Sphinx

One of the many interesting questions raised in yesterday’s final session of the series of workshops I’ve organised to explore ‘The Politics of Decadence’ was this: would you describe the current UK government as decadent, and why (not)? Corrupt, undoubtedly, among many other things; but, while decadence always involves corruption, it’s fair to say that not all corruption is a sign of decadence (h/t Shushma Malik, one of the loyal workshop participants, and her work with the Potsdam-Roehampton project on corruption in antiquity). The best questions get to the heart of a range of issues and open up the problems inherent in a concept or approach; while ostensibly light-hearted and trivial, this is one of those questions…

Now, despite my propensity for quoting doom-laden GY!BE lyrics in response to thr state of the world – we’re trapped in the belly of this hossrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death – my instinct is to avoid embracing the term ‘decadence’ with respect to anything other than ice cream and barrel-aged imperial stout. This is a project about taking seriously other people’s use of the term, and associated complex of ideas, rather than taking it very seriously as an actual description of the state of things. ‘Decadence’ may obstruct rather than aid understanding.

(1) It is overtly rhetorical, over the top and uncomfortably metaphorical (hence, as I argued years ago, historians are happy to use ‘dead’ metaphors like ‘decline’ but steer clear of decadence). The fact that it’s rhetorical and polemical doesn’t mean it isn’t important – on the contrary, and there are important questions to be asked about the nature of its appeal, in different contexts (fascinating observation from Dimitri Almeida of Halle last week, that the French right-wing populist Éric Zemmour deploys such ideas copiously in his books but not in his recent presidential campaign). But this apocalyptical, rabble-rousing dimension is precisely why I feel cautious about adopting the concept myself.

(2) Evoking decadence in a serious manner presents the behaviour of Johnson and his regime as symptomatic rather than a matter primarily of individual choice and values – which is not intrinsically unreasonable, except that ‘decadence’ immediately shifts the discussion to the level of an entire society or culture, rather than to intermediate systems like the British political class or the University of Oxford. It presents the decay of values and virtue as a more or less natural phenomenon, the results of the effects of time on a civilisation or institution. It misidentifies the problem – indeed, arguably this is the point, as ‘decadence’ works as an agglomerator, framing multiple phenomena (many of which might seem quite unproblematic to most people – the divorce rate, for example) as symptoms of the same cultural-level process of decay.

(3) Given that the Johnson persona is already predicated on the trampling underfoot of norms and standards and the enthusiastic embrace of vice and self-indulgence, there is an obvious risk that labelling this as ‘decadence’ actually feeds the myth. I can see the case for a revaluation of decadence as a positive quality in the context of, say, gay rights or modern art; extending this to old-fashioned elite male promiscuity, greed, self-entitlement and boorishness seems unnecessary.

Put another way: as someone (Seth Jaffe?) observed yesterday, decadence is one response to the crisis of liberal democracy; it’s not the only available interpretation, and one can recognise this without thereby denying that there is actually a problem worth thinking about. It’s not an exclusively right-wing response either, though that is where it’s most commonly found; similar ideas about the corruption and decay of society can be found in revolutionary left-wing traditions since the 19th century. Both perspectives aggregate multiple phenomena as symptoms of a system-wide crisis, thereby mobilising genuine grievances and anger for the project of ‘Burn it all down!’ The crucial difference is the imagined future: heightening the contradictions in order to hasten the advent of the new society, or a cleansing fire to root out the corruption and restore the old.

British democracy is clearly in a bit of a state. But it’s not at all obvious that this is a reflection of a corrupt and decaying culture. On the contrary, one issue is the extent to which the ruling class is detached from and out of step with most of the people over which it exercises power – and one reason for that is the success with which it, like other contemporary populist-authoritarian regimes in recent years, has mobilised the tropes and emotions of decadence – demographic anxiety, fear of difference and change, discomfort with modernity, envy and resentment – to win elections.

Since the workshops began, I’ve been sounding the #decadenceklaxon ever more frequently on the Twitter, and not just because I’ve been more alert to examples. The primary target – equally the case before and after Putin’s attack on Ukraine – has been ‘wokeism’, and the defence of racial and sexual equality. This is not a political concept we should be signing up for, or deploying ourselves – but it’s one we need to understand.