Decadence and the End of Days
Why have so many people gone crazy?
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1. Peacefield
Tom Nichols is writing a newsletter and I hate him for not doing it for The Bulwark. But you should read it anyway because itās very good. Hereās an entry on the mass psychosis weāve seen in America recently:
I do not mean that these are people whose politics are different from mine. I mean that these are people who took off from Spaceport Earth and then ripped up their return visa. Itās bad enough to support a coup against the U.S. government. Itās even worse to do it because you believe (as Powell did) that the CIA director is being held in secret custody in Germany or because you think (as Flynn did) that so many ballots were falsified that the military should impound them.
Remember, for a hot minute Flynn was the national security adviser, the guy who wakes up the president if thereās a sign of an incoming nuclear attack. You probably should worry if a person in that position is a member of a whacked-out cult and thinks maybe the government is sneaking vaccines into your salad dressing. . . .
Unfortunately, weāve become a nation, to steal a line from Peggy Noonan, of āsullen paranoids,ā in which millions of us have embraced a toxic combination of fantasy and stupidity. This is more than just the revival of conspiracy theories, which always lurk just beneath the surface of every society. This is far worse. From āmicrochips in the vaccinesā to QAnon, from Venezuelan voting machines to Russian-hacked voting machines, from faked moon landings to āJanuary 6 was antifa or the FBI or maybe both,ā too many of our fellow citizens are adrift, lost, freaked-out, and willing to believe almost anything, especially if it helps to support their preexisting political narratives and tribal loyalties.
Sure, some of this can be written off to ignorance. (When a quarter of us believe the sun revolves around the Earth, thatās just depleted-uranium dumbness.) But thereās a huge difference between being confused about which way the Earth turns and going to Dallas because you think a resurrected John F. Kennedy Jr. is going to lead you to a new era of government by revenant.
This is a social sickness, a chronic and growing problem in a society that is searching for meaning and connection. This search once led us to family or faith or community involvement. But that was before we chose a life of narcissistic, consumer-driven isolation. Even before the pandemic, modern humans spent way too much time inside our own heads, inside our own homes, and away from our fellow citizens.
As the kids say: #Endorse.
Read the whole thing. Subscribe. Nichols is great.
Even in the mass market intellectual space, people have been worrying about this modern search for meaning at least since Robert Putnamās Bowling Alone and no one has figured out why Americans lost their connections. Here is a partial list of possible contributions:
A free market system which cannot assign value to anything other than production and consumption.
Technology which acts as a mediating influence between human connections.
The waning influence of organized religion.
Increased geographic mobility.
The atomization of the family.
No one is even sure whether this disconnect is purely pernicious, or whether itās the side-effect of some development that weād otherwise regard as good. (For instance, a rising standard of living.)
Concern about the search for meaning runs the political spectrum, though you will be shocked to learn that liberals often blame the trends conservatives like, and conservatives mostly blame the trends liberals like.
I have my own theory about why our society is lost in its search for meaning and connection. And that theory is: All of it.
All of those bullet points above and many other factors, too. Which creates a melange so murky that the only real term that does much to describe it is ādecadence.ā
So far, so bad.
If you had asked me a decade ago what some remedies for decadence might be, I would have given you a š¤·āāļøš¤·āāļøš¤·āāļø and then mumbled something about helping families economically; trying to find ways to use technology to make geographic mobility less necessary; and reorienting our culture around people and not corporations.
Basically, I would have sounded like Josh Hawley.
What worries me is that when our political system tried to grapple with our decadence problem, it created an entire movement of little Josh Hawleys. Which is to say: anti-democratic demagogues.
None of whom are helping with our decadence problem. In fact, theyāre making it worse.
In the end, this is all probably fruit of the poison tree. If we are a decadent people, then why wouldnāt our responses to decadence be, themselves, decadent and useless? Why would we think that the same culture which got us stuck in the first place, would be capable of finding a way out?
2. Money Stuff
Matt Levineās daily newsletter from Bloomberg is free, but honestly, Iād probably pay $300 a year for it. Itās that good.
And this week he had an item about Zillow abandoning its homebuying program that fits nicely with our decadence talk.
In case you missed it: Zillow briefly believed that it could make money algorithmically flipping houses. Which is to say:
Zillow would figure out a value for a house.
Zillow would offer the owner some price below that value.
Zillow would buy houses from owners who accepted this price.
Zillow would then sell the houses for the value that their formula said they were worth.
Zillow gets fat on the vigorish.
Then Zillow shut down this program. Why? Hereās Levine:
On the one hand, sure, I can see why someone might consider this a problem:
When executives at Zillow Group Inc. pored over the companyās earnings in the spring, they saw a problem: The real-estate firm was making too much money.
On the other hand, it does feel like a problem that I would happily take off Zillowās hands? There are worse problems than making too much money! . . .
The problem was that āthe companyās algorithm, which was supposed to predict housing prices, didnāt seem to understand the market,ā and was generating prices that were too low.
This had two effects. First, most people declined its offers, which were too low: āOnly 10% of people who asked for a Zillow offer and eventually sold their home ended up selling it to Zillow,ā and āZillow was also behind on its target for home purchasesā in the first quarter.
Second, when people did accept Zillowās offers ā because they were in a hurry, or didnāt have a good sense of the market ā Zillow made a ton of money . . .
A lot of people would like to have a business like that! Sure it would be better if we could do more trades like that, but youāre realistically not going to find tens of thousands of people who will sell you their homes for below market value. But we have found thousands! Thatās pretty good!
I donāt know, itās a weird story about technology and scale, about how many businesses ā in particular, many public companies ā aim to maximize not profit but size.
So, in the modern tech economy:
Profits < Scale
Itās not just the culture thatās decadent.
3. Letters from an American
Recommending that people read Heather Cox Richardson is like telling people they should listen to U2. Everyone already reads Heather Cox Richardson.
But even so, sheās pretty great. If youāve never listened to The Joshua Tree, you should. And if you donāt subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, you should do that, too:
Michael Flynn spoke at the āReawaken Americaā conference in San Antonio, Texas, designed to whip up supporters to believe the 2020 election was stolen and that coronavirus vaccines are an infringement on their liberty. Flynn told the audience: āIf we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.ā
This statement flies in the face of our Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: āCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereofā¦.ā James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why it was fundamentally important to make sure the government kept away from religion.
In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should ātolerateā different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.
In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rightsāthe first ten amendments to the Constitutionāwould be based. It reads, āThat religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.ā
In 1785, in a āMemorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,ā he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human rightāan unalienable rightāof conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: āIn a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.ā
Read the whole thing and subscribe. Youāll instantly understand why sheās so popular.
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