The Idea of Decline in Western History

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by Noel Malcolm

The Idea of Decline in Western History, by Arthur Herman (Free Press, 521 pp., $30)

Mr. Malcolm is an historian and a former political columnist for the London Daily Telegraph.

THE idea of decline, you may suppose, aint what it used to be. The words "decadence and "degeneracy, so commonly invoked by politicians and cultural critics three or more generations ago, are scarcely the key terms of present-day political debate. Grandiose pessimistic theorizing of the sort that gave us Brooks Adamss The Law of Civilization and Decay or Oswald Spenglers The Decline of the West is out of fashion; the last person to attempt it, Arnold Toynbee, was slowly taken to pieces by other historians and is little read today.

But although theoretical system-building may be outmoded, the mind-set of radical declinism, and many of the central claims of the classic theorists of decadence, are alive and well. "We live in an age of cultural disarray and social decay, an age filled with ruins and fragments, is one typical remark. It comes not from Spengler, nor from Nietzsche or Carlyle, nor from Count Volney whose Les Ruines (1787) helped set off the fad of romantic pessimism but from Cornel Wests Race Matters, published just four years ago. And there are plenty more of such classic-sounding declinist cris de coeur to be found in the works of radical multiculturalists and Afrocentrists, not forgetting eco-pessimists such as Albert Gore and his spiritual soulmate, the Unabomber.

The great mistake most of us probably make about declinism is to assume that it is the natural preserve of the Right. Surely, we say to ourselves, people who go on about decline must be nostalgic conservatives, and probably middle-aged ones at that. As for "degeneracy, we all know that it is a word out of the fascist lexicon; Hitler organized exhibitions, for jeering purposes, of entartete Kunst ("degenerate art), and however wearied or repelled we might be by some of the products of our own avant garde we always try to find some other word to describe them.

What Arthur Herman has done in this wide-ranging and powerfully persuasive survey is to show just how permeated with traditional declinism the cultural theorists of the Left are today. This is a matter not just of noting surface similarities, or picking out a few suggestive quotations such as the one from Cornel West given above, but rather of tracing the deep root-systems of their arguments.

Professor Herman has devised, in effect, a genealogy of the jeremiad. Gloomy denunciations of the modern world have an extensive family tree; behind and beyond the eco-warrior inveighing against technology, or the multiculturalist attacking the sterility of white European civilization, there stands an array of intellectual ancestors, including some pretty disreputable ones. Among the granddaddies, cousins, and in-laws of this family one finds, for example, Adolf Hitler and Arthur de Gobineau, the founder of modern racism.

But "racial degeneracy is just one possible form of declinism, and it is not the main theory dealt with in this book. The central idea, the dominant family trait uniting critics from the Left and from the Right, is the belief that modern civilization is by its very nature dehumanizing, rotten, and spiritually corrupt. In one of the most compelling sections of his narrative, Professor Herman describes how a version of this idea, drawn from Nietzsche as well as from Marx, was implanted in American intellectual life by the social theorists of the "Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse) and subsequently reinforced by their French counterparts (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault).

All in all, the Frankfurt School represented a triumph of theory over experience. Its leading members spent the Second World War as guests of Columbia University, "ensconced, as Herman puts it, "in Morningside Heights amidst an unfamiliar sea of American affluence. They lived through the defeat of fascism and witnessed the vitality and resilience of American society at first hand; yet they continued to believe not only that Western civilization was spiritually dead, but also that it was itself the ultimate exemplar of fascist oppression.

Everything about life in the West seemed to bother them. Donald Duck cartoons, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, were part of a diabolical system of social control. Noticing that the doors of American cars and refrigerators had to be slammed, Adorno was reminded of "the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of fascist maltreatment. And as Marcuse observed, "the fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here simply means that they are not necessary in this country so deeply were fascistic mentalities embedded in the mechanistic, consumerist society of modern America.

As that last quotation may suggest, there was little confidence among the Frankfurt theorists that Western civilization was just about to collapse. On the contrary, it seemed to them a resourceful enemy: it had developed ever more subtle instruments of control, in the form of "ideologies which tricked the dehumanized masses into believing that they were not unhappy at all indeed, that it was rather nice to own a car and a refrigerator and watch the occasional Donald Duck film. Hence the increasingly desperate attempts of radicals in the Marcuse - Fromm tradition to devise strategies of "liberation: if Western civilization was not falling down, it would have to be knocked down, hard.