The Fascination of Decadence

By LANCE MORROW

I like the word decadent. All shimmering with purple and gold. It throws out the brilliance of flames and the gleam of precious stones. It is made up of carnal spirit and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of the Lower Empire: it conjures up the paint of courtesans, the sports of the circus, the breath of the tamers of animals, the bounding of wild beasts, the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets. --Paul Verlaine, circa 1886

It was partly the spectacle of Western decadence that aroused the Ayatullah Khomeini to orgies of Koranic proscription. Alcohol, music, dancing, mixed bathing all have been curtailed by the Iranian revolution. Americans find this zealotry sinister, but also quaint: How can almost childish pleasures (a tune on the radio, a day at the beach) deserve such puritanical hellfires? But Americans are also capable of a small chill of apprehension, a barely acknowledged thought about the prices that civilizations pay for their bad habits: If Iran has driven out its (presumably polluted) monarch and given itself over to a purification that demands even the interment of its beer bottles, then, by that logic, what punishment and what purification would be sufficient for America? The Ayatullah residing in some American consciences would surely have to plow under not just the beer bottles, but an uncomfortably large part of U.S. society itself.

The very idea of decadence, with all its fleshly titillations and metaphysical phosphorescence, excites that kind of Spenglerian anxiety. A lot of Americans seem inclined to think of themselves as a decadent people: such self-accusation may be the reverse side of the old American self-congratulation. Americans contemplate some of the more disgusting uses to which freedom of expression has been put; they confront a physical violence and spiritual heedlessness that makes them wonder if the entire society is on a steep and terminal incline downward. They see around them what they call decadence. But is the U.S. decadent? Does the rich, evil word, with its little horripilations of pleasure, and its gonging of the last dance, really have any relevant meaning?

Decadence is a wonderfully versatile idea--like a perfume that gives off different scents depending on a woman's body chemistry and heat. It arouses pleasure, disgust and bombast.

And sometimes elaborate denial. The critic Richard Oilman recently published Decadence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His elegant treatise argues that the term is almost impossible to define, is constantly misinterpreted and misused, and quite possibly should be deleted from the language.

Oilman makes a persuasive, if somewhat pedantic, point.

He argues that Americans overuse the word decadent, without knowing what they mean by it. They use it to describe a $50 bottle of Margaux, a three-hour soak in the tub, a 40-hour-a-week television habit, the crowds that tell the suicide to jump, a snort of cocaine. And yet Americans mean something by it. The notion of decadence is a vehicle that carries all kinds of strange and overripe cargo--but a confusing variety of meanings does not add up to meaninglessness. Decadence, like pornography (both have something of the same fragrance), may be hard to define, but most people think they know it when they see it.

They think it might cover, say, the Aspen, Colo., fan club that grew up two summers ago to celebrate Murderer Ted Bundy with, among other things, T shirts that read TED BUNDY is A ONE-NIGHT STAND. Or the work of Photographer Helmut Newton, who likes to sell high-fashion clothes with lurid pictures of women posed as killers and victims, or trussed up in sadomasochistic paraphernalia; one of his shots shows a woman's head being forced into a toilet bowl. The school of S-M fashion photography may, of course, be merely a passing putrefaction.

People informally play a game in which they compile lists of the most decadent acts now in practice. For horrific sensationalism, they might start with the idea of the snuff film (pornography in which an actress performing sex is actually murdered on screen). In the same awful category, they might include Viennese Artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who decided to make a modernist artistic statement by amputating, inch by inch, his own penis, while a photographer recorded the process as a work of art.

The list would have to mention Keith Richards, a member of the Rolling Stones, who, by one account, in order to pass a blood test to enter the U.S. for concert tours, had a physician drain his own heroin-tainted blood from his body and replace it with transfusions from more sedate citizens. Some of the sadomasochistic and homosexual bars in New York and San Francisco, with their publicly practiced urolagnia, buggery and excruciating complications thereof, would strike quite a few Americans as decadent.

In a less specialized realm, disco and punk songs like Bad Girls and I Wanna Be Sedated have a decadent ring. In fact, the entire phenomenon of disco has a certain loathsome glisten to it.

Extravagance has always been thought to have something to do with decadence. Some lists might mention Tiffany's $2,950 gold-ingot wristwatch, or a pair of $1,000 kidskin-and-gold shoes, or Harrods $1,900 dog collar, or Zsa Zsa Gabor's $ 150,000 Rolls-Royce with its leather, velvet and leopard interior. But be careful. Extravagance may actually be a sign of robustly vulgar good health. One can argue about such gestures as that of the 3rd century Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who once on a whim sent his slaves to collect 1,000 lbs. of cobwebs. They returned with 10,000 lbs. "From this," said Elagabalus, "one can understand how great is Rome." The Emperor would have enjoyed the Neiman Marcus catalogue, one of 20th century America's most fabulous menus of conspicuous consumption. The man who purchased His and Hers Learjets from the catalogue was helping to keep a lot of aircraft workers employed.

Decadence is a subjective word, a term of moral and psychological recoil. It expresses quite exactly those things that the speaker finds most awful, most repugnant, most dangerous and, as a Freudian might point out, most interesting. So a question arises: Are aberrant tastes decadent in themselves? Does the decadence consist in the fact that such tastes can now be openly practiced and even tolerated? Surely, tolerance is not decadence, unless it is a symptom of moral obliviousness.

Players in the game can pile up examples but still have difficulty arriving at any generality. Decadence, in one working definition, is pathology with social implications: it differs from individual sickness as pneumonia differs from plague. A decadent act must, it seems, possess meaning that transcends itself and spreads like an infection to others, or at least suggests a general condition of the society. Decadence (from the Latin decadere, "to fall down or away," hence decay) surely has something to do with death, with a communal taedium vitae; decadence is a collection of symptoms that might suggest a society exhausted and collapsing like a star as it degenerates toward the white dwarf stage, "une race `a sa derniere heure," as a French critic said.

Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners sometimes spent their Sunday afternoons at Bedlam mocking the crippled and demented.

In Florence during Michelangelo's time, countless victims of stabbings by hit men were seen floating under bridges. In London during the Age of Enlightenment, gangs roamed the streets committing rape. Says Critic George Steiner: "Our sense of a lost civility and order comes from a very short period of exceptional calm--from the 1860s to 1914, or the interlude between the Civil War and World War I."

One of the problems with the concept of decadence is that it has such a long moral shoreline, stretching from bleak and mountainously serious considerations of history to the shallow places where ideas evaporate 30 seconds after they splash. For all the range of its uses, decadence is a crude term. It houses fallacies. People think of decadence as the reason for the collapse of Rome, but the point is arguable. Rome at the height of its imperial power was as morally depraved as in its decline. Perhaps more so.

A second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict such a leap of civilization as the Renaissance. Ultimately, the process of decadence remains a mystery: Why has the tribe of Jews endured for so many centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words like corrupt or depraved to describe, say, punk rock, or murder in a gas line, but decadent is more popular because it contains a prophecy. To be decadent is to be not just corrupt, but terminally corrupt. "Decadence" speaks with the iron will of history and the punishment of the Lord. It is an accusation. "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion," wrote the prophet Amos, "and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria. Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory, who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils."

One could construct a kind of "worst-case scenario" to prove that the U.S., with the rest of the West, has fallen into dangerous decline. The case might be argued thus: the nation's pattern is moral and social failure, embellished by hedonism. The work ethic is nearly as dead as the Weimar Republic. Bureaucracies keep cloning themselves. Resources vanish. Education fails to educate. The system of justice collapses into a parody of justice. An underclass is trapped, half out of sight, while an opulent traffic passes overhead. Religion gives way to narcissistic self-improvement cults.

There is more. Society fattens its children on junk food and then permits them to be enlisted in pornographic films. The nation subdivides into a dozen drug cultures -- the alcohol culture, the cocaine culture, the heroin culture, the Valium culture, the amphetamine culture, and combinations thereof. Legal abortions and the pervasive custom of contraception suggest a society so chary of its future that it has lost its will to perpetuate itself. Says British Author Malcolm Muggeridge: "What will make historians laugh at us is how we express our decadence in terms of freedom and humanism. Western society suffers from a largely unconscious collective death wish." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shares with Muggeridge an austere Christian mysticism, has been similarly appalled by Western materialism.

And yet, oddly, the U.S. probably seemed more decadent, or at any rate, considerably more disturbed, eight or ten years ago than it does now. In the midst of the Viet Nam War, the ghetto riots, the assassinations, the orgasmic romanticism of the counterculture, the national rage was more on the surface.

Says Milwaukee Sociologist Wayne Youngquist: "There is decadence in our society, but it is an ebb, not a rising tide. Our institutions are healing, the age of moral ambiguity and experimentation is in decline."

Americans must beware, however, of looking for decadence in the wrong places. The things that can make the nation decay now are not necessarily what we think of when we say decadence: they are not Roman extravagances or Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, or Wilde's scented conceits. Nor, probably, do they have much to do with pornography, license or bizarre sexual practice. It is at least possible that Americans should see the symptoms of decadence in the last business quarter's alarming 3.8% decline in productivity, or in U.S. society's catastrophic dependence upon foreigners' oil, or in saturations of chemical pollution. It is such symptoms that betoken "a race which has reached its final hour."

But the word decadence, like an iridescent bubble, can be blown too large; it will burst with too much inflation of significance. In any case, decadence is too much a word of simplification. The U.S. is too complicated, housing too many simultaneous realities, to be covered with one such concept. Sub cultures of decadence exist, as they have in all societies. The amplifications of the press and television may make the decadence seem more sensational and pervasive than it really is.

A sense of decay arises also from all of society's smoking frictions of rapid change, the anxiety caused by a sense of impermanence. The nation's creative forces, however, remain remarkably strong -- in the sciences, for example, where achievements in physics, mathematics, biology and medicine rank beside anything so far accomplished on the planet. Before anyone tries to use too seriously the awful and thrilling word decadence, he ought to distinguish between the customary mess of life and the terminal wreckage of death.

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