The charge of decadence

"Decadent." It is one of the oldest accusations in existence, and it is having another heyday: the charge that a soft, prosperous culture has lost its nerve, that its care for the weak and the outsider is a luxury it cannot really afford. There is a serious version of this charge, and there is a serious rebuttal. The honest thing is to hold on to both rather than picking one straight away.

The serious version

The strongest form comes not from an angry pundit but from a fourteenth-century scholar, Ibn Khaldun. In his work from 1377 he describes asabiyyah, the group cohesion that makes people stand up for one another. Hard groups conquer rich, soft cities; but then they grow rich themselves, accustomed to luxury and refinement, and within a few generations their cohesion dissolves, until a new hard group defeats them. Luxury, he says, is the solvent of solidarity. That is not a slur but a mechanism: prosperity can soften, and a society can lose itself in status and purity while neglecting its foundations, production, security, the will to defend itself. Give that thought its full weight.

The most abused word in history

And then give the counter-voice equal weight, because "decadence" may well be the most abused word in all of history. Every older generation has called the younger one decadent. And every established order has dismissed the broadening of morality, the idea that others count too, as going soft. At the abolition of slavery, at women's suffrage, at the ban on child labour, the same refrain sounded every time: this is soft luxury that weakens us. And every time, in hindsight, we called it not decadence but civilisation. The pattern is uncomfortably clear: "decadence" is what power calls a threatening change, until that change wins, and it is suddenly called progress.

Rome itself is the finest proof of this. Roman moralists lamented the "decadence" of their own age for centuries, the opulence, the decay of the old ways, the softened youth, while the empire meanwhile simply kept on functioning, growing and conquering. The charge of decline sounded almost without interruption, and it said remarkably little about when something actually broke. An accusation you can level in any century is not a diagnosis; it is a mood.

How to test the difference

So how do you tell a genuine loss of capacity from a change you simply dislike? Not by going on your feelings, because that feeling is precisely what both sides share. Ask testable questions: which concrete capacity has actually declined, can the society still produce, defend itself, cooperate, repair its mistakes? Distinguish a concrete claim from an atmosphere, because a word like "woke" is a catch-all in which very different things get lumped together. And watch for the tell: calling your opponents' values "decadence" is the classic rhetorical move of the strongman seeking power.

The honest middle is this: prosperity can soften, and expanding who counts may well be civilisation's core achievement rather than its decay. Both can be partly true. But the categorical version of either side, "it is plainly decline" or "it is plainly pure progress", is a prophecy masquerading as an observation. You decide, and you decide better the more you distrust your own certainty.

A moment to take with you: the next time you call something "decadent", or hear it called that, ask yourself: which concrete capacity has declined here, and could I be mistaken? Or am I simply giving a change I dislike the name that history likes to give it most?