Against Meta-Decadence

Everybody wins when you don't give up.

I once heard a story about a man who works on Capitol Hill, a centrist with mostly respectable political convictions who works as an expert adviser on human rights. This person is a good friend and father, but his job had left him discouraged and cynical. He had his reasons: the halcyon days of international human rights are over. Despots pay lip service to ideals which they betray without shame. They know America is less likely than ever to punish them for it. This man usually avoids following politics closely, even though he works in government.

By October 2016, politics was getting too crazy and the man decided to pay attention. He watched recordings of the GOP debates on YouTube. “It was hilarious!” he reported. Trump impressed him, even while disgusting him. The way Trump mocked the Republican frontrunners was cathartic and hilarious.

A psychiatrist could do a better job at explaining why I have imagined this man to be a symbol of our national predicament. I can’t quite explain it myself, though Ross Douthat’s book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, provides a useful vocabulary. Decadence, he writes, is marked by “frustration,” “resignation,” and “repetition.”  What the man in my friend’s story represents is decadence at its highest level — or better, something worse than decadence. His is a self-aware decadence: meta-decadence.

Every time I read about a future war or falling reading scores or some other looming catastrophe, I think about this man. Why? Probably because what makes life endurable — even with bad forecasts and dark predictions — is hope. What this man represents is a studied awareness of, and resignation before, our shortcomings, powerlessness, and bad odds: meta-decadence. 

During the Nazi occupation of France, the philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote an essay titled, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope.” Marcel argues that hope and despair are more than mental states. They can, in some hidden way, change the world outside our heads: “in hoping for liberation I really help to prepare the way for it … in raising a doubt about its possibility, I reduce the chance of it to some degree.” This essay was completed in 1942, when victory over Hitler was far from certain. 

Marcel is known as the philosopher of “mystery.” Mysteries are not natural phenomena, but are both subjective (they transform our consciousness) and non-human (they are outside us). They can’t be fully understood, but they can be perceived if we pay attention. Hope is a mystery. It engages our freedom and transforms us into subjects who can look forward in time with expectation of deliverance.

To hope in our own time requires going against the temptation of meta-decadence. Meta-decadence is a cousin to despair. It breeds passivity before the daunting tasks before us, and makes the ascent of the unjust more likely. Rejecting it doesn’t mean becoming naïve or even optimistic, or inveighing against accounts of decadence in the name of hope (don’t shoot the messenger!). It means not allowing those accounts to be the final word on our time or a drag on one’s spirit. 

And so I choose to imagine that Capitol Hill clerk moving beyond cynicism, resignation, and irony. He will no longer enjoy those 2016 GOP debate videos. But he won’t indulge in showy moral indignation either — he won’t join the “resistance.” Whatever he does will be the product of deep hope. I can’t tell you what it will be, but it will be better than laughing and doing nothing.

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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