The decadence of the West is back on the agenda. I recently read two essays on the decline and fall of the West: La défaite de l’Occident by Emmanuel Todd (Gallimard, 2024), and The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
The authors are well known: Emmanuel Todd is a French historian and sociologist, author of some two dozen books on contemporary societies and the world; among them La Chute Finale, the 1976 essay in which, in a unique feat, he predicted the end of the Soviet Union, then considered eternal. Ross Douthat is an American writer and essayist, born in 1979, author of works such as Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class and Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times, filling the quota for conservative editorialists at the Big Apple’s progressive daily.
La défaite de l’Occident and The Decadent Society are, of course, about the defeat and decadence of the West and America. Personally, I’m more concerned by Todd’s pessimistic reading—which almost half a century ago predicted the end of the Soviet Union—than by Douthat’s. The Decadent Society ends up dismantling, in a non-apocalyptic way, the signs and symptoms of a “sustained decadence” in leading Euro-American societies, ”in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver.”
But the gallery of decadent headlines about the future of the West, understood as the Western Euro-American world, is endless. Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean economist and diplomat, sees it from the other, emerging side. In Has the West Lost It? – A Provocation (Allen Lane, 2018), Mahbubani predicts the technological and economic rise of the Asian giants, India and China; then, in Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (PublicAffairs, 2020), he focuses on the struggle for supremacy between China and the United States. More recently, in The Asian 21st Century: China and Globalisation (Springer, 2022), he declares the end of Western hegemony in world history, with the geopolitical rise of China and India and the transformation of humanity’s environment from a “vast planet” into a “global village.”
Emmanuel Todd identifies the decline of Euro-America in ideological and social factors, such as the rise of the “Woke religion” in the Biden administration, where a collection of racial, sexual, and cultural minorities attests to the “inclusive” obsession. But the ‘global south’ neither understands nor takes seriously the stagnant unrealism and sado-masochistic decadence of the new religion that has taken over the Western avant-garde, which, for Todd, contributes to the scant support it finds in Asia, Africa, and the Hispanic Americas for the West’s cause against Putin’s Russia—a culture which appears, by comparison, religious, traditional, and virile.
The theme of decadence is an old one in Western history: in the 18th century, the fascination with the greatness and decadence of Rome and the Roman Empire led Charles-Louis de Montesquieu to publish Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) and for Edward Gibbon to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes (the first in 1776, the second and third in 1781 and the last three in 1788-1789).
In the 19th century, after the Napoleonic wars, it was perhaps due to the successes of the industrial revolution and the subsequent age of imperialism that—with the rapid conquest and occupation of Asia and Africa by Europeans—decadence was not of much concern to the continent’s thinkers. The exception was Nietzsche, who was impressed by the rapid rise and fall of the ancient Greeks, and who dealt with the conflict between science and wisdom in classical Greek philosophy. The thinker’s tragic genius also led him systematically to fight the dominant ideas, the “idols,” whatever they were.
The Weimar Kulturpessimismus
The pessimism of many European intellectuals and thinkers in the aftermath of the Great War is not surprising. Among the victors, as among the vanquished, the weight of the dead and maimed, the degree of destruction in the industrialised war, with its material battles, left a sense of desolation and emptiness. And then there had been the destruction of empires—the Habsburgs, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, even the Ottoman Empire. And in October 1917, the Bolshevik revolution took place in Russia, threatening the West’s entire way of life.
But despite the feeling of decadence and the reactions to this decadence and to the Bolshevik revolution—national and popular caesarisms and traditional autocracies, from Italian fascism to the conservative national dictatorships of the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe—and despite the first tremors of British imperialism in Ireland and Malta, it was in Germany that the theme of the decline of the West was theorised to the greatest extent and depth.
The circumstance of German thinkers a century ago was the profound humiliation of defeat and the punitive peace of Versailles. Over the course of the 19th century, Prussia-Germany had gone, in three generations, from traditional agrarian feudalism to a mass industrial society.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, lived through these circumstances of war, defeat, and humiliation. The disasters of war, the tension of the revolutions, and the uprisings of the Spartacists and Communists in the early 1920s deeply marked him and his entire generation. Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger—circumstances would make them victims of decadence, but resistant to chaos and its effects.
For Heidegger(das Sein, the Being) which had been at its peak in Ancient Greece—was in crisis in the modern industrial age. That’s why the Sein und Zeit thinker turned to a resurrection of community and family values and a return to the sacred both as antidotes to decadence and as the foundations for a new national-conservative way of thinking. In 1933, Heidegger would find or at least seemed to find the political materialisation of this thought in Hitler’s identitarianism and totalitarianism and his ‘German revolution.’
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), who published the two volumes of Decadence of the West – Outline of a Theory of Universal History in 1918 and 1922 Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, centred the idea of decadence on a theory of the ages of civilisation. In the 19th century, the West had reached maturity and was entering its final years, old age. And because of this, and because “civilisations were mortal,” it was in decadence, and the door to the end. Although little appreciated by the victorious National Socialists, Spengler would leave in Decisive Years (1933) a set of suggestions for dealing with and overcoming the crisis.
Heidegger was also critical of Spengler’s fatalism and determinism, which he saw as an expression of “superficial rhetoric,” but he himself was also pessimistic, speaking of the “night of history,” the occultation and “flight of the gods,” and painting the dangers to being and the community of the machine age.
Carl Schmitt (1888-1895), known as the crown jurist of the Third Reich, would deconstruct Weimar parliamentarism—and its liberal 19th century antecedents—as a dysfunctional institution, due to his distrust of state power. For the author of Political Theology, the constitutional priority of individual rights, from the right to property to freedom of expression, led the system to make national representation unfeasible by blocking decision-making.
Schmitt would have been tempted to see a dictatorial solution based on the special powers of the Reich President: supported by the Army, Hindenburg could ban radical political parties—Communists and National Socialists—and rule in a commissarial dictatorship. The question of this Schmittian temptation persists, but to outlaw two parties that together had half the electorate would be to pave the way for civil war. So Hindenburg did not proclaim a commissar dictatorship, and instead called Hitler’s national-conservative alliance to power. Schmitt, like Heidegger, went on to join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1933, after the victory.
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) is the fourth German to be marked by decadence after defeat and Weimar. A great combatant, the youngest holder of the Pour le Mérite, his Kriegstagebücher, war diaries, was one of the first literary incursions of one of the greatest European prose writers of the 20th century and also of a thinker on the edge of the sword—the tragedy and the fate of Germany.
Jünger read and admired Spengler’s The Decline of the West and its contrast between Zivilisation (civilisation, bourgeois and decadent) and Kultur (culture, primitive and strong). Furthermore, like other authors and militants of the Konservative Revolution, he saw Marxism as a degraded and plebeian form of capitalism, both expressions of the same economistic civilisation. His book closest to National Socialism, Der Arbeiter, didn’t dispel the antipathy between his heroic nationalism and what he saw as a mass democratic movement led by a demagogue Caesar. He felt closer to the ‘reactionary modernist’ Spengler and his ideas about decadence. That is also why Jünger criticised National Socialist power in Auf den Marmor Kippen (Hamburg, 1939) and, in the summer of 1944, at German headquarters in Paris, plotted to overthrow the Führer. He escaped because Kniebolo (the name he would give Hitler in the Diaries) ordered him to be spared, not because of his literary value, but because he was the bearer of the Pour le Mérite. Corporal Hitler had been nothing more than a first-class Iron Cross and he knew how to appreciate the difference.
Thus the intellectuals of Weimar Germany reacted to the decadence under the spectre of defeat and against the backdrop of a national humiliation. Some, like Spengler and Jünger, initially sympathised with National Socialism and its reaction to Versailles, before later becoming critical. For Jünger, after the night of the long knives, the Kristallnacht of 9-10 November 1938, would be the decisive turning point.
From cultural pessimism to real decadence
Today it is no longer a question of German intellectuals from the Kulturpessimismus conjecturing about decadence in a world where European imperialism was still master, thanks to technology and weapons. Today, decadence affects all, or almost all, European peoples and is concretely measured in economic stagnation or decline, demographic decline, and the crisis of institutions. It is no longer intellectuals and elites who sense it, but ordinary people, from Lisbon to Warsaw, from Helsinki to Naples. It’s a decadence that is felt in the flesh by ordinary people, in the impoverishment of the working classes and the middle classes due to deindustrialisation, and in the loss of a sense of identity and roots in the land and the family. The elites seem oblivious, caught up in a delirium of microaggressions, ‘gender’ subtleties, and rituals of accusation and atonement for the past and the present.
Faced with elites that tend to be globalised, individualistic, and hedonistic, the answer has been to vote or to seek, through voting, to give the community back its voice, rescuing values—the nation, the sacred, the family, and freedom—that can counteract decadence. Unfortunately for the new Left, but fortunately for those who cherish a worldview grounded in real concerns and the needs of ordinary people, free and fair elections favour the conservative national values of old.
