When describing America or ‘the West’ extra broadly, ‘decadence’ is commonly invoked. Sure factions in Western democracies fret that, as financial energy shifts in direction of Asia, their once-powerful societies have been irrevocably diminished and are rife with inertia. Reasonable conservatives are frightened, such because the New York Occasions columnist Ross Douthat, who referred to as his 2019 guide The Decadent Society: How We Turned the Victims of Our Personal Success. For the far proper, Donald Trump’s 2016 slogan promising to ‘Make America Nice Once more’ tapped into those self same anxieties by implying that greatness – each financial and in character – had been misplaced. Vladimir Putin, in justifying Russia’s numerous human rights violations, imagines a ‘decadent West’ degenerating below ‘the excesses of political correctness’, triggering an ethical disaster during which the rejection of ‘conventional identities’ will end in chaos.
Decadence comes from the Latin noun decadentia ‘fall’, and is carefully associated to decay. The idea itself is even older. The traditional Greeks believed that males of the previous had been nearer to the gods. From the start of its use within the English language decadence was understood as a fall or decline, however by the nineteenth century ethical failings have been more and more hooked up to its which means. The adjective decadent emerged in English within the 1830s as a historiographical descriptor. Thomas Carlyle adopted it in his The French Revolution (1837) to explain durations during which ethical values stagnate. The idea of decadence was philosophically expanded in Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, describing a state during which cultures or people lack the main target to realize their goals. For him, decadence was a limiting of human potential, typified by a common lack of need to excel.
For European empires of the nineteenth century, the decadent adjective developed alongside specific colonial anxieties. It was a manner of understanding the autumn of historical Greece and the Roman Empire from which European elites drew inspiration and parallels. In influential histories, resembling Edward Gibbon’s The Historical past of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), Rome particularly was understood as being a sufferer of its personal successes. Its victories have been thought to have made its elite complacent, weakened by luxuries gained from their territories and incapable of responding when barbarian hordes attacked. This urged that the degeneration of cultural values was answerable for Rome’s fall and, by extension, that up to date Europeans ought to fear in regards to the morality of their very own societies. Decadence grew to become, because the literary students Dustin Friedman and Neil Hultgren have outlined it, ‘a typical, if fairly imprecise, late-Victorian time period that was used to explain something that appeared to threaten the cultural establishment’.
Indulgence
Decadence grew to become an aesthetic time period when experimental artists started embracing condemnations of their weirdness as decadent. Originating in France within the late nineteenth century, the Decadent Motion noticed the fin de siècle as a novel second during which fashionable European empires, like classical ones, have been destined to degenerate. Decadents considered themselves as hyper-refined aristocrats, akin to the pleasure searching for Romans of antiquity, and that the morally corrupted centres of recent empires, resembling Paris or London, have been the equivalents of Rome. For Decadents, the tipping in direction of wholesale collapse was a novel second within the cycle of civilisation. Society was failing and extraordinary ethical values didn’t apply. Why not indulge within the second? This was a possibility to discover subjects that have been taboo for Victorians, resembling intercourse, medicine, demise, illness and flamboyant self-expression. The French Decadent Paul Verlaine is alleged to have remarked in 1886:
I really like this phrase decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the delicate ideas of final civilization, a excessive literary tradition, a soul able to intense pleasures … It’s redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the video games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of untamed beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capability for sensation, because the tramp of an invading military sounds.
Decadence was now not simply related to decay, however more and more with pleasure and non-conformity. The sexologist Havelock Ellis outlined it in 1889: ‘A decadent fashion, in brief, is an anachronistic fashion during which the whole lot is sacrificed to the event of the person elements.’ Decadence challenged collective norms with self-expression.
As a part of their breaking of taboos, some used Decadence as a method of exploring homosexuality in texts, obscured by refined classical references. However when probably the most well-known Decadent, Oscar Wilde, was tried for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895, his hedonistic novel The Image of Dorian Grey (1890) was used as proof towards him. Wilde’s imprisonment alarmed fellow artists in Britain and lots of, wishing to keep away from the homosexual and French associations of Decadence, moved away from the label, although it remained stronger in different international locations and continued to affect artwork actions resembling Modernism.
Decadent jazz
By the 1910s, ‘rag-time’ music, ultimately often known as ‘jazz’, grew to become understood as America’s personal musical mix of Western decadence. Once more, the time period mirrored anxieties about ethical decline, America now having industrialised and develop into economically {powerful}. Earlier eras had been involved with social order, clearly outlined whiteness, Christianity and feminine modesty. The jazz of the brand new century, in contrast, may very well be interpreted by white critics as proof of America’s cultural decadence alongside its financial successes. The various musical kinds related to jazz prompted issues about racial intermixing. For conservatives, proof of its immorality was typified by the jazz-loving high-society flapper, a girl emboldened by her new proper to vote, who, in accordance with one offended commentator in 1921, ‘drinks, swears, smokes’ and tells tales ‘that after belonged to the lads’s smoke room’.
In Weimar Germany, jazz was equally criticised as dekadent, understood by conservatives as the other of ‘tradition’. On this line of pondering, ‘tradition’ was civilising artwork produced by superior societies, whereas decadence was savagery or the gradual contamination of a nation’s tradition by perceived outsiders. When the Nazis took energy in 1933, jazz was described as ‘musical decadence’ and banned from radio programmes. The hatred of decadent jazz was sure up with racist concepts of America as an ethnically polluted Western tradition. The label was additionally used towards Jews: their fashions have been ‘decadent’ and ‘weakening the inhabitants’. On the opening of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Nice German Artwork Exhibition) in 1937, Adolf Hitler stated:
With the opening of this exhibition, the tip of the mockery of German artwork and thus of the cultural destruction of our individuals has begun. Any longer, we’ll wage a pitiless, purifying warfare towards the final parts of our cultural decay.
Postwar decadence
Whereas German fascism was defeated, decadence continued as a moralising insult within the Marxist lexicon. Early Soviet propagandists typically spoke of capitalist existence by way of ‘Western decadence’, during which the bourgeoisie have been introduced as obese and corrupt, gorging on unnatural pleasures whereas the employees suffered. Capitalism was once more imagined to be impotent; its ethical decay would end in a decline in Western energy and the inevitable rise of Communism.
Putin’s current discuss of Western decadence harks again to this rhetoric, with Russia now introduced as godly in opposition to a supposedly atheist West (fairly than the outdated stance, during which the Soviet state’s atheism was an indicator of its enlightenment).
The fashionable Russian state’s linking of decadence to ungodliness and sexual nonconformity has disturbing precedent contemplating Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in Victorian Britain. Decadence has lengthy been related to LGBTQ+ subcultures and, extra broadly, any teams or people who’re perceived as transgressing societal norms. Within the Center East, spiritual fundamentalist terrorists have imagined the variety of existence in Western societies as proof of their ungodly immorality and impending disintegration.
Decadence at present
In current many years, decadence has extra generally develop into related to chocolate cake. It’s nonetheless, nevertheless, used as a critically emotive phrase for an emotive subject – decline, actual or imagined. When decline is mentioned in historical past, or perceived within the current, decadence is a moralising technique of rationalization and of scapegoating those that don’t conform to perceived norms. As an aesthetic time period, decadence can alternatively be an excuse for Wildean experimentation of the taboo. Decadent, in any case, emerged as an adjective alongside an expressive individualism within the West, the place id is more and more seen as fluid and self-defined. It’s this individualism that modern-day critics, together with Putin, current as a risk to society.
Decadence is each a sense and a judgement. It displays anxieties about, or embrace of, change in a world of ever-shifting energy. Rome might have fallen, however the idea of Western decadence is unlikely to say no any time quickly.
William Rees is a PhD historical past candidate on the College of Exeter finding out decadence and disco.