We’re living in a decadent age. From scletoric institutions, to cultural exhaustion, to flatlining virility, signs of decline are metastasizing everywhere. Though we notice myriad symptoms of decay all around us, diagnosing its causes remains controversial. One can never seem to articulate why we’re in decline without advocating an agenda of some sort, and thereby undermining the diagnosis. This instrumentalization of the rhetoric of decline is one of the oldest tricks in the book, going back at least to Cato the Elder in the second century BC - who warned that luxury and Greek culture would inevitably corrupt the rustic simplicity of the Roman character - and has most recently been wielded by Donald Trump (“We are living in hell”), however the fact that it serves a propaganda function doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue. Many of us sense that - on some level -we are living in hell, or at least a Huxleyan version of it, but how to form a non-prescriptive understanding of the causes of decadence is a question I’ve been pondering recently. Or, put another way: what ever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type?
Our understanding of the symptoms of decline come originally from a few Roman chroniclers of the second and third centuries AD, most of whom had personal or political grievances with the contemporary order, and thus we should treat their narratives with caution. At any rate, the basic pattern emerges in Suetonius’ collection of biographies ‘Lives of the Caesars’: men who came from long distinguished lines of virtuous Romans became depraved, effeminate buffoons upon rising to power. Characteristics of these decadent Emperors that are repeated by both Suetonius and Cassius Dio include homosexuality (especially assuming the “feminine” position in homosexual relations), cross-dressing and incest. An especially egregious offense is to associate one’s rule in any way with Eastern (i.e. femininized) culture. It’s very easy to see the rise of LGBT and Anime as our contemporary analogue to these phenomena, but such an assessment is usually the preamble to wearied political prescriptions: “We need a spiritual reawakening and a return to traditional gender norms” etc. Perhaps, but that would merely be a means of self-induced cultural amnesia to return to an idealized status quo ante without understanding the forces that affected change in the first place.
The inherent contradictions of decadence is one of the central themes explored in The Sopranos. What Tony says to Dr. Melfi in the pilot episode about feeling like he came in at the end, that “the best is over”, is the decadent mantra par excellence. Tony’s attitude towards the past, however - one common among decadents - is in fact contradictory; he romanticizes tradition while personally disregarding its mandates. It’s a largely unremarked upon fact that Tony was never officially the boss of the family - he avoided holding a ceremony officially declaring his leadership. Junior’s meek reaffirmation in later seasons that “I’m still the boss of this family” was true according Cosa Nostra traditions, but despite often bemoaning their disappearance, Tony personally engineered a power structure to circumvent those traditions, a pattern of violating sacred mob codes of behaviour that he’d repeat throughout the series. Tony yearns for the fading values of the past while shirking any of the responsibility implied by those values; over the series he - like many of us - reveals himself to be the embodiment of everything he hates about the modern world.
Among the first to attempt an explanation for the “fall” of the Roman Empire, Montesquieu was also the first to observe the paradoxical nature of its decadence. In the succinctly titled "‘Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, the political philosopher made the novel claim that everything that contributed to Rome’s expansion and rise contained the seeds of its eventual decadence. His thesis was basically that the conquests undertaken to protect the Republic brought with them the wealth that would eventually destabilize it. He goes on to parrot the Roman chroniclers’ tales of increasing moral depravity leading inexorably to demise, but it’s worth pausing for a moment on the paradoxical connection he draws between wealth and decadence. States and people alike are compelled to seek wealth lest they fall behind and become dominated by rivals. Success in this venture, however, carries with it the seeds of the eventual moral corruption of one’s descendents, radically undermining the traditions you endeavoured to protect. Viewed from this perspective, decadence doesn’t represent a deformation of the natural moral order, but the ultimate destination of the process of socio-cultural evolution. It would appear that we can’t have our cake and eat it too; the point of attaining hegemony is to poetically piss it all away.
We’re all familiar with the Spenglerian meme: strong men, good times, weak men, etc. And while most people recognize the meme as simplistic and reductive - many societies of strong men have been incapable of ever producing good times, while multiple generations of weak men have managed to quite effectively preserve them - it nevertheless seems to reveal a cosmic truth of the cyclical nature of history. Spengler’s error was in mistaking history for a science in which predictable, mechanistic laws govern the rise and fall of civilizations, when in reality the process of historical change is better conceptualized by the patterns of cultural evolution. Literary or artistic movements, for example, aren’t subject to any sort of positivistic laws governing their relevancy. Rather, they capture a particular zeitgeist, are popular for a time, but ultimately become unfashionable and disappear, and on occasion will return to prominence at some later point. I claim a similar pattern governs the decadence of a culture; eventual moral deviancy is the inevitable transvaluation of all traditional norms.
A salient feature of decadence is the sense of contemporary aesthetic inferiority in relation to the art of a previous age. This sense of cultural nostalgia - depicted in The Sopranos through Tony’s fondness for classic cinema and history documentaries - is also paralleled in the vastly different receptions of Roman poets like Virgil, who wrote during the reign of Augustus, and Ausonius, who lived during the fourth century when the Empire was already in an advanced state of decay. A steady decline in the quality of Latin verse was first observed by Renaissance writers and later echoed by Edward Gibbon, and while I’d be the first to judge contemporary cultural output largely inferior to previous eras, it’s unclear whether my judgment - or that of the Renaissance writers - is on purely aesthetic grounds, or is rather coloured by an association of the supposedly superior culture with the grandeur, wealth and power of the era in which it was produced. When we say movies used to be better, what we’re really saying is that we yearn for the prosperity of a lost age and the sense of cultural vitality it empowered. Tony’s rhetorical longing for Gary Cooper betrays his conviction that, were he not condemned to be born after “the best is over”, he too would be a strong silent type. Gary Cooper is thus a nostalgic symbol of laconic self-confidence that the values of our own decadent era - with its saturated emotionality and permeating anxieties - have deprived us any hope of emulating.
The decadent ambivalence towards the past is in reality the flipside of the perceived denial of any future. In the classic fin-de-siecle formulation, this modern sense of despair towards the loss of one’s station expresses itself in the figure of the fading aristocrat, unable to reconcile himself to his social relegation in the new bourgeois paradigm. In the novel À rebours (1884) - the work largely responsible for popularizing this archetype - the main character finds solace by losing himself in the world of art, critique and aesthetic concerns. Though a work of fiction, the same essential process actually unfolded in Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century. The cultural historian Carl Schorske argued that the intellectual and artistic flowering of early twentieth century Vienna - in psychoanalysis, literature, economics, and art - was largely the result of the political routing of liberalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. According to this theory, while the liberals were ascendant for a generation following the advent of constitutionalism in 1860, having successfully wielded the aspirations of the masses to shatter the old aristocratic regime, their staunch secularism, laissez-faire economics and narrow political base inadvertently unleashed popular forces which they couldn’t master, leading ultimately to their political annihilation. For Schorske, a whole generation that included the likes of Freud, Zweig and Mises were frozen out of the political class due to being liberal and Jewish, leading to a diversion of energy away from politics and towards culture and academics. That generation’s sense of pessimism about the future of civilization had a formative influence on their work, and can be readily grasped in the pages of Civilization and its Discontents, The World of Yesterday, and The Road to Serfdom. I see this dynamic being somewhat paralleled today among politically scorned millennials. A lot of us would seem to prefer having a media career to actually doing politics; we’re evidently more inclined to chronicle rather than forestall our culture’s demise. Whether this changes as the Grim Reaper gathers more and more boomer souls clinging to the levers of state remains an open question, but the sense of a discontinued future has undoubtedly led plenty of talented millennials away from the old dream of ‘changing the world’ towards its 21st century variant: ‘monetizing your thoughts’.
To return to The Sopranos, the final season can be broadly reduced to Tony’s ill-defined anxiety about the future. The non ending of the last episode is in my view irrelevant, as over the course the season we already witnessed the only three possible endings for Tony through the arcs of the three other bosses on the show. Tony could either die in the can like Johnny Sack, get whacked like Phil Leotardo, or live so long that none of it has any meaning, like Uncle Jun. Tony’s own fate is almost besides the point, however, because the true source of his anxiety is the fate of his two families. My interpretation is that this anxiety about the future manifested itself in Tony’s manic run of gambling losses in Season 6B. The streak ultimately ends in the same episode he kills Christopher, because in doing so he finally freed himself of the burden of having to worry about the future. While we can argue about Tony’s exact reason for the murder, Christopher symbolized the next generation of the family; a future without him in it and for this reason a future in whose outcome he has no interest. But this fanatical narcissism expresses itself in the opposite way when it comes to his biological family. Among the most poignant scenes in the entire series is the last of the penultimate episode in which Tony visits AJ in the mental hospital after he’s attempted suicide and offers his unconditional solicitude A central source of conflict between Tony and Carmela throughout the series involves their constant shifting of blame for AJ’s indolent, erratic behaviour. Was he coddled, or did he lack a positive male role model? The truth is that AJ is exactly like Tony in every significant respect, but because of the rapid pace of social change - the narrowing aperture of postwar American prosperity and opportunity, mirrored by the golden age and decline of Cosa Nostra - the material and moral setting of the early twenty-first century have changed the valence through which we view those characteristics. When Tony got in trouble, it was ‘boys will be boys’. When AJ did, he has mental health issues. When Tony left school, there were other ways to make money. When AJ flunked out of college, he was immediately deemed a failure. AJ Soprano is the twenty-first century revival of the decadent dispossessed aristocrat, unable to adapt to the relegated station to which modernity had consigned him.
If decadence is a verifiable phenomenon rather than an endlessly recycled preamble to a political platform, I would conceptualize it as a pincer movement of on the one hand increasingly precarious material conditions - whether due to exogenous causes or growing social stratification - and on other hand a rapid transvaluation of norms. These two movements are inseperable: the vagaries of prosperity always elicits an accompanying ideological response. Decadence is not a terminal condition, however, because over time the new values and material conditions simply become the norm. Rather than a general social malaise, decadence is better understood as a subjective aversion or ambivalence towards the direction of society, eternally legitimate and never fully substantiated.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not living in hell.