Decadent Societies

Author Micheal Skeet has written a series of posts about decadent societies that are worth reading, especially given the current state of our society. They're based on the book, Decadent Societies, by Robert Adams, which was published in 1983. 

Michael says:

Adams's definition of societal decadence is simple and stark: a society is decadent when it no longer persuades enough of its members that they have any stake in that society's continuation; when an existential crisis arrives, there's pretty much nobody left to defend the society.

What did for Rome wasn't the sexual misbehaviour of the elite, nor was it the economic inefficiencies inherent in slavery and the introduction of serfdom to the agriculture of the Italian peninsula. I'm not even sure I agree with Harper's contention that it was epidemics that brought down Rome. When the Roman state forbade its citizens from joining the army and taking a role in their own defence; when it taxed its farmers into insolvency (and then tried to dump the tax burdens of the insolvent on their neighbours); when it sold into slavery the children of the German tribesmen it had invited into the empire to serve as soldiers in place of citizens—then Rome was decadent, and when the Goths attacked it fell.

In later posts (here and here)  he goes on to examine the ideas in Adams' book and compare them to what he sees in our current society. 

And so we come to the final, greatest sign: a complete lack of concern over the increasing proportion of the population with little to no reason to continue to support the society’s existence. Here the present situation isn’t irreparable but the trend-line seems to be headed the wrong way. And the decline in the number of people who think their society worth saving as it is seems to be coming from all extremes of the political quadrant. It isn’t just that Black and Hispanic† Americans are increasingly frustrated with the society they live in*—there is also the increasing evidence of a sort of nihilistic violence coming up from the white-supremacist/quasi-libertarian fringes. The truly destructive members of these groups are, we must remember, still fairly small in number. But their impact appears to be out of proportion to their numbers, and may well be increasing.

This may be reflected in survey numbers showing that only 12 percent of American respondents are satisfied with the current state of the country (87 percent are dissatisfied). That’s a decline by more than two thirds over the past year, and on the surface at least suggests a disturbing trend. (We mustn’t get carried away, though: these opinions are almost laughably fickle: at the worst of the Great Recession the percentage of Americans who were satisfied with the way things were going was seven. Obviously the concerns reflected here are short-term, rather than systemic.)

Has this dissatisfaction reached a tipping point, at which a majority of people no longer care to lift a finger to prevent the damage to society becoming worse? No, it hasn’t; and in fact the survey mentioned in the previous paragraph actually suggests Black Americans are more optimistic about the future than their White or Hispanic counterparts. So there’s some encouragement there.

I'll leave his conclusion to you to read.