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A good Facebook brawl or Twitter mobbing might be the political equivalent of Huxley’s Violent Passion Surrogate, delivering all the tonic effects of joining the Weathermen or the Black Panthers or Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome with none of the physical inconveniences. The Internet might be bringing back the dramas and tragedies of history, only as a stage production, a costumed farce.
Big Brother doesn’t have to watch everyone because everyone is always watching everybody else.
A system of control that requires huge prisons and 1.5 million abortions annually will inspire outrage, activism, and protest.
The age of Fukuyama was over; the world of Samuel Huntington’s “clash
What’s more, birthrates for Muslims within Europe are higher than for natives but dropping steadily as well. So while assimilation is clearly a serious problem for
the fact that the West’s would-be rivals lack the mix of zeal, coherence, mysticism, and futurism that tends to propel challengers to established world pictures.
Under the Romanovs, the throne-and-altar idea
violence or parody or both.
none of these regimes has actually claimed an alternative source of legitimacy; an alternative vision of where sovereignty resides. “Illiberal democracy” in practice is either just liberal democracy with somewhat more nationalism than Western bien-pensants prefer, or pseudodemocracy dominated by a dictator who doesn’t want to own up to his own authoritarianism—because, again, he’s still tacitly accepting the legitimacy of the late-modern Western liberal
But what exists in the so-called illiberal democracies now is just a more nationalist or conservative or degraded form of what exists in “normal” Western countries—a
At the same time, you can see in the Chinese system something closer to the form that a postliberal order might take: a system where technocracy is formally elevated over liberal norms and democratic principles;
convergence-in-decadence between the world’s rising great powers
the loneliness of a postfamilial society’s middle-aged and elderly worsened by the relative weakness of the social safety net, the West’s male-dropout problem worsened by abortion-induced male-skewing sex ratios and millions of surplus young men.
it won’t have pioneered an alternative to Western liberalism that the rest of the world will leap to follow; it will be another case study in convergence, of liberal democracies and pseudodemocracies and would-be meritocracies all ending up in the same kind of place, as de facto oligarchies trying to manage stagnation and its discontents.
the Western order is still pretty good at weakening potential rivals through recruitment.
it drains the talent from the provinces and the peripheries and deprives potential rivals and potential rebels of the leaders who otherwise might challenge its hegemony.
Two brain drains sustain this balance: one global and the other national.
Instead, they resemble the description of the “mercurial” working classes offered by Young’s pompous civil servant: they are disorganized, poorly led, conspiratorial and anti-intellectual in a way that undercuts their own effectiveness, vulnerable to con men and manipulators, and swing wildly from far right to further left without finding talented leaders or a clear program.
challenge of climate change, and the possibility that decadence will end in fire and flood.
Therefore one can imagine a future shaped by climate change that’s like the present, but more so. Every rich place on earth would be more like every other rich place, every poor place more like every other poor place, and the national-level political order would seem like a fractal of the international-level political order.
That due starts with the reality that complaining about decadence is, almost by definition, a luxury good—a
many elements in a society can turn stagnant, there can be many intimations of dystopia, before the possibility of human flourishing is in any way extinguished.
As a thousand Faustian tales attest, destruction can easily be the unexpected punishment for Promethean ambition.
The crucial task for twenty-first-century humanity, in this view, would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; improving institutional functioning at the margins; using education to lift people, especially young men, out of the prison-and-virtual-reality nexus and into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; treating the chronic conditions of old age more humanely; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current
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And without critics, without resistance, this drift can carry things a long way without anyone fully noticing how far.
Nothing lasts forever: not the cruel decadence of the last world empire, and not our own version of the Roman peace.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
Put it all together and suddenly we’re no longer experiencing a virtual 1930s, an online or reality-television simulacrum of the past, but the return of history, and the expiration of decadence in war and authoritarianism and human misery.
there will be a morality-play element
Let’s start with the technological solution to decadence, because it’s the one that our culture, and particularly our elite culture, is conditioned to expect. This
Religious conservatives have been having more children for many generations, and yet they have achieved at best a provisional resilience in a world where almost every institutional faith is weaker in the developed world than it was before the 1960s.
Already there is a strong post-Christian religious tendency that’s visible in various places in our culture but hasn’t taken on a fully coherent, culture-shaping form. It might usefully be described as an inchoate neo-paganism—meaning not the literal worship of Osiris or Odin (or not necessarily), but a general belief in the immanent divine, in a supernatural reality that’s interwoven with the material world rather than standing outside it as a Creator God.
tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism,
middlebrow embrace of New Age spirituality and self-help religion,
most overt and literal form of neo-paganism: the booming business in horoscopes and astrology, the psychics and mediums doing a brisk trade in communication with the spirit realm, and the people (overrepresented on the online extremes of left and right, interestingly) who simply self-describe as Wiccan or neo-pagan,
the influence of the civilizations, Asian especially, where polytheism and pantheism never lost the battle with monotheism—of
the range of different forms of paganism means that the raw materials are there for something more dramatic—if
So if we imagine religious decadence ending with a new paganism or an Islamic renaissance, we should also imagine it ending with a Christian revival—especially since, for all its weaknesses, Christianity remains institutionally significant, at least for now, in America and Europe on a scale no rival faith can match.
Butlerian Jihad” possibility, after the future rebellion against artificial intelligence imagined by Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic Dune.
