★ 01/20/2020
A comfortable but unoriginal, tired, and frustrated age has arrived, argues this scintillating diagnosis of social dysfunctions. New York Times columnist Douthat (To Change the Church) surveys a contemporary world where technological advance has subsided into the engineering of trivial digital apps; sclerotic, gridlocked governments dither; birth rates have fallen below replacement rate; young men lose themselves in video games and porn rather than start families or change history; the arts endlessly rehash boomer cultural touchstones and superhero franchises; and a managerial meritocracy entrenches itself in a soft authoritarianism of health and safety, while radicals playact at resurrecting communism and fascism in defanged social media tantrums and feckless street theater. Douthat’s elegy on the death of progress is unsparing and often pessimistic, but never alarmist; decadent modernity may muddle along without apocalyptic collapse, he contends, or perk up again with a religious revival or renewed space exploration. His analysis is full of shrewd insights couched in elegant, biting prose. (American political partisanship, he writes, is “an empty traditionalism championed by a heathen reality-television opportunist, set against a thin cosmopolitanism that’s really just the extremely Western ideology of liberal Protestantism plus ethnic food.”) The result is a trenchant and stimulating take on latter-day discontents. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (Feb.)
Clever and stimulating . . . Informative and well balanced . . . [An] intriguing theological-political idea.” —Mark Lilla, The New York Times Book Review
“Well-timed . . . This is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era. . . . Charming and persuasive." —Peter Thiel for First Things
“A scintillating diagnosis of social dysfunctions . . . His analysis is full of shrewd insights couched in elegant, biting prose. . . . The result is a trenchant and stimulating take on latter-day discontents.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Ross Douthat is the rare pundit who has managed to keep his head through the ideological turbulence of recent times — and his new book grows out of his characteristic equanimity and good sense.” —Damon Linker, The Week
“Douthat’s best book yet, a work of deep cultural analysis, elegantly written and offering provocative thoughts on almost every page. It’s hard to think of a current book that is as insightful about the way we live now as is this one.” —Rod Dreher, The American Conservative
“It is a testament to [Douthat's] singular skill and wisdom, then, that he has written so thoughtful and compelling a book that bemoans the end of progress. The Decadent Society is Douthat at his best—clever, considered, counterintuitive, and shot through with insight about modern America.” —The Washington Free Beacon
"Ambitious and entertaining." —Financial Times
"A convincing argument." —The National Review
"A substantial book by one of the more serious people in American public life today, The Decadent Society deserves a wide readership." —The New Atlantis
Praise for To Change the Church:
"High-minded cultural criticism, concise, rhetorically agile, lit up by Douthat's love for the Roman Catholic Church . . . An adroit, perceptive, gripping account . . . It's strong stuff, conversationally lively and expressive." —The New York Times Book Review
"Erudite and thought-provoking . . . Weaves a gripping account of Vatican politics into a broader history of Catholic intellectual life to explain the civil war within the church . . . Douthat manages in a slim volume what most doorstop-size, more academic church histories fail to achieve: He brings alive the Catholic 'thread that runs backward through time and culture, linking the experiences of believers across two thousand years.' He helps us see that Christians have wrestled repeatedly with the same questions over the past two millennia." —The Washington Post
“Absorbing.” —Booklist
2019-12-08
A journalist sees materialism and complacency pervading contemporary life.
New York Times op-ed columnist and National Review film critic Douthat (To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, 2018, etc.) delivers an impassioned but not entirely convincing critique of American and European society, which he condemns as depressed, enervated, and bored, and he points to economic stagnation, cultural and intellectual exhaustion, and a dearth of technological and scientific marvels. According to Douthat, America's space project was the last time technological prowess ignited the public's imagination; now, instead of a shared vision of a "giant leap for mankind," we are left with a sense of resignation. The domination of near monopolies quashes economic risk-taking and growth; "below-replacement fertility" portends a "sterile, aging world"; a polarized, sclerotic government is mired in gridlock; and a narrowing range of cultural offerings reflects widespread cultural malaise. Movies reprise "unoriginal stories based on intellectual properties that have strong brand recognition"; publishers depend on "recursive franchises and young-adult blockbusters"; and pop music reveals "a sharp decline in the diversity of chords in hit songs" and repetitive lyrics. Douthat acknowledges that readers, many of whom have heard similar arguments in countless recent books, may not be as distraught as he is. Despite social, political, and ecological problems, they may ask, "instead of bemoaning the inevitable flaws of our present situation, shouldn't we work harder to celebrate its virtues"? The author thinks not. Although within a decadent society individuals can still "work toward renewal and renaissance"; although sustainable decadence "offers the ample benefits of prosperity with fewer of the risks that more disruptive eras offer," still, he insists that "the unresisted drift of decadence leads, however slowly and comfortably, into a territory of darkness." Describing himself as a believing Christian, Douthat underscores religion's entanglement with decadence. No civilization, he writes, "has thrived without a confidence that there was more to the human story than just the material world as we understand it." Underlying his call for change is an invocation to look "heavenward: toward God, toward the stars, or both."
An earnest analysis buoyed by debatable evidence.
