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

by Ross Douthat

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 position. This would require accepting that the postwar boom isn’t coming back, accepting that the space race was mostly just Cold War posturing, accepting that we’re an aging society that can’t afford vast socialist experiments or growth-chasing supply-side fantasies, accepting that we aren’t going to spread democracy by force of arms—accepting, in other words, that the discontents motivating idealists of the center and populists of the right and left are just differing forms of nostalgia, which can be managed but never satisfied, and which are ultimately just impediments to achieving contentment in our civilization’s old age.