The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

by Ross Douthat

The high definition, on the other hand, tries to make the aesthetic and moral and political all fit together in a comprehensive civilizational indictment—in which moral decay goes hand in hand with overripe aestheticism and rampant hedonism, which in turn connects to a cowardly failure to make the sacrifices required to protect civilization from its enemies.

Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.

“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W. H. Auden of the last world empire in its endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”