The week before last I was in Paris. While I was there, I paid a visit to the Musee D’Orsay in an attempt to build on my minimal artistic education. I’d never been there before, but the Musee D’Orsay turns out to be a great museum; a bit like Tate Modern in that it is a new use for an old building (in this case a stunning ‘Beaux-Arts’ railway station), but nothing like Tate Modern in that it contains art.
This is one of the biggest paintings in the museum: Romans of the Decadence. Seen for real, it is quite something: it’s staunchly old-fashioned, maybe even slightly pompous, but it’s executed with a real sense of belief. You can see why: it’s a campaigning painting. Here are some of the top people of the once-mighty Roman Empire, feasting and debauching like there is no tomorrow – which there won’t be, as it happens, largely as a result of the grape-sucking, fornicating, wine-guzzling loucheness of the ruling class here displayed. Clearly a rot has set in at the heart of things; a rot whose immorality is driven home, if it needed to be, by the figures of the two foreign visitors to Rome standing to the right of the picture, looking on the scene with undisguised contempt and disapproval. We have come, they seem to be saying, to what we were told was the heart of civilisation. And this is what we find. Decline, it is clear, is well underway.
Of course, this painting is not really about Rome. Painted in 1847, it was a comment on the perceived decadence of France’s ‘July monarchy’. A portrait of a society which the artist, Thomas Couture, a Jacobin and radical, believed was in danger of going the same way as Rome if it didn’t mend its ways and turn its gaze outward. When it was unveiled it was with an explanatory quote from the Roman poet Juvenal: ‘Crueller than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world.’
I wonder if there has ever been a generation, in any civilisation, which didn’t think, to a greater or a lesser degree, that its society was decadent, falling apart, betrayed by hopeless leaders, suffering from a failing system. Perhaps not. But the fact that this may be the case doesn’t disguise another fact: that it is sometimes true. Sometimes societies are noticeably in decline; sometimes a cultural decadence does set in. When it does, ferociously insisting otherwise may become a necessary survival mechanism, but it doesn’t arrest the slide.
This set me wondering about the society I live in. In some ways – ways which we have explored here before – it seems that an inevitable decline is clearly underway. This is the decline of the industrial world: the world that has held sway globally for two centuries. We’ve looked at this in economic and environmental and political terms: climate change, peak oil, ecocide, the collapse of political and economic narratives; the evidence is all there.
It is easy, in some ways, to point to things like climate change, peak oil or deforestation, or even the hardening of the democratic veins with corporate fat, as signs of an imminent collapse or decline, because at least to some extent these things are clearly measurable. But what about more malleable, fuzzy, cultural pointers? What about decadence? Because if decline is real, it should surely be obvious in the culture we make.
It seems to me that a healthy society would have a healthy cultural heart. Its art, its music, its literature, its manufacturing, its artisanship – its ability to make things, from songs to machines, and to make those things speak about its values and its dreams – would be strong. It would have a sense of itself in time and place which, if not identifiable immediately, would be so in retrospect.
Think, for example, of Britain in the 1960s: arguably the peak of the 20th century popular British state. Culturally, it soared: in music most obviously, but also in fashion, in art, in literature, in cinema: in all these areas there were real, lasting examples of making, from the Beatles to Mary Quant, from Billy Liar to James Bond, the Mini to the Routemaster. In retrospect, we recognise the sixties with ease: the clothes, the hair, the music, the art, the politics, the cars. It was a moment of cultural heat which left an imprint on time.
I think the same could be said of the seventies and the eighties, to lesser degrees: look back, isolate these moments and the things they produced, and you can see them for what they were: recognisable chunks of history, with their own cultural forms and responses. The nineties, too, just about cut it: from Grunge to Britpop, Irvine Welsh to Danny Boyle.
I wonder if this can be said of the first years of this century. True, we are not long past them, so the retrospective is not possible yet. But the first signs, it seems to me, are of a culture collapsing in on itself.
What great, era-defining books did the last decade produce? What cinema? We were neo-gypsies one season, neo-Mods the next. Music was uber-derivative, often literally cut-and-pasted from earlier forms; there was no real fire, no lasting gathering point for culture or subculture. The London stages filled up with nostalgic musicals based on the tunes of three decades before, the pop charts with whey-faced androids culled from corporate TV ‘talent’ shows. So many celeb mags now line the shelves that it’s almost impossible to count them; but they all run the same stories. Overall, beyond the specifics, was a sense: a sense that everything had been done, that we were killing time, treading water. Irony, cynicism, cleverness and perhaps most of all, money, were held up as shields against our cultural flaccidity. We had run out of stories to believe in.
Meanwhile, in the age of blogs and tweets and pirating and consumer choice, a generation has grown up believing that everything is free, everything has been done and nothing is sacred. Currently there’s a mini literary scandal going on in Germany: a hip young author has been caught stealing entire pages from another novel and pasting them into her own effort (which appeared, naturally, to rave reviews from middle-aged literary neophiles desperate not to look past-it.) When she was caught, though, she wasn’t cast into outer darkness: she was put on the shortlist for a prize. This, it was explained, is just what the kidz do these days: they mix and match; they ‘hypercontextualise’. It’s fine. It’s the new culture. ‘There is no originality any more’, said the author, with no sense of irony, in her defence.
Our culture has always fed on the meat of earlier eras; all cultures do. From a medieval cathedral to an album by Mike Skinner, everything has influences rooted in an idea of the past. But there must surely be a gulf between a culture that builds on past influences to create something new and a culture that cannibalises past influences because it has run out of ideas; and then begins, as it seems we have begun, to cannibalise itself.
It’s hard to write this kind of thing without sounding like someone who thinks it was all better in his day. I grew up with Duran Duran and Kylie Minogue, so I harbour no illusions. And I’m being quite Brit-focused here; doubtless things are different in France and Canada. But I’d be willing to bet they aren’t that different. I don’t think this is just my imagination: it looks rather like the intellectual and moral exhaustion of the West is becoming ever more obvious in popular culture: which is, must be, the weathervane of wider society. We can’t say anything new, or even pretend to try. We have even lost the will to resist: the whole consumer apparatus of money and wanting has colonised everything, including the rebels. We are no longer a society of makers – we are a society of takers. Cultural pirates, living off the works of others, calling them our own, making money from money and art from art. Speaking to ourselves, turning in circles, swallowing our tails.
I wonder if others out there feel the same, and I wonder in particular what thoughts others have about the cultural moment we find ourselves in. What defines it? What has the 21st century brought us so far? If we are the Romans of the decadence, where next? What does culture mean in a dying empire?
Paul, I totally agree. Yesterday I unexpectedly picked up a copy of Reality Hunger by David Shields, a book published last month. The laudatory comments from other artists and authors were quite unlike anything I’d ever read for a book. It seemed, standing in the bookshop, that this was the best thing to be written in ages. I bought it and went home to read. It turned out that nearly the whole book was a collection of cleverly (actually, not that cleverly) disguised quotes and snippets from other writers, musicians, films, philosophers, etc. That, apparently, was the whole point: we live in an age of stealing from others, where text belongs to no-one, where – and reflected in the manner that the book was written – everything is derivatory and imbibed from elsewhere. I started reading with enormous excitement and ended in blanket despair.
It is however extremely difficult to know where to go to create something genuinely new and of our time.
It’s the mind at work: our thinking is under siege; almost paralysed by the weight of the past. We no longer stand on the shoulders of giants; we are crushed by them.
Even the idea of doing something new is a sullen one. More contrivance.
We live in a bubbling farrago of dull ideas, yet are told that as a society we are more creative, exciting, and imaginative than in times past. I don’t see it. The decadence you speak of is wholly reflective of our present cultural state – and even decadence now has not the allure it once had.
Consciousness is a play – trapped in a theatre – and left to play out as a tragedy.
Paul,
Even Hypochondriacs get sick eventually. All times are decadent to some extent in some place. This being predominantly a global monoculture when we reached decadence it was all over.
Decadence proceeds from the feeling that everything’s been done and all we can do is mourn that, copy it, or party like it’s 1999. The danger is when that attitude is carried forward after the crash that follows decadence like the Spring. If people continue to look backward this way it perpetuates a Dark Age. A time when all people think they can do is look back in awe at the previous “Golden Age,” either the active time before the Decadence or even the decadence itself.
The door is always open, at the individual level at least, to break out of this. Life does not have to be a game, and certainly not a game where the previous generations have already tied up all the great plays. If we are willing to do what it takes to see our own moment as our defining time then we can lose our squeamishness and our expectation of ease, and get down to the un-cool and hard work of forging lives for ourselves and finding and developing meaning within that life.
We are choked today by institutions that perpetuate fossilized thinking and “Decadent,” “Ancien Regime,” “Fin de Siecle” Angst and Ennui. Our Crises of Expertise and Leadership both stem from this dead weight of fossilized experience. At this point much of what they run on has been chewed and re-chewed to the point no self-respecting cow would bother to chew it again!
The trouble with focusing on the decadence of one’s time is that this effort displaces the real work of not looking back, either in awe or scorn, and facing our own moment squarely. The poets of the Roman Decadence spent their time bemoaning – between binges. Meanwhile the Celts and Hermans were not only sharpening their swords, but getting ready for an outpouring of cultural dynamism.
I agree that there’s a cultural vacuum now, but I disagree that that is the cause of decadence (although it might be a symptom).
I believe the real cause of decadence is spiritual decline. No, I’m not a religious fundamentalist or even (willingly) religious; I’m speaking of a widespread unwillingness to search out deeper meaning, a disrespect for and disconnect from the natural world of which we are a part.
It is this very disconnect which has led to the forthcoming environmental apocalypse, and which allows the masses to pretend that either there is no problem, or that we can fix it.
A spiritual wasteland leads to selfishness, greed, agression, brutality, and inhumanity. If we are so heartless that we can brutalise our own species, what hope is there for hard-to-love species like vampire bats, great white sharks and dung beatles?
Civilisation is a hideous beast that we created because of our own fear of the natural world; it’s the original sin. Like so many fictional monsters, it is going to turn back and devour its makers. Homo sapiens may or may not survive what’s coming. If we do, the surviving community will mostly comprise individuals and groups who foresaw the darkness and prepared themselves.
I don’t believe that an individual can ‘own’ ideas – nobody operates within a vacuum, the ownership of ideas is based on the capitalist model of selfish individualism rather than mutual co-operation…
didn’t Sartre say that anybody who claimed that their idea had never before been thought was either lying or it (the idea) must be completely rubbish… i like that take on it… so much so i wrote a poem about it:
thought
this thought is mine is it not?
this thought that
I created, that I alone
imagined
owned by this mind
is this thought,
rightfully mine
is this thought,
to be thought by
no-other without my express permission,
as this thought is mine
a single consciousness attached
to no-one
to no-thing
created this thought,
detached from all other thoughts
ever thought
is this mind, and
this thought is mine is it not?
i think that your own belief that we are coming to the end of this phase of civilisation explains perfectly how it is time to stop looking for ‘the new’ and remember ‘the old’ and by that i mean ‘the really really old’ isn’t that now so old it’s the new ‘new’?
cheers!
Mark,
I entirely agree with your post – I have also thought this way for a while now. To borrow from William Blake, we are currently far too single-visioned; we need to work towards a more truthful, four-fold vision of reality instead.
And I’m not a religious fundamentalist either, or an enemy of reason, whatever that means, but I do think that as a society we need to pay serious and immediate attention to what could be called ’spirit’.
In this, I have been heavily influenced by Theodore Roszak among others, especially The Voice of the Earth and Where the Wasteland Ends. I’d like to discuss either of those with anyone else out there. (Though I admit now I’m highly biased – I think Roszak is a brilliant intellectual shot in the arm.)
Elizabeth
Does not ‘uncivilised’ mean wild?
From the point of view of wild life, all civilised culture, our urban world, is destructive. If wilderness is best, then civilisation is a curse and its progress has been a descent. This is as our ancestors saw it, from an original golden Age to Silver, Bronze, Iron, to Apocalypse, the end of the world.
From the summit of the Mountain there are great views, the vision of a new world which is neither uncivilised nor destructive, a view all the way to a future global Golden Age.
To reach the summit there is first an abyss to cross. The abyss is this: At the very time when we, clever naked apes, have discovered the scale of the universe and our possible future in it – almost limitless – we threaten ourselves with extinction! Deep this abyss: At very great cost humanity has climbed the peaks of cultural achievement, and all will be lost if we fall, making the struggles and sufferings of our ancestors futile and to no purpose. We not only risk becoming inhumanly barbaric but also are at risk of becoming completely soulless, mechanical, mere automata in a robotic world – apes in spacesuits.
It is not possible to exaggerate the depth of this abyss. It is the Abyss of Despair. Only the fear of despair makes you seriously consider, realise the seriousness of the danger. Stare into the abyss and only then ask what really matters. What cultural inheritances are really worth keeping? What is the best of human culture worth saving? Facing despair, only then can anyone seriously see what matters, what is of lasting value, both wild and cultivated.
Then, look up – There is an abyss to cross and a mountain to climb. And it can be crossed and it can be climbed, one step at a time, one person at a time.
This, from one who has seen the view from the summit.
Funny that you begin with Rome and impermanence. I was just reading a passage in The Wind in the Willows in which Badger explains that his underground home used to be part of a Roman city.
***
“Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, and from here they rode out to fight or to drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last forever.”
“But what has become of them all?” asked the Mole.
“Who can tell?” said the Badger. “People come, they stay for a while, they flourish, they build – and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”
“Well, and when they went at last, those people?”
“When they went, the strong winds and persistent rains took the matter in hand, patiently, ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little – who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually – ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help.”
***
Kenneth Grahame for the Uncivilised reading list!
Gavin – thanks for that. Perhaps he should be on the list. The Wind in the Willows can be curiously subversive, and ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ is the single weirdest chapter in any childrens’ book ever. Deep animism in Edwardian England! Badgers in tweed jackets being led astray by the wild god of the woods. Marvellous stuff.
Agreed, I have just picked it up for the first time after 33 years and can’t believe I waited so long. Beautiful and weird.
Paul – thanks for a very interesting post.
Nostalgia and regret for a more vibrant world may be hard-wired in us – activated the older we get, and 30-40 years ago always seems to be the site of the golden, or at least less crude and rude, age. But as you say, just because every generation and culture can feel that things are on the wane does not mean that sometimes it is all too true.
One problem in the modern West is the downside of the post-50s social liberations and the sense that every aspect of the first wave of industrial culture – which was permeated by pre-industrial traditions and values – was clapped out, repressive, boring and incapable of speaking to the new age. Babies were hurled out with bathwaters, and the idea that complete disinhibition would promote more creativity took hold. But limits and conventions provide discipline and direction for creativity; lose them and you get not freedom, but sprawl. And inability to focus, channel, discipline our creativity seems to be widespread.
Two other problems strike me as relevant here. First, the endless flow of technological novelties and the speed of innovation give us the illusion that a) we live in unprecedented times and have nothing to learn from a dim and less enlightened past (even and especially the recent past); and b) we are seeing greater change than anyone has seen before, and are making amazing progress. But there is a good case to be made that nothing in the past 60 years has been as profound in social and technical innovation and expansion of knowledge as the 60 years from 1880 to 1940. We live off the breakthroughs of that time (including oil). And there is a disastrous result from the conceit that we live in such unprecedented times that there is nothing to learn from past centuries of Western (or other) cultures (Ford – History is Bunk). That is the hyper-ironic and decadent stance towards the people of the past – how peculiar and pitiful their knowledge and technology! how uncool they were! – coupled with near-total failure outside (and increasingly also inside) universities to transmit a rich sense of where we have come from, what values and traditions from the past can still teach us, and the timeless relevance of human spiritual responses to Earth and cosmos. Capitalism has use for spirituality and history only as a couple of consumer options among a billion others, and wants – needs – us to be amnesiac, ironic, restless consumers with a permanent sense that something is missing, which we might find in the next purchase.
We have become a society of cultural DJ’s – no real talent, originality or authenticity.. Just mixing it up for the masses.
Good piece, we are in a very dull derivative rut at the moment. If you want some hope that new things are on the way though, go and see Jerry Dammers’ Spatial aka Orchestra. It might be what music will be like after civilisation.
Paul
Apologies for pitching in late here, and before all else thanks for writing this, and provoking me.
Some of the targets identified in this piece are certainly worth striking out against (vacuous celebrity culture to name one), and I take on board your call to confront conditions of cultural decadence. At the same time, I feel frustrated by the tired, hugely generalising rhetoric of the cultural jeremiad in which you make your case. One of my biggest hopes for the Dark Mountain project is that it might begin to crack open the forms, as well as the substance, of our myths of progress and civilisation; so to run up against a ‘today’s culture is a load of rubbish’ routine, worthy of the Daily Mail, is honestly disappointing.
As you yourself admit, we are too close to the early 21st century to make reliable pronouncements as to its cultural worth – let alone getting into knotty questions like, who enjoys that worth, and by what timescales should we measure cultural decadence, or indeed cultural endurance? I can remember many mournful conversations back in the golden 80s and 90s about how nothing was original, everything was recycled and postmodern. As time passes, we and our media surrounds do a fine job of filtering out the mediocrity and confusion which filled up bygone eras as much as our own, and crafting tidy tales of the cultural achievement of past decades which only include the good stuff. For every Billy Liar, remember that there was a Doctor in Distress.
Antonio in his comment is right: dwelling mournfully on the decadence of present times evades simply facing up to and creating the present. The present gets made anyway, with absolutely no cast-iron guarantees about how it measures up to either past or future – again, much depends on who’s doing the measuring. The sweeping condemnation of your jeremiad – all music is derivative cut-and-paste, all theatre is a musical nostalgia-fest – is simply wrong in failing to acknowledge that meaningful, spiritual, original, hard-grafting creation is still going on, all around us. If we fail to see it, maybe we are looking in the wrong places, or our radar isn’t tuned in. What, after all, will the Dark Mountain journal be filled with, if not this?
So, what might happen if we consciously gave up the rhetorical power of defining the past as a sequence of neat ten year chunks ,which get better the further back you look, and against which the present never has a hope of competing? What if we consciously gave up the rhetorical power of vast generalisations, and instead chose always to offer a more complicated, nuanced view? What is happening when complaint draws more energy than the new creation it is supposed to be making space for?
Reading your subsequent post, and about the reader who raised the need to mourn our past myths before we overcome them, I admit we’re all mired in the comfort and familiarity of these rhetorical habits. Yet they restrict our imagination as much as they actually diagnose problems, and risk cutting off the fresh possibilities for observing, thinking and acting within the world that I think we’d all agreed we need.