of course it leads into what wouldnt one claim the book makes is people hear the word decadence and feel theres an iron logic of history, once you are decadent you are doomed and the absolute cliche version of this is the writing on the wall, the babylonian palace, orgies in rome, the barbarians sweeping in and so on. In fact i make the argument that decadence is a normal condition for successful societies, empires and civilizations to fall into. Once they do it can lead to collapse. If they have a rival who can exploit the decadence, it can lead to a sustainable stasis that can last a long time and however you want to chart a roman decadence it is 400 years from the nero, youll a moment of the fall of rome. However you want to chart ottoman decadence or decadence of the chinese empire to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These are long historical periods were prosperous societies look decadent without being tipped over into crisis and collapse. In certain ways that is a more pessimistic vision of the future. There is an appeal to the idea that once your point you are doomed. There is a sense at some level that people want history to follow morality play arc even if they dont want to be, up in the sacking of rome themselves. I quote w h ogden at the start of the book saying i am going to mangle the quote, the book is right here, so convenient. He says what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not that it went smash but managed to last four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope. That is the dark version of sustainable decadence but lets qualify by saying those four centuries rome lasted under decadence were, from the point of view of the face that founded this university, period of dynamic change from within, development of a nondecadent religious faith that did not in the end save the roman empire but did preserve and Carry Forward roman elements into the future down to the present day and was there when the empire went smash as a powerful force, you can imagine versions of that, renewal under decadence that reinvigorate our civilization, renewal under decadence that when our civilization falls, create something new to carry on the best a legacy and that is the optimistic case. In fact decadence has virtues. There are alternatives to decadence that are a lot worse than the lives we have now and we should regard life under decadence not necessarily as a horrible burden but as something that is not ideal but a gift because it leaves room for creativity and path back to dynamism and flourishing. The path back to dynamism and flourishing i did not anticipate encountering Cardinal Sarah in the book. Even less anticipated encountering exceptionalism. If you havent read it i apologize for spoiling it. No spoiler. If possible, ways of envisioning or imagining some sort of replenishment. If you are thinking about the vulnerabilities of a decadent civilization the vulnerabilities are starker than ours and in part that is because europe is more advanced in my sister sickle decadence indicators, lower birth rates for a longer period of time, they had relatively stagnant growth compared to a longer period of time but also more vulnerable in the sense that europe sits in the middle of the world whereas the United States has always had splendid isolation. Europe is in a deeply unstable equilibrium, not only with islam in the middle east but also the current exception of democratic diffidence which is the continent of africa. We are headed for a scenario where europe had more people in africa, by 2075 or so have 5 million odd people, 3. 5 billion, one way or another doesnt seem like that equilibrium will hold. You can tell a pessimistic story that a lot of conservative and reactionary types tend to tell where europe will build a fortress against mass migration and the fortress will fail and there will be migrants driven chaos but you can also tell an optimistic story, the ones i was raising by referencing Roman Catholicisms most famous african cardinal and the image of the afro futurism that has the appeal in the decadent west as examples, less examples because they are not examples, but suggestions of what a more successful confrontation between europe and africa is going to become could play out. So in that sense that is an example of places where decadent civilizations can be most vulnerable and they are for the most hope for renewal. It is a fascinating example of a very conservative traditional Roman Catholic cardinal from Africa Talking at a monument to the french revolution and in effect trying to call europe back to its ancestral faith while also building bridges to increasingly christian and catholic africa. What comes of that i dont know but it is an example of how history can present sympathies that you had not anticipated 30 or 40 years ago. You seem it is a reasonable argument, a long playing out over time but you do think through the apocalyptic. You wrote a column that talks about the coronavirus as a test case of the thesis. I didnt anticipate it happening when i was literally promoting the book. We could have some sustainable decadence for the book tour. I think i dont think the coronavirus is the thing that ends are decadence but it is an example how unexpected events, it is on the list of potential world transformers. It is something that can hit the week point in a decadent society. Under decadence, our government doesnt work particularly well. It doesnt have a lot of trust in public institutions. You have had a certain amount of naivete the way the western world has exported, in the supply chain this. It seems to be headed towards a more stable of authoritarianism but could be vulnerable to unexpected turmoil or revolution. I would describe the coronavirus as a stress test for decadence. It is quite serious and should have canned goods in your home. How is it a stress test, capable of responding to that, or a stress test i think we will be capable of responding to it in an imperfect but fundamentally adequate way. But i dont think it is guaranteed and puts pressure on institutions that under decadence or least functional and most vulnerable to outside stress. You have this affective stalemate in western politics between some sort of establishment that believed really intensely, the promise of the early Twentieth Century and it is fair to miss govern the western world in various ways. That has conjured up a populist response but the populist response seems perpetually unready to govern the country. The coronavirus is a threat that on the one hand is not consciously except in a providential way exploiting the mistakes of the establishment, the mistake of saying it is fine to have all your supply chains go overseas, find not to manufacture your own antibiotics domestically, we will not go to war with china, it is hitting that naivete but also hitting the fact the establishment isnt running the government, the populists are running the government meaning we have an acting department of Homeland Security head whose testimony today instilled noconfidence whatsoever, the populist who got elected talked about how to police the borders would be the man for this hour. Trumps tweets, he seems convinced he can talk the markets into calm, might be the thing America Needs right now. One of the four indicators responding to this are anticipating technology. We assume the area of technology, when not exploring the stars with human beings, there are some medical responses to this. If not summertime it will be shortly after that. That is reasonable and a counterpoint to some of the stagnation arguments. Not just we dont necessarily have a Public Health response. We dont necessarily expect the governmental side. We have effectively come close. And ebola vaccine, we managed past threats with a vaccine, and not dealt with or responded to. There havent been the kind of dramatic medical breakthroughs a prior round of breakthroughs let us to expect. When next declared war on cancer there were reasons to expect that we would cure cancer. We have very slowly made grinding progress against cancer. The same goes for alzheimers. We havent had the big dramatic victory. There has been slow progress and specific progress on rare conditions that is dramatic and there have been effective responses, somewhat effective responses to new diseases as they come up. I agree that it is not fool decadence. If it were fool decadence we should not expect the vaccine and we reasonably do. Theres a lot of the realm of technology and economics, like you said earlier there is good argument about what is happening. Your book assumes a kind of Technological Progress measured in rep unity is good. Not to have it become the kind of it is not always a good . I hope not. I say in the book that there are ways Technological Progress could end decadence that could be very dark. There is a transhumanist posthuman scenario that as a catholic i would oppose but under my definitions would count as an escape from decadence. It is not that all progress is good but i guess what i do think is the society we have built up is a society that expect them to some extent depends on the promise of progress and it is hard to imagine getting back to a society where that is not a big part of what is expected and hoped for. I dont think, as much as i find a certain pastora list and agrarian perspective appealing in certain ways i dont think there is a pastora list retreat from the modern world. There is for some people in some communities but not culture as a whole. In that sense i do think the alternatives are succeeding in finding new ways to grow or stagnating rather than finding arcadia again. Two more questions before we turn to the audience. What you entertain some alternatives. Is liberal democracy and alternatives . What is happening in turkey or hungary or poland. Is that a response to this . Every envisioning maria livening of society . Or is it Something Else . My take is both the revival of socialism embodied by figures as diverse as the likely next democratic nominee pending events in tonights debate and Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbin or others, the kind of populist nationalist a liberal democracy mixture on the right are responsive to decadence, summoned up as rebellions against stagnation so sanders and other socialists are saying we took a wrong turn in the 60s in 70s with reagan and thatcher and we can get back to a more utopian perspective on what government can do. The scandinavian utopia, maybe something beyond that and the populist, the nationalists in various ways are saying make America Great again, a futurist slogan, we were great in the past, we want to get back there in the future and there is a future we were promised that we havent been given that we want to achieve again. In that sense they are both kind of alternatives to the stewardship of decadence. Michael bloomberg, jeb bush, to some extent barack obama. Not the barack obama of the 2008 campaign, but mitt romney in 2012, they were all promising the same liberal or conservative politics and is stewardship of a prosperous stagnation. Sanders and trump, they are all in different ways saying we can do Something Different and we can do something better. That said, i have some skepticism how far this can go. I think as i said the once the populists take power in the same would be true the socialists they are constrained by their own limitations and the larger Structural Forces to make it hard to pursue dramatic change even if you want to. That is one point. Second, there are ways, a collaboration between people in the media who are terrified of what he represents where he stands up and gives a speech and says i represent an alternative to liberalism and everyone in the western press said he represents an alternative to liberalism. And practice, he wants the organization of the eu that existed 20 years ago rather than today, it wants a kind of 1party situation for hungary that resembles mexico across the 20thcentury or japan at various points more than a represents mussolinis italy. A democracy that is a real democracy but one clearly dominant party. And social conservatism kind of a normal social conservatism of the post 1970s west and liberalism has obviously changed. A standard conservatism can look more exotic in contrast with were progressive seem to be going but i am not completely sure, you see a return of history alternative so much as a slightly more conservative in ways i like, more corrupt in ways i dont like version of the latemodel democratic order and i say in the book if you crowned a king in hungary, if you had these places reaching for a different source of legitimacy even Vladimir Putin pretends to be a democrat. The sanders campaign, if they intervene, sorry, russian interference humor is not there are still elections in russia. It is acquired by one party state with certain freedoms and there is a lip service to democracy even as Vladimir Putin governs as an autocrat. Is not crowning himself or having the russian he is not restoring the romanovs. It seems to me you cant declare in a postliberal world until you have powerful and important governments claiming a source of legitimacy that isnt just a version of the mobile liberal democratic view but i could be wrong, we will see. Someone may ask about it. Final question for me at least. The book starts the moon and ends with the stars. You have an almost sheepish i would be a bad christian if i didnt mention faith essentially, to begin the final sheepish . Humble. I would be a bad the book ends with hope more or less and the way faith can provide hope. Is that really the force of your argument. What is at the root of a decadent society as it is a hopeless society . I ask in part because that would be a theme i would love to see carried out a little more in the book but maybe that is partly tactical because you are not writing simply for believing crowd. I have written two books about religion and i figure i should become a little more sheepish. You changed the church. I think that es, to go back to the definition, the loss of a decadent Society Faces is that a possibility. Implicit in that is a sense that the loss that it faces is loss of confidence that this particular society is part of the story and has a particular destination. And that isnt exclusively a religious idea but is to some extent a religious idea. Other books i made the argument societies cant escape having some religious impose a religious to direction. I think that is true certainly in this case. The more specific thing i want to claim, we should be cognizant we as human beings but particularly those of us who are religious believers, Catholic Christians should because isnt, if we are in a story it is an interesting point in the story. The story starts from a christian perspective with an admonition to fill the earth and for better or worse with some environmental catastrophes along the way and further risks ahead we have done that. From a christian perspective the prior hinge moment of history came when there was not a true world empire but what seemed a world empire that had similarly had a republican period, entering an imperial period and seems exhaustive seeming and that was the moment god entered the world. That was an interesting if that was an interesting moment in this moment of world civilization is an equally interesting moment so what i draw from that is not just the idea we need a recovery of faith and a religious revival, obviously i would be in favor of that and that would be a force pushing against decadence but i go a little further and become a little more speculative and say maybe it will just be a christian revival, this is a moment we should expect a stranger to happen and maybe that Stranger Thing is figuring out a way to leap into the stars. Peter teal in his review of the book said ross douthat doesnt give reasons why we cant build a warp drive. That is fair. But i do think you have this, we sold this one place and dont know if we can go further but there is a huge universe and maybe we are supposed to go further or maybe this is a moment when it is not us going up, it is something unexpected coming down. A strange place where i end the book but a justified place. It really is the case that we have reached a moment of human achievement that seems to have some limit on it and if you believe the human story has a purpose in a direction then you would expect a really interesting plot twist to come along, maybe not now but somewhere in the next 200 years or so. Great place to turn to you guys. I will approach the lectern. I cant see this out of the room. I cant ask everybody to speak of i dont. If you have questions raise your hand and we will bring the microphone. We have one over here that i can barely see. Why dont we start up here . You mentioned decadence and disaster, apocalypse and so forth and the radicalization of politics with Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin. What kinds where are we going . Are we living in First Century rome or 1788 paris . My best, could be wrong, is it is more First Century rome than late 18thcentury paris. What you are seeing, i was gesturing at this, talking about moribund on the right, but on the left, desire to return to the bliss that don to be alive spirit of the french revolution but the desire that is hard to meet in a society that is rich and old and stagnant and relatively stable. My expectation is you could put a socialist in the white house and the result would not be the french revolution. It would be a leftwing version of the struggles the Trump Administration has had to enact much of the legislative agenda. In that sense, on the religious front i disagree a little bit with my religious conservative friends who see a sort of cultural progressivism carrying all the afforded reducing conservative christians to little readouts. I think cultural progressivism has carried all before it in certain environments but i think there are some limiting principles and in certain ways more likely that the secularism of today is neither as vigorous nor as dangerous as the secularism that murdered nuns in the french revolution and the christianity of today is neither is vigorous from a secular perspective as dangerous as the Catholic Reaction in the nineteenth century. We are sort of beating at each other with weak fists and reenacting on twitter, that is happening online. I am not completely convinced that it is about to break out into dramatic revolutionary chaos but probably there was someone in nicholas and alexanders russia saying the same thing right before lenin arrived at finland station. Part of me expects to be guillotined with pages of this book stuffed into my mouth at some point in the next 20 years. He said we were too decadence, what did he know . In the back, i will get to you over here. Thank you very much for an interesting presentation. National Defense University which is apropos, senator bernie spoke at this university and at my university a few months ago and he has promoted, the term is common good capitalism. The virtues of sporadic decadence notwithstanding, how does that fit in. Is that a possible alternative that is proposed now that resist the excesses of the financial eyes to thinking of the right and distribution is thinking of the left . Full disclosure, with some caveats i basically support some version of that kind of program. To the extent there is an attempt by figures like senator rubio and senator josh holly of missouri to put more policy meet on the bones of trumpian populism im interested in that and i have been interested in that going back to when i had more hair and was young and innocent. I do think the virtues of that kind of program is it is intended to push back against specific features of what im describing is decadence. It contains within it efforts at profamily policy pushing against the turn toward sterility and demographic decline. And some version an emphasis on industrial policy and technological innovation that tries to get us back to if not the Manhattan Project at least the building of the interstate highway system. That the promise a kind of agenda too is it is a goal, to build a real political majority and not just one of these 50 plus one or 47 plus one coalition exchanged power, arguably since reagan, certainly over the last ten years, stalemate and gridlock in washington dc, one of the two Political Parties to figure out how to build a majority that can win landslide and rubios goal is to take existing conservatism and make it more appealing to middle and workingclass americans, black and latino americans to build a kind of panethnic conservative populism, white workingclass conservatism donald trump is managed i am favorably disposed towards senator rubios project. Some of the caveats i offered about populism and socialism apply to the project too, it is hard to make a real headway. I try on the one hand to be optimistic and supportive about their prospects. The policy work in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we were building and incrementalist reform agenda someone like rubio or jeb bush needs to embrace in 2016 and ride to victory and trump came along and adopted those ideas in a different way and blue everything up and destroyed my preconceptions of what happened in american politics and that makes me i would like to see Republican Party led by holly and rubio. We should all be prepared for that eventuality. That cant solve the decadence you are describing. The convergence of factors, some are outside our control. You talked about limiting principles, ingenuity and what you can do, foreign policies getting us out of decadence, the rubio approach is not sufficient and you need a Dramatic Development we are not looking for, innovation being prepared that push radical change, religious revival that cannot be engineered from above. The answer is no, my expectation is decadence, takes more than political programs to end decadence but it is not an either or. You can mitigate decadence, you can reduce decadence. The dot. Com boom was temporary but did create a nondecadent window and there was only the trying, the rest is not our business. We should applaud the trying and we do seem to have hit up against the ceiling and how to extend human lives. What we can do with space travel and so on. It is a bottleneck. An expected range of innovations on the other side. We have a question in the front. Back to the discussion of whether decadence is a western or global phenomenon if you look at the world of 50 years ago you have tremendous disparity between the western world and the western world of wealth and all these barriers to transportation and communication and commerce coming down and this is a pro decadence question. Can the case be made that maintaining any level of minimal but positive growth in the western world, is a significant achievement, but nobody can see that. Economists can say it. I might be getting it wrong, he had a suitably germanic name and has written a book, called fully grown, makes the case, we should not expect economies to develop to a certain point where it is unreasonable to expect them to achieve dramatic affect. We have resource constraints, we are a one planet species, our goal should be to be convergence. We want to get india as close to the per capita gdp and avoid the disruption of the coronavirus or anything else and be comfortable with the fact, the best we can do since the Great Recession, 2 growth, and we can maintain those deficits and it is a great achievement. It is worth taking it seriously, not just decadence is the worst thing in the world. If it really is the case, there are technological feeling, we wont a invent the warp drive and so on, we shouldnt be totally unhappy with that that being said, i think, one, its a little bit, theres a tendency for that counsel of reasonability to become a kind of council of quasii despair were at a certain point this is all we could ever do and we just have to accept these limits on our imagination which put some of the bestt of humanity increasingly to one side, and then theres also the aspect of decadence that we talked about a little less but where this sort of, the huxley and brave new world scenario is under those conditions a real peril. You dont have the gulags by jeff sort of slowmotion dehumanization where people, their horizons are narrow. They are just sort of, you have small families because you dont want to bake a carbon footprint, and you dont have wide kinship networks and you retreat into Virtual Realities at the next thing you know you are on and youre right, that i think is why, i dont think we are there but there are elements in our society. We have drugs d that are with an awful lot of online pornography as a substitute for reallife romance, sex and marriage. Nl and you want, the part of me thats not content with the case for sustainable decadence looks at that its insisted it on the people pushing against decadence, whether its politicians looking foran an agenda or just people trying to be fertile and created in the own communities and lives, then you can drift a long way towards the brave new world input without anyone completely noticing and you wake up one day and you are hooked up not going to be able to quote this sufficiently but you know what i am saying. I was wondering if you could connect the things of your last two books for us. How does this decadence analysis applied to the Catholic Church today, and what should the Catholic Churches response to the present decadence status quo look like . Thanks. Sure. Sondol i think you can see this argument, so my last book for those of you who missed it, was an analysis, sort of analysis of the controversies in the church in the first four or five years of the francise pontificate wih me taking a more conservative side and in think of fairly critical in certain cases with the holy father but also are doing that some of the changes people around him were pushing for were all really dramatic moment and catholic history with the potential to create schisms down the road. I think you could see this book as a kind of qualifier to the analysis, that to the extent i think the t evidence of the 2. 5 years since i wrote my wrote my book is that decadence and catholicism itself is more powerful than maybe i thought when is writing the book. And again, as a conservative who was doubtful if some of the reforms being considered in rome, im rooting for decadence in the centerline rooting for a return to the liberal conservative stalemate rather than a sweeping liberalization and sweeping transformation. But that is the story of the last couple years pending events in germany, that if not francis himself, certainly figures around him had a pretty dramatic reform agenda that was sort of stalled in the senate but push for to some s extent through famous footnote and then beyond that, whether its homosexuality and samesex blessings, or or in case of the last year or so, deaconesses and especially celibacy in the priesthood. The push has continued and then each time the i holy father has backed off and we sort of return to a version of the status quo. I think that suggests that yes, i mean, i think the Catholic Church in the western wall is very clearly decadent in very interesting a Large Institution struggling to adapt and in some kind of slowmotion decline, and decadence rather than crack ups seemsne like whether even the francis pontificate has ended up. As to what the church should and can be doing, i mean, i think its a really tricky question for the hierarchy for people. The problem of a bishop or an archbishop supervising the church, supervising a city or region from on high is similar to the problems of politicians in washington under conditions of decadence, that if you throw yourself into revolution or dramatic transformation, it may fail or it may actually make things worse since is an understandable desire to sort of steward of the ship as it exists for as long as it exists. The case study, the Catholic Church of rome enforces the questions within the sort of imperial context and its obviously not quite like that by some twitter accounts would argue, there were not necessarily going to persecute, their persecuted christians but still, you are trying to get the institution from within. That means figuring out ill give you one example. What does the American Church need right now . And needs a lot of things but lets say, a needs a missionary order, a new or revived existing order, capable of essentially treating significant portions of ones Catholic America as mission territory. That something that again, a newspaper columnist who writes about the church, im not in the position to vent but there are people who are in a position potentially to do that. The world of decay and diocese maybe needs in order you have three priests coming in and living in oratory and having parishes between them as the diocese fails to generate. That is just one example but thats the kind of, youre not trying to save the whole structure but are trying to figure out ways also not to abandon structure and find dynamic ways to renew it even amid its decay. Maybe two more questions. Wondering if you would be interested in commenting on the topic of risk. Mother enough to remember that we Wander Around the neighborhoods, our parents didnt know where we work and we didnt wear comets when we work bicycle. Now, thats meant to be a tiny metaphor. I wonder if our society is just extremely riskaverse. I dont think thats a tiny metaphor at all, it gets to one of the core questions here, not that its just bicycle helmets, teenage life in america is safer than its ever been in spite of fears of predators on the streets and the internet pedophiles. If you look at teen behavior, and mostand driving drug use, not marijuana but almost every form of drug use, teen pregnancy, how early teens have sex, all the substance of 1000 rock n roll songs. Everything is safer than it was when i was a kid and even safer, im assuming we are about two years apart in age, when you were a kid and clearly, people had this argument on twitter just the other day, david who was circulated who said the only thing kids are doing more of his pain playing call of duty and hes in favor of call of duty but you knew it would come back to this. Theres something about the spirit of this place but i dont think that i dont think that is a sufficient analysis. Its not just that kids are playing video games, also that they are somewhat more depressed and anxious and teen suicide rates have gone up steeply even as the other indicators have improved then beyond that, well see how things look in ten years but right now, it seems like these anxious iphone using videogame maintains have more trouble than past generations, forming meaningful relationships, figuring out how to pair off and get married and have kids. That seems to me to be the crucial decadence tradeoff right now at this moment, that we have more safety and stability in many ways than america had in 1969. That sort of what conservatives wanted. They looked at the 60s and 70s and said theres been a terrible collapse, dynamism of the baby boom generation so we need a recovery of stability but the recovery of stability we got can feel more like sickness unto death a real return of fruitfulness. So things are, the movie that came out this year, once upon a time in hollywood, its a portrait of a moment in time that in manyy ways cultural conservatives deplore this moment of the sexual revolution reaching its peak and then the moment where the manson family shows up and people are murdered in the dark 70s began but its striking to watch that and of course, its a fantasy but it roots in reality to see how young and garish and vigorous and vibrant the america it conjures up seems to be. Part of the theme of the book is a sort of, im a cultural conservative who is in certain ways, nostalgic for a certain degree of chaos and i find myself to my own surprise, preferring it to a stability that doesnt seem to have real fruitiness about it. One more question . Thank you for really interesting conversation. We prefer to a number of artworks, im curious to ask you to reflect on the relationship between the arts and this movement. Re if i could preempt may be the most obvious answer, i was thinking about the decadence movement in the arts into the way that arises in a very constant and arguably overconfident, and sees itself as a kind of rejection critique of confidence and progress. If im right, if theres not a onetoone correlation betweens. Decadence culture and decadent arts, what kind of art might we expect, hope for or dread arising in a decadent culture . I would, under my definition, this is an extraction claim to make about the decadent work really decadent. In the sense that they were sor of over right and highly is undersized and sort of experimenting. Like the sort of 69 moment in American Culture, experimenting with transgression for its own sake but they had a sort of, they felt like they were sort of, in effect, renewing a kind of increasingly sterile bourgeois smog, late victorian moment. I dont think you really have that in the arts today. Again, i feel like the transgressive nurse that conservatives deplore have its and and given waytr to a kind of urrly adolescent culture. This is my impression of sort of certainly where a lot of cinema has ended up, using a space that is perpetually 14 years old. Not childish, the superhero origin story that never ends. Youre always just sort of coming into your powers and have a lot of adolescent angst about move on tor roadulthood. Theres no sexex or real romance in the superhero universe, its always sort of scary adulthood and you never quite get there. In the same way, i think the sort of distinctive the hierarchies about this, their free treatment cultural significance mostly. I dont think i dont feel i am wellversed enough in the state of contemporary painting or opera, havent gone to see akhenaton. I dont feel like i am completely equipped to comment on the aesthetic quality of certain area of the hierarchs but i am equipped as a cultural observer to think there places in society has shrunk dramatically. What has taken their place even for the very well educated, an earlier era would have been going to the opera and sustaining Art Galleries and so on, its a sort of algorithmically generated entertainment content. It is pretty good, every netflix show is pretty good but it is, in its own way, stuck in doing the same thing over and over. If you like the moment of the golden age of tv from sort of the way i see the internet book, there was a brief moment where a bunch of figures were able to create some really impressive works of art on television and it lasted about ten years. It echoed the cinemas of the 75 now that was nice but now its over and now the algorithm is creating our television and entertainment. Thats the part of the book about culture i mostly about that, the ways we are in a sort of, we are in a period of petition and on creativity, and a period of Something Like the internet has not had exactly the effect of people expecting. It sort of homogenized things further. At the promise of the internet, which im not bold enough to look back on instead of big newspapers, you would have bloggers and instead of cute pop stars 1 Million People playing the guitar and some of that exist in the way that teens used to talk and youtube into these things, it doesnt completely exist but in terms of cultural production, the internet has been a consolidating force. So now you have a few big newspapers like mine that are doing pretty well but the small mid times ones are weaker or gone. Taylor swift and connie are bigger than ever but the eccentric figures have less commercial viability in the same thing in publishing. Its pushed in different ways, everything toward a mobilization of culture and i enjoy marble movies but they do seem to represent a kind of version of repetition that i am talking about in the book. Great, thank you. The book is fantastic. It really is worth reading, its easy to read. His style is accessible and funny, easy and sophisticated. The goal in the paper, thats how it plays its excellence. Great. Im glad to hear you have goals in your life. [laughter] apparently the rest of us dont. Anyway, thankin you for all comg out on a tuesday night to be with us and we are grateful he join us tonight on the day the book is released. Im privileged to have you here as well. As a reception afterwards, if you can stay around and answer more questions. Join me in thanking him. [applause] you are watching a special edition of book tv, without airing during the week, while members of congress in our district due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, life in america. First, American Enterprise Institute Scholar michael strain argues the future is bright for those who want to become successful in the United States. The washington examiners, temp offers his thoughts on why the American Dream is less attainable today. Later, the prizewinning journalist, Nicholas Kristof report on the issues facing the working class in rural america. 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