What can ‘The Age of Decadence’ teach us about today? A great deal
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1900 was an age of decadence, 1920 was an age of decadence, 1940 was an age of horrors so horrific Europe basically collapsed. 1960s were extremely decadent but it was a bit more broad-based. The 1980s were decadent (I recommend Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities). 2000 was maybe unusually sedate? Probably it was decadent and I didn't notice. 2020 is decadent and I am not surprised.
The times don't change all that much.
I was a child, and with my dad in a pizza parlor.
Guys were watching the television, and there were numbers being shown.
My dad told me those guys were hoping their number wouldn't show. I still remember the guys drinking beer, but looked miserable.
I suppose now people get killed with drones so the US death count is lower. Does that make the struggle against terrorism better or worse than against Communism? There are arguments both sides.
The risks are actually higher today as far as I can tell, the next big war might be the end of civilisation for a century or more. But what is happening in the world is much the same as ever, just more techy.
It is more of the pathway to wealth and power that is promoted by the culture. Sometimes greed and exploitation is promoted, sometimes hard work is promoted and exploitation is diminished. Both always exist, but sometimes one is more dominant.
After World War II, there were many people who had to work very hard and wanted to start a family, start a business, and improve their communities; they got an education and tried to do their civic duties.
I know a lot of people like that, almost all of the people I know who grew up in that generation are like that. Though the 60s has well publicized decadence, most people in that time period were not like that. They were humble, honest, and hard working people. The culture that we remember most from some decades is the minority culture in that decade, which comes to fruition later, not the vast silence majority who truly made it what it was.
For most of history that is probably an unanswerable question. There aren't any archaeological or forensic methods I know to statistically count sin.
Decadence, like most subjective qualities we try to give history are unscientific and in my opinion should be ignored.
Edit: Also, the sixties were a time of rising drug use, riots, political assassination, teenage pregnancy, prostitution and murder. It's one of the few times we can say with some certainty was worse than now.
The interesting question is, why? Why is nihilism somehow psuedo-intellectually cool?
If you cannot produce a test by which your claim fails, in this case criteria that would meaningfully distinguish an age as not decadent then your hypothesis isn't worth pontificating.
Claims of "decadence" by historians have a funny way of aligning with a narrative a historian is trying to tell about a people or place. It is uncanny how often the claim is made by some older historian who doesn't like the new hair styles or new lingo or new political positions of a younger generation.
Edit: the philosophical razor here is what Mike Alder refers to as Newton's Flaming Lazer Sword
https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sw...
>>> The times don't change all that much.
That doesn't sound philosophically or factually rigorous, nor particularly true in many ways, nor like something that reflects any razor-like precision.
I think it's pretty obvious that if someone wanted to dig through popular historical stories they could easily cherry pick factoids from virtually any decade in order to paint it in a decadent light.
In this case, the null hypothesis is that human behavior is pretty consistent over time. It's on the claimant of an idea that cuts against the null hypothesis to provide the evidence. I have never seen a statistically convincing analysis of decadence. It's just usually someone spouting off with a bunch of anecdotes. I can provide you some from an array of decades if you like.
> The times don't change all that much.
The implication, in my mind, is that there's nothing we can change; it takes away all agency to improve our world.
As a simple factual counterpoint, the distribution of income and wealth varied widely between those periods. Also, the choice of years omits WWI, the Great Depression, and much more.
> The times don't change all that much.
Again, any basis in fact?
So when I see references to value-laden words like decadence, it usually says more about the author/speaker than it does about the thing in question.
Ever notice how once you buy a car everyone else has it too? Or how when you learn a new word everyone else seems to have just learned it too? Or how when you discover a song it's instantly in TV shows and on the radio like never before?
It's almost as if these things are always there, yet sometimes we take notice of them and other times we don't. Weird.
I think at least some people in here are familiar with it, it's called:
"The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success"