Good afternoon and welcome. Happy fat tuesday, thank you for spending your tuesday with us. Im the executive director of the institute for human academy, joseph capizzi. We have been here for three years. Ross has been an important member of the institute, our media fellow helps coordinate these events, the more contentious events i have been involved in. The release of the latest book, ross is one of the most important commentators, the opinion page, has written a few books at this point, they became something. I will engage ross in conversation about the book. It is an interesting book, not the sort of typical conservative harangue on the way things are but takes a nice tack to explore what is going on in our culture. Once he and i exhausted each other, we open up to the rest of you. If you have a question please raise your hand and they will approach you, dont be alarmed, make your question and ross will engage you. I implore you to phrase a question. More time ross has to respond better, dont make a speech if you can avoid that if possible, just a nice pointed question. Thank you for coming. [applause] lets begin. The book is called the decadent society with decadence. What is decadence in the book . Guest this is working. Thank you for doing this. It is a pleasure to be back in a situation where i am not modern american conservative. Midway through, we will have a wrestlemania style faceoff. Decadence, basically the conceit is lifted, the definition offered 20 years ago. He wrote a book called from don until decadence. He made the argument we should think of decadence not in terms of catastrophic moral corruption, not in terms of luxury goods, weekends in las vegas, the perks and faculty lounge, that kind of outrageous stuff, a clinical term that describes a civilization that has achieved a certain level of wealth, development and proficiency and finds itself. That is a formal way of putting it, stuck is the oped columnist distillation so in the book, the decadence properly understood refers to stagnation, drift and repetition at a high level of civilizational, the argument is this term reasonably applies to america, the west, the developed world encompassing the pacific rim since the late 1960 numplaps1970s for the sake of convenience to what it even oaks. I start the book with the moon landing as this particular peak of american and western achievement that was expected at the time not to be a peak but a beginning, opening of infinitys phrase a new frontier. Instead it turned out our capacities were more limited than we hoped, and space a tiny bit bigger and colder and less remunerative especially once there wasnt the soviet threat to compete with so the spaceage sort of petered out and that frontier was closed and at that point we entered into what i am describing as decadence. Host you identified four areas, four indicators almost in this period of deference, repetition, stagnation, economic and technological stagnation, political sclerosis is one in sterility. And those who havent read it political sclerosis is the one that everyone in the western world especially the us recognizes and agrees upon. Over the last few generations it has become harder, to effectively reform or transform or build new government programs. The age when it was possible to elect a president has have a Dramatic Program of reform and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson through ronald reagan, and age when president s are lucky if they can pass one major piece of legislation across the presidency, if we succeed as obama did with obamacare they pay a political price that lasts the duration of their presidency. Politics is dominated by various stalemates by polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities. And congressional abdication and increasing form of government that consists of negotiation between the executive branch and the judicial branch, actual american policy gets made. It is a different version in europe where the institution of the European Union which has advanced to the point it is too big to fail and no one except the wild and crazy english take the step, and nationalists of eastern europe, failed to leave the eu, it is an efficient, creates common courtesy, all kinds of economic problems, both forward or back, cant shrink back to a more sensible arrangement, cant move forward to the european superstate many of its architect envisioned so it too has this stalemate. That is what im describing as sclerosis. That is the easy one, people nod along to. The others are a little bit more debatable. Stagnation, economic stake nation. Youd have periods of Economic Growth, a respectable pace of growth, since the Great Recession in 2008, we see a pattern of real deceleration, lower growth rates compared to the norm prior to the 1970s and the growth rates achieved through perpetual borrowing where you can get to 2 growth with massive deficits whereas in the 1950s you have 4. 5 growth with what then were complained about as mass deficits but were not really deficits at all so in effect those deficits may be more sustainable than some conservatives think that sustainable in effect a rich society paying itself to maintain a form of progress that its own fundamentals dont justify. Host talk about stagnation, the technological stagnation. You referred to back to the future which exemplifies it. Give us a walkthrough that. This is an argument i am stealing from a group of economists and noneconomists who over the last we 10 years made the case that in spite of the iphone in your pocket and all the resources of the internet Technological Progress since the apollo era has been pretty disappointing. This is an argument tyler cowan of george mason made and peter teal, famously made with his line about how we expected flying cars, deloreans winging their way to the future and instead we got 140 characters on twitter which is now 280 characters so there is no great stagnation. [laughter] host guest Robert Gordon from the university of chicago has written a sweeping thousand page book the rise and fall of American Growth in the point they all make, it is not certain logical progress has ceased, the internet era has demonstrated a lot of incredible breakthroughs in communication, information and simulation. It is more Technological Progress has been mono dimensional. And areas like transportation, energy, agriculture, and the built environment. And and and they try to revolutionize realworld industries those are the companies that often end up being the unicorns the turnout to be frauds or failures. To bring big tech to bear on and all fashion. And we were trying to revolutionize office space, a similar story. That is the core of that piece of the stagnation, progress hasnt ceased but it is on a particular dimension that feedback into the larger pattern of decadence because it leaves people to spend more time in Virtual Reality simulations of reality and to retreat from both certain kinds of Economic Activity but also bringing us to another retreat from family formation, romance, sex and childrearing which is the aspect of decadence i cost a reality. Host you have a wonderful comparison of Margaret Atwood and pj jamess book involving a sterile landscape which is really brilliant and really fun. Lets think critically about what you wrote. What is a counter indicator . You provide indicators excuse me. Sorry. Thank you, michael. You provide indicators by which to identify us as a decadent society, what might be counter indicators . Signs of life . Lets give examples. One of the key indicators to suggest that we are not living through a period of immense technological transformation is the fact that productivity growth and economic measurement, how technology is affecting the way it works has been stagnant and pathetic for a long time in the early 21st century. That was not true, the initial flush of the internet revolution there was a surge of productivity growth in the development from 19962001. That suggests, i was alive, a teenager and it really was a brief window where there was a sense of the possibility of dramatic growth returning and had that continued the argument i am making i would be making a different argument, that window was a nondecadent exception that may not have cascading effects. Another example i mentioned, the defining feature of demography in the western world since the baby boom, since the 1960s in 70s is sub replacement fertility, people having too few children to replenish the population and this is true but for a long time america was an exception. Down to the early 2000s american conservatives like to say because america retains a more dynamic economy than western europe, it is not a socialist and sclerotic, and optimism about the future and intense religious practice. That is why our birthrate, we are country oriented toward the future in a way that france or sweden or japan are not. In that sense the United States was not decadence as long as its birthrate was exceptional. The birthrate ceased to be exceptional and were interesting was from sub replacement paternity levels. Those are two examples how it is not under my attempts to create a statistical understanding of decadence, things have happened that would be unpleasant and if they happened again, a shift, a change, the other point i would make is im not trying to examine each of these forces as forces existing on their own. The reason every society has some decadence in it, what is distinctive about our moment is the way these forces are converging. It feeds political unhappiness and distrust in government, makes it harder to pass policy programs which slows Economic Growth further and drives down birthrates, they dont feel they have economic capacity to have kids which make society older and more riskaverse, harder to make political changes, you follow me. There is a convergence of these forces that makes our moment, not fully decadent, then period place in the past, have one of these forces at work. Host talk to me about the week, how we became who is but we here. It is the thing i wondered through the book, at times could be the United States, the west or Something Like that, seemed almost global in terms of your description. Instead of expanding it to include more and more, the victims of success leading to decadence might be exclusive and exclude certain communities who might say we are not in any age of decadence but prosperity or ascendance. Think of the African American community in the United States. And African American president was elected. How inclusive is the point . What extent might you think about the refined analysis. Take the case study of africanamericans. I think, this is a highly debatable proposition. I think there was more progress for africanamericans and the period running from 1940 to the moon lantern 19401980, a period like that, there has been in the period since. Africanamericans have participated to some extent in decadence. This has very little. On implement rate is low at the current moment in the election of the first black president was a dramatic breakthrough. If you look at gaps in racial wealth, household wealth, the blackwhite income gap, test score gaps, all of the things that reformers who are interested in racial equality are interested in changing you get a lot more change in a lot of those cases in the era of the Civil Rights Era in particular but a fool zone from the great migration through the king assassination into the 1970s. In that sense at least in some socioeconomic way there is a participation in decadence there and it is an open question in culture, in certain ways there has been an increase in africanamerican representation in pop culture and cinema. Sometimes that is overstated and there is a little bit of forgetting of the very recent past. If you go to 1980s the biggest stars in america were africanamericans. One of them was bill cosby, not a cause for celebration at the moment but bill cosby, eddie murphy, it was not the case there was no africanamerican representation. The rise of African American pop culture figure dates to the 60s, 70s and 80s and we are getting a further cycle that is not a complete novelty. That is the point. In the larger sense, one of the questions the book raises and doesnt answer is is it a western developed world phenomena nor is a global phenomenon and i think i feel very confident in arguing his deceleration and stagnation the japan, south korea, United States and western europe share in common. The harder question is what is happening with the countries we still call developing . The rising powers in the world, china, india and so on and you could make a case the decadence of the west will enable the nondecadent developing world to develop past us. When we talk about a Pacific Century when asian century that is implicit. At the same time there are ways in which if you look at demographics, the demographics of china is in the same low fertility travel developed world is in and there are ways in which you can say china is converging with the west, as our government a convergence in oligarchy, billionaires compete to be president , not the same thing as the politburo in beijing but theres a convergence in stratified low fertility oligarchy and higher rates of wealth, it isnt a case of china leapfrogging past us and what is happening with the coronavirus raises a further host of questions the we can talk about in the apocalyptic portion of the evening. Host i had a question about that but we can save that. Another thing i enjoyed about your book is it wasnt the end of book. It is a book that doesnt say we are in this decadent society and its only a matter of time before it is over. It described the kind of sustainable decadence. Guest that is the bumper sticker. Host you get insurance on it. Describe what would make this a sustainable decadence . It leads into what wouldnt make it sustainable decadence. One of the claims, people hear the word decadence and heavy idea of iron logic of history, once you become decadent you are doomed and the absolute cliche version of this is the writing on the wall of the babylonian palace or orgies in rome, the barbarians sweeping in and so on. In fact i make the argument and i think it is true that decadence is a very normal condition for a successful society, empires and civilizations to fall into and once they do it can lead to collapse if they have a rival who can exploit the decadence but it can also lead to a kind of sustainable stasis that can last a very long time. However you want to chart roman decadence it is 400 years from the nero caligula moment to the actual fall of rome. However you chart ottoman decadence or the decadence of the chinese empire down through the eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century these are long historical periods, prosperous and societies in hindsight look decadent without them being tipped over into crisis and collapse and in certain ways that is a more pessimistic vision for our future in that there is an appeal to the idea that once your decadent you are also doomed. There is a sense at some level people want history to follow a kind of morality play arc even if they dont actually caught up in the sacking of rome themselves. I quote w h oddin, i am going to mangle the quote, the book is right here. That is so convenient. He says what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not that it finally went smash but that it 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 that rome lasted under decadence were, especially from the point of view of the face that founded this university, a period of dynamic change from within as there was the developers of a very much nondecadent religious faith that did not in the end save the roman empire from ruin but did preserve and Carry Forward roman element into the future down to the present day and was there when the empire finally went smash as a powerful force. You can imagine versions of that, renewal under decadence that reinvigorate our civilization or a renewal that when our civilization falls, create something new to carry on the best of our own legacy and that is the optimistic case that in fact decadence has its virtues. There are alternatives that are worse than the lives we have now and we should regard life under decadence not necessarily is a horrible burden but as something that is not ideal but potentially a gift because it still leaves room for creativity, renewal and passed back to dynamism and flourishing. Path back to dynamism and flourishing i did not anticipate encountering Cardinal Sarah in the book and even less anticipated encountering what condon exceptionalism. If you havent read it i apologize for spoiling but what condon exceptionalism and Cardinal Sarah, possible ways of envisioning or imagining some sort of replenishment. Guest my basic view is if youre thinking of the vulnerability of a decadent civilization, the vulnerabilities of europe are in some ways starker than ours and in part that is because europe is more advanced on some of my statistical decadence indicators, lower birth rates, for a longer period of time, they have had relatively stagnant growth compared to was for a longer period of time but they are more vulnerable in the sense that europe sits in the middle of the world whereas the United States has always had its splendid isolation and europe is in a deeply unstable equilibrium not only as people often think with islam in the middle east but also with the current exception to demographic decadence which is the continent of africa so were headed for a scenario where europe which used to have more people than africa will buy 2075 have 500 million odd people and africa could have 3. 5 billion and one way or another it doesnt seem that kind of equilibrium will hold so you can tell a pessimistic story that a lot of conservative and reactionary types can tell where europe will try to build a fortress against mass migration and the fortress will fail in their will be migrant driven chaos as far as the eye can see that you can tell an optimistic story which is the ones that i was raising by referencing Roman Catholicisms most famous african cardinal, and the image of wauconda and black panthers, afro futurism has an interesting appeal in the decadent west as examples less examples, they are more suggestions of what a more successful confrontation between europe as it is and will become and whatever africa is going to become could play out so in that sense, that is an example of places where decadent civilization can be most vulnerable, also wearing the best timeline offer the most hopeful renewal and cerrado, i quote him giving a sermon about the murders a fascinating example of a very conservative traditional Roman Catholic cardinal from Africa Talking as a monument to the catholic dead, the french revolution and in effect trying to call europe back to its ancestral faith while also building bridges and increasingly christian and reasonably catholic africa. Was comes of that i dont know but it is an example how history could present unexpected syntheses that you wouldnt have anticipated 30 or 40 years ago. Host on the subject of an expected stuff, reasonable argument that what we are seeing is a long playing out over time but you do also think through the apocalyptic and today your column you wrote a column that talks about the coronavirus as a test case you had not anticipated of the thesis in your book of guest i didnt anticipate it happening while i was promoting the book. We could have sustainable decadence for the book tour and then the stephen king scenario could hit but i dont think the coronavirus is the thing that ends our decadence but it is an example of how unexpected events, this is and completely unexpected, a global pathogen is the most predictable thing on the list of potential world transformers but something that can hit the week points in the decadent society. Our government doesnt work particularly well, the public doesnt have a lot of trust in public institutions. You have had a certain amount of naivete in the way of the western world has exported part of its industrial base, so dependent in the supply chain on china. A country that in certain ways seems to be headed towards a more stable authoritarianism but could be vulnerable to totally unexpected turmoil, even revolution so in that way i would say, i would describe the coronavirus as a stress test for decadence and i think it is serious, you should have a source of canned goods in your home. Is it a stress test because the societies are capable of responding in an adequate way . We will be capable of responding to it in an imperfect but adequate way but i dont think it is guaranteed, puts pressure on the institutions that are least functional and most vulnerable to outside stress. You have this affective stalemate in western politics, some sort of centrist establishment that believed in globalization and the promise of the early 21stcentury, that miss governed the western world in various ways, that had a populist response but the populist response seems perpetually unready to govern the country so the coronavirus is a threat that on the one hand is not consciously but 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, to manufacture your own antibiotics, we are not going to war with china and so on, hitting that naivete but also the fact that the establishment isnt running the government, populists are running the government, we have an acting to permit of Homeland Security head whose testimony and still no confidence whatsoever and donald trump say what you will about donald trump, you would think the populist who got elected talking about how we need to police our borders and be tough on china would be the man for this hour but trumps tweets he seems convinced that he can talk the markets and to call instead of acting like a german phobic nationalist which might be the thing America Needs right now. Host one of the four indicators seems poised to respond to this, most of us are anticipating and that is technology. We assume the one area of technology will be medical technology. We are not exploring the stores with human beings the way we anticipated but all of us more or less take for granted by the summertime there will be some kind of medical response to this. If not the summertime, shortly after that because that is what we expect of our technology. That is reasonable and a Counter Point to some of the stagnation arguments that it i put it this way. Not that we necessarily expect an incredibly Effective Public Health response. I dont think we expect the governmental side but we do expect at some point a vaccine. That is an expectation that we have that has been, we effectively came closer, to enable a vaccine. We have managed past the last great plague, aids, was not dealt with, responded with some effectiveness. I agree there hasnt been one way to put it is there hasnt been the kind of dramatic medical breakthroughs the prior round of breakthroughs led us to expect. When nixon declared war on cancer there were reasons to expect that we would cure cancer. Instead we have slowly made grinding progress against cancer. The same goes for alzheimers. We havent had the big dramatic victory but there has been slow progress on rare condition that is dramatic and there has been Effective Response 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 i think we reasonably do. Host there is a lot in the realm of technology and economic stagnation as well but like we said earlier there is good argument about what is happening, even the way your book assumes a kind of Technological Progress measured in red pity is a good, that not to have it becomes a kind guest it is not always a good but i say in the book that there are ways Technological Progress could end decadence. It would be very dark. There is a transhumanist posthuman scenario that as a catholic i would oppose but under my definition would count as an escape from decadence. It is not all progress is good but what i do think is the society we have built up is a society that expects in 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, hopedfor and so on. I dont think, as much as i find a certain pastoralist and agrarian perspective appealing in certain ways, i dont think there is a pastoral retreat from the modern world. There is for some people in some communities but not the culture as a whole. I think the alternatives are succeeding in finding new ways to grow or stagnating rather than finding arcadia again. Host two more questions before we turn to the audience. You entertain alternatives. Is liberal democracy and alternatives . What is happening in turkey or hungary or poland. Is that a response to this . Reenvisioning korean livening of society . My take is both a revival of socialism embodied by figures as diverse as the likely next democratic nominee in tonights debate, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbin or others and the kind of populist nationalist the liberal democracy mixture on the right are both responses to decadence, summoned up as rebellions against stagnation. Sanders and other socialists are saying we took a wrong turn in the 60s in 70s or we took a wrong turn with reagan and thatcher and we can back to a more utopian perspective on what governments can do. At the very least a scandinavian utopia but maybe something beyond that. The populists and nationalists in various ways i saying make America Great again, a futurist slogan saying 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 alternatives to a stewardship of decadence. Michael bloomberg, jeb bush, to some extent barack obama, not the barack obama of the 2008 campaign but the barack obama who governed, mitt romney in 2012 were all promising the same liberal or conservative politics and stewardship of a prosperous stagnation, sanders and trump are saying we can do Something Different and better. That said, in the book, i have some skepticism about how far this can go. Once the populists take power in the same would be true the socialists they are constrained by their own limitations in larger Structural Forces to make it hard to pursue dramatic change even if you want to. That is one point. Second, there are ways, our collaboration between a figure like orban and people who are terrified of what he represents where he gives a speech and says i represent an alternative to liberalism. Everyone in the western press says he represent an alternative to liberalism. And practice he seems to want the organization of the eu that existed 20 years ago rather than today. It wants a kind of 1party situation for hungary. It resembles mexico across most of the Twentieth Century or japan more than it represents mussolinis italy. It is a democracy that is a real democracy but also has one clearly dominant party and social conservatism is a normal social conservatism of the post 1970s west. Liberalism has changed and so a standard conservatism, core exotic in contrast to where progressives are going but im not completely sure orban you see a return of history alternative so much as a more conservative in ways i like, corrupting ways i dont like version of the existing late model order. If you crowned a king in hungary, if you have these places reaching for a different source of legitimacy even Vladimir Putin pretends to be a democrat and maybe in the Sanders Campaign if they intervene. Russian interference humor is not but there are still elections in russia. It is a qualified 1party state but there are certain freedoms and a lipservice to democracy even as putin governs as an autocrat. Hes not crowning himself or having the Russian Orthodox church crown him. Hes not restoring the roman ofs. You cant declare that we are in a really postliberal world until you have powerful and important governments claiming a source of legitimacy that is in just a version of the normal liberal democratic view but i could be wrong, we will see. 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 not sheepish. Humble. I would be a bad christian. The book ends with hope more or less, ways in which states can provide hope for people. Is that the force of your argument that what is at the root of a decadent society is it is a hopeless society . I ask that in part because that would be a theme i would love to see carried out a little more in the book but that is partly tactical because you are not writing for believing crowd or so on. I have written two books about religion and i should become a little more sheepish. Change the church. I think that i think yes, the loss the decadent Society Faces is that of possibility. Implicit in that is a sense of the lawsuit faces is a loss of confidence that this particular society is part of the story and has a particular destination and that isnt exclusively religious idea but is to some extent a religious idea. Other books, societies cant escape from having a religious impulse or religious direction. That is true in this case. The more specific thing i want to claim is we should because prisons, those who are religious believers, Catholic Christians should because prisons if we are in a story, this is an interesting point in the story, the story starts from a christian perspective with an admonition to fill the earth and subdue it and for better or worse with environmental catastrophes along the way and for the risks ahead, we have done that and from a christian perspective the prior hinge moment of history came when there is not a true world empire but what seemed the world empire that had similarly republican period and entering in imperial period and was exhausted seeming and that was the moment got into the world and that was an interesting, if that was an interesting moment in this moment is an equally interesting moment. What i draw from that is not just the idea that okay, we need a recovery of faith and religious revival. I would be in favor of that and that would be a force pushing against decadence but i go a little further and become more speculative and say maybe it will just be a christian revival but also a moment we should expect something stranger to happen and maybe that Stranger Thing is figuring out a way to leap to the stars and peter teal in his review of the book said doesnt really give enough space to the reasons why we probably cant build a warp drive and that is fair but i do think you have this, we filled 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 but something unexpected coming down. That is a strange place where i end the book but it is a justified case that we have reached some 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 you would expect a really interesting plot twists to come along. Maybe not now but somewhere in the next 200 years or so. Host i will stand up and approach select turn. I would never ask anybody here to speak if i dont. If you have questions raise your hand and we will bring around the microphone. We have one over here which i can barely see. You mentioned decadence, disaster and apocalypse in the radicalization of politics with Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin. Where are we going . Are we living in First Century rome or 1788 paris . My bed and could be wrong is it is more First Century rome the late 18thcentury paris and what you are seeing, i am gesturing at this talking about orban on the right the same applies to the left, a desire to return to the bliss, that don to be alive spirit of the french revolution, a desire that is hard to meet in a society that is rich, old, stagnant and relatively stable. My expectation is you could put a socialist in the white house and the results 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 i dont, on the religious front i disagree a little bit with some of my religious conservative friends who see a cultural progressivism carrying all before it and reducing conservative christians to little readouts and rumps. Cultural progressivism has carried all before it in certain environments but i think there are some limiting principles on its advance and in certain ways more likely 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 as vigorous nor from a secular perspective as dangerous as the Catholic Reaction to the Nineteenth Century so we are beating at each other with weak fists and reenacting what is happening online. Im not completely convinced that it is about to break out into dramatic revolutionary chaos in the real world but probably there was someone in nicholas and alexandras russia who was saying the same thing right before lenin arrived at the finland station. Part of me expects to begin teamed guillotined with pages of this book second my mouth, he said we are too decadence, what did he know . In the back and we will get to you over here. Thank you for an interesting presentation. For National Defense university which is apropos, senator rubio 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 sclerotic decadence notwithstanding, how does that fit in . Is that a possible alternative that is proposed now that resists the excesses of the financial eyes to thinking of the right and redistributionist thinking of the left . Full disclosure, with some caveats, basically support some version of that. To the extent that there is an attempt by figures in different ways like senator rubio or senator josh holly of missouri to try to put more polysemy on the bones of trumpian populism, im interested in that and i have been interested in that going back to books i wrote when i had more hair and was very young and innocent. The virtues of that program is it is intended to push back against specific features of what im describing is decadence, attempts to contain within it efforts at pro family policy to push back against the turn towards sterility and demographic decline, it includes in some versions and emphasis on industrial policy and funding for research and technological innovation that tries to get us back to if not the Manhattan Project at least the building of the interstate highway system. I think the promise of that kind of agenda is it is a goal to build a real political majority and not just one of these 50 plus one or 47 plus one political coalitions that have exchanged power in our politics arguably since reagan, certainly over the last ten years. The clearest way out of political decadence, stalemate and gridlock in washington dc is for one of the two Political Parties to figure out how to build a majority that can win landslides. I think rubios goal is to say how do you take existing conservatism and make it more applicable to middle and workingclass americans and especially black and latino americans to build a kind of pan ethnics conservative populism that is not just the kind of white workingclass conservatism that donald trump is managed to rally. And all those ways i am favorably disposed towards senator rubios project and it does, some of the caveats that i offer about populism and socialism both apply to that project too. Under conditions of decadence it is very hard sometimes to make real headway and that is pushing back a little but it is hard to achieve that much. 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 li and instead trumpkim along and insert was adopted some of those ideas but in a very different white and blue everything up and destroyed a lot of my preconceptions about what can happen in american politics. And so thatue makes me, i mean i would like to see the Republican Party led by rubio. I think its quite possible the future of the Republican Party is an endless battle to the death between don jr. And a vodka instead and we should all be prepared for that eventuality. To sum up the response though it is a no. That cant solve the decadence that youre describing, right . The convergence of factors youre. Describing some of them or let outside of our control. He talked about limiting principles on ingenuity and sort of what we can do that seem to be beyond our capacity to form policies. Of the more optimistic than that. My basic assumption is to really get us out of decadence, just sort of the rubio approaches a sufficient and you need some more disjunctive events, some sort of Dramatic Development that we are not looking for, some innovation that even now being prepared but will sort of push radical change, some religious revival that cant be engineered from above. In that sense the answer is no, my expectation is decadence it takes more than just political programs to end the decadence. But its not an either or, right . You can mitigate data gets. You can reduce decadence. The. Com boom was temporary but really did create a nondecadent window in theth american econom. For us theres only the trying, the rest is not our business. We should applaud the trying and we shouldnt assume like that human ingenuity, yes, we do seem to have hit up against some kind of ceiling and how long we can extend human lives and what we can do with space travel and so on, but maybe t its not the ceiling. Maybe its a bottleneck. Sometimes you are just sort of shouldering your way through ant and theres an unexpected range of innovations waiting on the other side. Its not all pessimist. Good. We have a question might appear in thehe 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 scenario. Of that being said, it is a little bit, there is a tendency for that counsel of reasonability this is all we could ever do. We have to have limits on our imagination on one side and an aspect of decadence we talked about a little less. The brave new world scenario. There is slowmotion dehumanization where horizons are narrow, small families, dont want too big a carbon footprint, and simulacra, you are on soma and it is tough territory. That is why i dont think we are there but there are elements in our society, drugs that are soma a lot of online pornography, a substitute for real life, and the part of me looks at that and if you dont have people pushing against decadence, whether it is politicians looking for an agenda, they are fertile and creative in our own communities and lives, along way towards the brave new world end point and you wake up one day and you are hooked up. I wont quote huxley sufficiently. The head is up earlier and so on. How does this decadence analysis apply to Catholic Church today and what should the Catholic Church response to the present decadence status quo look like . You can see this the analysis of the controversy of the church in the first 4 or 5 years. It is critical in certain cases of the holy father but arguing some of the changes they are pushing for, a dramatic moment in catholic history with potential to create schisms down the road, a qualifier to that analysis that to the extent the evidence of 2 and half years since i wrote the book, decadence and catholicism is more powerful than i thought when i was writing the book. As a conservative who was doubtful, i was rooting for decadence and rooting for a return to the liberal conservative stalemate rather than sweeping transformation. That is the story of the last few years pending events in germany. If not francis himself, figures around him had a dramatic reform agenda that was stalled but pushed forward to some extent. Whether it is homosexuality, or in this case of the last year or so, in celibacy in the priesthood and the holy father backed off returning to a version of the status quo. The Catholic Church is clearly decadent in various ways. A Large Institution struggling, with slowmotion decline and decadence rather than crack up, even the francis pontificate ended up. As for what the church should be doing, it is a tricky question for the hierarchy, and an archbishop supervising the church, or on high for politicians the conditions of decadence. If you throw yourself into revolution or dramatic transformation it may make things worse. Trying to steward the ship as it exists for as long as it exists. That makes it much more important for catholic institutions and figures who have the capacity to be more number and adaptable to think about what renewal from within looks like and you can take the roman case study, and forces of catholic renewal as christians within this imperial context. And the vatican is not necessarily going to persecute reformers but there is still a sense you are trying to breathe life into an institution from within and that means figuring out, i will give you one example, context. What does the American Church need . A lot of things. Maybe it needs a missionary order, new or revised or existing order capable of essentially treating significant portions as mission territory. That is something as a newspaper columnist to write about the church im not in position to invent were found but there are people who are in position to do that, the world of decaying Catholic Diocese may need an order where we have three priests living in an oratory, handling 7 parishes between them as the diocese fails to generate, that you are not trying to save the structure. And amid the dk. I wonder if you are commenting on the topic of risk. Want around the neighborhood, parents didnt we didnt wear helmets except when we made it look cool. If it is meant to be a tiny metaphor i want a society is riskaverse. Yes. I dont think that is a tiny metaphor at all. It gets to those core questions which is not just bicycle helmets. Teenage life in america is safer than it has ever been in spite of fears of predators on the streets and the files on the internet. If you look at teen behavior, drinking and driving and most drug use, almost every form of drug use, teen pregnancy, how early kids have sex, all of the substance of 1000 rock n roll songs everything is safer than it was when i was a kid and even safer, we are two years apart in age. People had this argument on twitter the other day, david french, circulated a version of this chart and said the only thing kids are doing more of is playing call of duty. David french is in favor of call of duty but in fact in fact you knew it would come back to french in the end, something about the spirit of this place. I dont think that is a sufficient analysis, not just what kids are playing more video games but also more depressed, teen suicide rates have gone up steeply as all these other indicators have improved and beyond that we will see how things look in 10 years but it seems like these anxious iphone using videogame playing teens 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. We have more safety and stability than america had in 1969. That is what conservatives wanted, they looked at the 60s in 70s and said there has been a terrible collapse. The dynamism of the baby boom generation was destructive so we need a recovery of stability but the recovery of stability we got can feel more like death than a return of fruitfulness so things are not the tarantino movie once upon a time in hollywood is a portrait of a moment in time that in many ways cultural conservatives deep for, the sexual revolution reaching its peak at the moment the manson family shows up and people are murdered and the dark 70s begin. It is a fantasy with roots in reality. Young and garish and vigorous and vibrant the america that this time is up degree and part of the theme of this stuff, i am a cultural conservative who is not down check for a certain degree of chaos. The ability doesnt seem to have real fruitfulness about it. Final question. Thank you for an interesting conversation. You referred to a number of artworks, cultural products. I am curious to reflect on the relationship in a decadent moment. I was thinking about the decadent a very confident and overconfident moment and sees itself as rejection or critique of a kind of but now confidence in progress. If i am right, if there is not a 1to1 correlation between a decadent culture and decadent arts, what kind of art might we expect or dread in the decadent culture . Under my definition, the decadents were not really decadent. They were overripe, and experimenting, the 69 moment in american culture, transgression for its own sake and they are in effect renewing the increasingly sterile, bourgeois, smug, late victorian moment. I dont think you really have that in the arts today. The transgressive nest that conservatives deplore has reached its end point and given way to a sort of early adolescence culture. That is my impression of where a lot of cinema has ended up. It is in a space that is perpetually 14 years old. Not childish but the superhero origin story that never ends, coming into your powers and have a lot of adolescent honest about it but never move on to adulthood, no sex or romance in the superhero romance, always that scary adulthood and you never quite get there. In the same way, what distinctive about this era is their retreat from cultural significance mostly. I dont feel that i am wellversed enough in the state of contemporary painting or opera. I dont feel like i am completely equipped to comment on the aesthetic quality of certain areas of the high arts but i am equipped as a cultural observer to say their place in society has shrunk dramatically and what has taken their place, even for the very welleducated people in an earlier era going to the opera, sustaining Art Galleries and so on is a sort of algorithmically generated entertainment content that is pretty good. Every netflix show is pretty good but it is not it is in its own way stuck doing the same thing over and over again. I see the golden age of tv the way i see the internet. There was a brief moment where a bunch of old turkish figures were able to create some impressive works of art on television and that lasted about ten years and it echoed the author driven cinema of the 70s. It is over and the algorithm is creating our television. Parts of the book are about culture, mostly about that, the ways we are in a sort of period of repetition and an creativity and appear go were Something Like the internet has not had the Effect People expect. It homogenized things further. The promise of the internet that im old enough to look back on, instead of big newspapers you will have bloggers and instead of huge pop stars you will have 1 Million People playing the guitar and some of that exists in the way teens use ticktock and youtube, doesnt completely not exist but in terms of cultural production the internet has been a consolidating force. Now you have a few big newspapers like mine that are doing well but the small and midsized ones are weaker and it weakened smaller midsized recording artists so taylor smith and kanye are bigger than ever but the more eccentric figures have less commercial viability. It is pushed in different ways, everything towards a marvelous asian of culture. And represent the kind of versions the repetition im talking about in the book. Thank you. The book is fantastic. It is an easy read. Ross douthats style is accessible and funny. It is easy and sophisticated. The goal is to write dan brown. That is how it plays. Glad to hear you have goals in your life. Apparently the rest of us dont. We live in a decadent society. Thank you for coming out on a tuesday night to be with us. We are grateful ross douthat joined us tonight, privilege to have you here. Again, join me in thanking ross. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you you are watching a specil edition of booktv erring now drink the week while members of congress are in their districts because of the coronavirus outbreak. Wednesday night we take a look at pandemics. Enjoy booktv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan2. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year we brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. 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