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

claremontreviewofbooks.com

121–130 of 209 posts

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

#121

This is a fascinating discussion because it hits directly at a topic that civilization-after-civilization has faced throughout history: are we able to reasonably assess whether we are continuing towards growth and progress or stagnation and extinction? Frankly, the historical record is not encouraging. Usually, when this topic comes up people chime in with easy takeaways like "people have always complained about this…

Coincidentally enough, today is actually the anniversary of the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus. That happened on September 4th 476.

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

#122

This is a fascinating discussion because it hits directly at a topic that civilization-after-civilization has faced throughout history: are we able to reasonably assess whether we are continuing towards growth and progress or stagnation and extinction? Frankly, the historical record is not encouraging. Usually, when this topic comes up people chime in with easy takeaways like "people have always complained about this…

A lot of this stuff is just ship-of-Theseus for politics; institutions and power structures gradually break down and are replaced piecemeal with other ones, making it difficult to identify a cutoff date. Not only that, what are the boundaries of "our" "civilization" - what's not ours, and what's not civilization?

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

#123
post #7

> But there is also the possibility of a worst case that he describes in a chapter titled “Catastrophe.” Suppose that climate change has created an uninhabitable equator. The aging advanced nations cannot sustain their deficit-financed prosperity. The population of Africa continues its rapid growth, resulting in a mass migration into Europe that meets increasing resistance. Reading this reminded me a bit of reading t…

> This also reads a little weird. The author is obviously well versed in history and the progression of civilisation, and as such, must be aware that we’ve always moved in a progressive direction. Sure it sometimes takes a few life times, but we’ve never moved permanently backwards before, so it would be rather strange if we started doing that now.

As a counterpoint, I'd read the essay "The Whig Interpretation of History"(1931). Her criticizes the notion of interpreting history as a story of progress.

Review: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/11/19/philosophy-of-h...

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

#124
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.

When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap. Al…

Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard.

Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful".

To be fair, Coal Chamber and Sublime are "objectively awful" :D

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, that's reassuring. Virtually everyone agrees we are in a state of decline right now.

Covid aside, which is self inflicted, I highly disagree.

Funny, I agree with him because of things like Covid being self-inflicted. We're so unable, as a species, to avoid even known risks (yes, we've known about the risk of new Coronaviruses since SARS), prepare for them, or deal with them when they've actually occurred. Even now, a not insignificant part of the US population thinks Covid is a hoax. Or that climate change is a hoax. We're reaching a point where catastrophic failure is just a stone's throw away, and we're already seeing the system buckle (rise of the Republican's hold over Congress, the rise of Trump, the rise of far right activists across Europe, growing environmental issues causing things like surges of refugees and civil war, unrest across the globe, etc.). It's only going to get worse from here as problems go unsolved and people's suffering grows.

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree with your point but his 4 other examples were "steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable. With that said it felt like everyone I knew watched it (I associate with mostly non-techies) so to each his own. But yes the moon landing was on another level.

> steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable Also pretty dubious. Regardless of what you and your friends did, you have to admit that there’s a whole wider world that didn’t watch it. Just looking at the numbers, the SpaceX launch got about 10.3 million viewers ( https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/nasa-spacex-as... ) That’s good, but about as many as an important cric…

The author defines his shared cultural moment as "some feat of technical mastery". Obviously sports, politics and celebrities are always going to eclipse these. I'd put money on an order of magnitude more Americans caring about Lincoln's assassination than the steamship.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality and sophistication of mainstream pop art is an important indicator, though. It is consumed by the majority of the population and gives sense to the "wisdom" of an era. Nowadays you simply don't find any mainstream music approaching the levels of sophistication of, say, 1980s mainstream music. Where's the Dire Straits, the Gary Moore and the David Bowie of the 2010s?

Wasn’t 80’s pop music disco?

Early 80's. Top 100 charts of like '80, '81 had a lot of disco-inspired songs. This fizzled out around '85-'86.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A succinct and pithy saying, but generally incorrect. Historically, good times create a food surplus. A food surplus creates well-nourished armies. Well-nourished armies, for better or for worse, create hard times for everybody else. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I would recommend reading the following series of blog posts. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

You’re taking it too literally. It’s not about physical strength, it’s about cultural and societal strength and fortitude.

Exactly. It was in response to the “America is too comfortable” part of the comment.

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

#129
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap. Al…

Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard. Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful". To be fair, Coa…

I'm surprised someone with formal music education wouldn't take at least some interest in tool, even if they didn't actually enjoy it.

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

#130

I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks. It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them. e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of ha…

Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure. Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its…

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:

The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)

Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)

Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)

Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)

A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.

This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.

This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.

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