Peter Thiel on Ross Douthat's "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success"

Mr. Thiel writing at First Things:

When Boeing introduced its flagship 707 jet airliner in 1958, the power to cruise at 977 kilometers per hour did more than enable routine transcontinental commercial flights. It fed the optimistic self-understanding of a society proud to have entered the Jet Age. More than sixty years later, we are not moving any faster. Boeing’s latest plane, the 737 MAX, has a cruising speed of just 839 kilometers per hour—to say nothing of its more catastrophic limitations.

The since-retired 707 was a success. The new MAX looks like a failure. As for the 747 jumbo jets that we are still flying today fifty years after their 1969 debut, they are a sign of what Ross Douthat calls decadence. By “decadence” he does not mean delicious sensuality or over-the-top indulgence (think Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate dancing mid-flight in the upper-deck cocktail bar of a 747 in last year’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood) but stagnation and complacency, a dissipation of creative energy, a jaded will merely to muddle through.

Douthat’s book is well-timed. The fiftieth anniversary of the ­Apollo 11 moon landing and ­Quentin ­Tarantino’s painstaking recreation of the year 1969 summon the same nagging question: How far have we come since then? Few men in the street would be able to ­evaluate the ­progress of, say, physics as ­instantiated in string theory. But everyone should be able to tell whether or not the streets around us, and the expectations of life, have been transformed for the better.

Are we making progress? Not so much, Douthat answers. Baby boomers will wince at his title, since “decadence” sounds to them like the complaint of an old curmudgeon. They cannot stand to think of themselves as old, nor can they bear to think of the society they dominate as dysfunctional. But this is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era.

Douthat outlines four aspects of decadence: stagnation (technological and economic mediocrity), sterility (declining birth rates), sclerosis (institutional failure), and repetition (cultural exhaustion).
Stagnation is the most evident. Look up from your phone, and compare our time to 1969. “Over the last two generations,” Douthat writes, “the only truly radical change has taken place in the devices we use for communication and entertainment, so that a single one of the nineteenth century’s great inventions [running water] still looms larger in our every­day existence than most of what we think of as technological breakthroughs nowadays.”

Sterility is not immediately obvious outside of a few places like San Francisco. In public debates, low birth rates are treated as a matter of personal preference. If they mean anything more, it is as a drag on future economic performance—hence an argument for immigration. Douthat goes beyond economistic abstractions to point out that missing kids weaken a society’s connection to the future.

He thus explains a key current in “populist” skepticism of the elite consensus: “[Immigration] replaces some of the missing workers but exacerbates intergenerational alienation and native-immigrant friction because it heightens precisely the anxieties about inheritance and loss that below-replacement fertility is heightening already.” Douthat does not ignore racism, but he focuses on the dynamics that explain our unique moment instead of inveighing against an age-old evil.
“Sclerosis” refers to our diseased institutions, especially the inability of our government to get anything done. Assessing the record of rule by experts, Douthat again emphasizes historical contingency rather than doctrinaire ideology:

Time makes these problems worse, as popular programs become part of an informal social contract that makes them nearly impossible to reform; as the administrative state gets barnacled by interest groups that can buy off and bludgeon would-be reformers; and as the proliferation of regulations handcuffs administrators and deprives them of the room to respond to changing times.

In other words, the New Deal could only happen once, and whatever competence prevailed at its experimental dawn no longer exists.

“Repetition” names the condition of our culture, endlessly remaking remakes of remakes. Whereas the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties all had distinctive by-the-decade styles in design, clothing, music, and art, from the nineties to now feels like one big remix. We are stuck in a boomer culture loop, explains Douthat, from J. J. Abrams remaking George Lucas’s Star Wars to Martin Scorsese remaking himself:

The boomers were the last rebellious generation to come of age not only with various traditional edifices still standing but also with a sense, in the Eisenhower fifties, that those edifices had actually been strengthened by the experiences of the Depression and World War II. This gave the rebel culture of the sixties a real adversary to struggle against: the old bourgeois norms refreshed by suburbanization and prosperity; a Christianity that had just ­experienced a sustained revival; a patriotic narrative of history that had been burnished by victory in the Second World War; a common culture that had become more binding through the ­influence of radio, television, mass-market periodicals, and movies.

Now the old family structure has been smashed, religion is in decline, patriotism is passé, and the cultural marketplace is fragmented. Because there is no longer a healthy dominant culture, would-be rebels have nothing to resist. So they playact the battles of a previous age....

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