Decadence

The weakening of a people or civilisation resulting from internal causes that leads it to lose its identity and creativity.

The causes of decadence are usually the same throughout history: excessive individualism and hedonism, the softening of mores, social egoism, devirilisation, contempt for heroic values, the intellectualisation of elites, the decline of popular education, the abandonment of or turning away from spirituality and the sacred, etc.

Other causes: modification of the ethnic substrata, the decay of natural aristocracies, the loss of historical memory, and the forgetting of primordial values. Decadence ensues whenever concern for the community-of-people in history fades, whenever the communal lines of solidarity and lineage slacken. One could say, in effect, that decadence occurs whenever apparently contrary symptoms combine: the excessive intellectualisation of elites, more and more cut off from reality, and the people’s primitivisation. Panem et circenses . . .

Europe today knows such a situation. Most of the time, decadence is not seen as such and thus denied. Those who denounce it are stigmatised as prophets of doom. Periods of decadence sometimes even initially assume the guise of a renaissance. Such periods seek to conjure away the real, occultating its negative symptoms in order to reassure everybody. No decadence is irreversible. We would do well to cultivate Nietzsche’s tragic optimism.

(see devirilisation; individualism; neo-primitivism)

Latin: ‘bread and circuses’, a term first coined by the Roman poet Juvenal to describe the entertainments which Romans used to distract themselves from dealing with the larger problems of the Empire. It has come to refer to any such entertainments which serve to divert people’s attention away from social problems.