Before Sunset

Book reviewed: From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Writing a history of the last half a millennia of Western civilization is a daunting task, particularly if you only have 800 pages in which to do it. Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) seems to have pulled it off. He was certainly the right man for the job. French-born but transplanted to the US just after the First World War, the polymathic Barzun had enjoyed a rich career in the academe, served twice as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, authored scores of works on a vast array of topics, and just might have read every book ever published. To call From Dawn to Decadence a mature work would be an understatement — Barzun started writing it at an age when one’s mental faculties tend to be at abeyance (he was eighty-four), and the result challenges the conventional assumptions concerning a writer’s peak years.

From Dawn to Decadence charts the journey of the Western world from the Protestant Revolution to the end of the 20th century. Barzun reviews the seminal accomplishments of Western man in the realms of art, science, philosophy, and politics, linking them with recurring themes that weave their way through Western history. Not one to suffer fools gladly, Barzun hacks away at rusty clichés, challenging commonly held notions and debunking myths. The Protestant ethic of northern Europe did not spur capitalism. Women were not systematically oppressed throughout Western history. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not advocate a return to the primitive state, and if he was paranoid at the end of his life, he had his reasons. Voltaire never said he was ready to fight to death to defend the expression of views he personally disagreed with. The Sexual Revolution began long before the 1960s, and the American Revolution was no revolution at all. The democracies we think we live in are democracies in name only. Und so weiter.

Barzun’s focus is on what he calls the Occident — the countries that were embroiled in the conflagration of the Protestant Reformation. The Occident is distinct from Europe, which is just an extension of Asia that happened to be promoted to a continent. Originally a civilizational offshoot of England, the US is consequently included; Russia hardly gets much of a look-in, though Barzun, somewhat dismissively, says that it is one of the “two appendages of the Occident” (the other one is Spain). If you assume, as Barzun does, that the modern age began with the Reformation, the focus is logical and understandable. Less explicable are some of the portraits in the gallery of individuals that Barzun holds up as the outstanding figures of their times. Used intermittently to enliven the text and convey the flavor of their epochs, they are not necessarily people of genius, although some of them certainly were that. Instead, Barzun favors Humanist polymaths who were effulgent in their time, but whose brightness has dimmed in the eyes of an ignorant posterity. This preference makes for some curious choices. I suppose one can accept the inclusion of Bernard Shaw as one of the 20th-century titans, but the likes of John Agate and Dorothy Sayers might make the reader’s eyebrows sail north. As far as Barzun is concerned, that is the reader’s problem. His work is not meant to be a crowd pleaser, and this reader, for one, wasn’t put off by the author’s haughtiness. Barzun doesn’t cover his ideas with the fig leaf of cant objectivity, and the sovereignty of his idiosyncratic curtsies to obscure figures is as refreshing as the car-tel-est-mon-plaisir tone of the text.

Barzun belongs to the same club of cultural pessimists as José Ortega y Gasset and Johan Huizinga. As can be inferred from the title of the book, the question of the current state of the West is settled: we have slipped into an age of decadence. Barzun insists that the word “decadence” is not a slur, only a technical label. In fact, a society in the throes of decadence can be an agreeable place to inhabit. “When decadence is not anxious,” writes Barzun, “it is the best of times,” a veritable belle époque. Yet he only finds past periods of decadence to be charming. When it comes to our own neurasthenic climate, Barzun is far less forthcoming with his praise, and the last chapter of the book, “Demotic Life and Times,” was not written by someone who liked what he saw when he looked out the window. But Barzun is no curmudgeonly codger pining for the world of yesterday, and his analysis of our times is cogent. Its one flaw is the lack of a clear explanation of why the West has succumbed to decadence or why societies do so historically. Barzun contents himself with showing how historians can diagnose decadence and follow its course. The onset of decadence can be traced to the point where good intentions exceed the ability of the culture to fulfill them — the culture wants to punch above its weight. Typically, this happens to societies that become too complex, the way French society did before the French Revolution, or the way our own society has under the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age. Modern society has never been more complex; it is too vast, too bureaucratic. The common man needs to fill out forms generated by his very existence; he is an “unpaid clerk who [writes] his names and address three times on one page.” His collaboration with modern institutions requires him to deal with “an indefinite number of its representatives, amiable or grudging, but all armed with computers” to decide his lot. This Kafkaesque reliance of the common man on the impersonal forces of a labyrinthine institutional machine designed to serve him is what Barzun has in mind when he talks about the imbalance between a culture’s intentions and its ability to carry them out. The exact time of the onset of Western decadence is unclear. It is definitely not the 1960s, as some conservatives like to believe, nor are baby boomers the culprit. We need to go back to the 19th century, likely to the Industrial Revolution. But this is not an exact science.

According to Barzun’s diagnostic manual, a culture is decadent when it is characterized by open confessions of what ails it, an endless quest for identity in all directions, and the normalization of the absurd. As far as our culture goes, that’s three heavy check marks right there, and there is no need for me to dwell on it further. More interesting is the demotic character of our times as described by Barzun. He takes care to use the word “demotic” and not “democratic.” Democracy is when the entire populace assembles in the main town square to vote on the burning questions of the day. Influenced by lobbying groups and special interests, the present electoral systems of most Western states have nothing to do with the Athenian model of democracy. The Western systems of government are not democratic but representative, and the societies they represent are demotic, meaning “of the people.” That is Barzun’s way of saying that Ortega y Gasset’s mass-man has taken over everything. The machine-based society created the welfare state, mass production, and the consumer society: the population had to have the means to keep on buying all the time to keep the machine going. This lifted swathes of the population out of poverty and empowered the masses. (It also imposed a peculiar kind of tyranny — that of the standard of living. Poverty is impossible in the sense that no household today can do without such necessities as Internet, phone service, and other utilities, which must be obtained even at the price of indebtedness. Those who opt out are condemned to a kind of penury that would not have been imposed in earlier periods. The flipside of this oppression is the eradication of misery; in the fully industrialized countries, virtually no one goes to bed hungry.) The kind of “starvation in the midst of plenty” that existed in the 19th century was no longer a viable option for the middle classes, which “would have sided with the workers in protest and revolt. The society was demotic.” The vox populi is the supreme law.

What does the vox populi demand? As a result of his 500-year-long emancipation, Western man has acquired a taste for the “Unconditioned Life.” This is more than just the expectation to be treated with dignity and to enjoy the untrammeled exercise of his rights; it is a life where nothing stands in the way of one’s wishes. This is not always a bad thing. Barzun writes that the Faustian longing for the limitless may lead to new knowledge and spiritual discoveries. But in ordinary souls the Unconditioned Life isn’t much more than the urge for small satisfactions. Barzun does not make it explicit (and I suspect I know the reason — see below), but the Unconditioned Life is one that is free of any stigma. It puts no limitation on man’s desires. All lifestyles are equally valid; anything goes. Barzun rejects the use of relativism to justify and prop up this kind of life. Relativism is the intelligent application of general principles to different situations. While murder is forbidden, someone who kills an attacker in self-defense will be exonerated if the legal system is any good. Or: believing in Santa Claus is endearing if you are five years old, but if you are forty, you might be taken for an imbecile. Relativism is the understanding that while everything falls under general principles, a degree of flexibility is required when dealing with different situations; it is not an invalidation of said principles. Hijacked like so many other terms of nobler provenance, relativism as it is (mis)understood today is merely the revolt against hierarchy, authority, and points of reference. It is the refusal to appeal to a higher standard; modern man sets his own standards. This is without question a result of secularism — without religious belief, there is no fixed point of reference, and values float freely, based on what is fashionable — but the Humanist in Barzun prevents him from acknowledging the role that theme has played in the promotion of the Unconditioned Life.

As can be expected, the demotic society appeals to the lowest common denominator. This is manifested in all aspects of daily life, starting with what we choose to put on before heading out. Whereas people tended to look up to the upper classes for sartorial guidance in the past, the demotic trend is for aping the bottom — the “Unfitting,” in Barzun’s parlance. He correctly notes the enthusiastic embrace of casual wear, which has gotten even more casual since the publication of his book. As I wrote in another piece, our society is constantly seeking ways to decomplexify itself in the realm of fashion, language, and culture, even as the technology it uses gains tremendously in sophistication. Aesthetical considerations are swapped for those of convenience. Social conventions are flouted with ease, and legion is their name: the ubiquitous first-name basis, even when addressing one’s betters or the elderly; the gradual replacement of the formal singular “you” with the informal in languages where the use of the informal singular was previously unthinkable; the “hey” greeting that has supplanted the casual “hi,” itself a demotion of “hello”; the use of “sir” in settings where one is not addressing an individual of superior rank, thereby rendering the word meaningless, etc.

In demotic times, everyone can be an artist, and there is no need for genius. The result is a surfeit of art and the erosion of standards of excellence. The merely trivial is “awesome.” At every concert I have attended over the past five years, for example, the audience unfailingly gave the performers a standing ovation, regardless of the performer’s level of virtuosity. While generous, this unqualified adulation undermines criteria and devalues outstanding talent. Barzun observes that in the arts the demotic trend towards the bottom has created the cult of the anti-hero, both in highbrow and in the more lowbrow/mainstream forms. Call it the process of de-heroization. Older literature offers virtuous characters who can be emulated as role models (think of von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Manzoni’s Renzo, Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonsky and his father, too — despite his abrasive nature, Bolkonsky père is the kind of man empires are built with). Even complex characters who are not necessarily paragons of virtue (Balzac’s Rastignac, Stendhal’s Sorel) do not invite revulsion; in many cases, their burning ambition signals a desire to become better versions of themselves. At some point towards the end of the 19th century (the exact point is impossible to pinpoint — these things tend to develop gradually and invidiously), the neurotic started popping up. Huysmans’s des Esseintes, Svevo’s Zeno Cosini, Proust’s alter ego, Chekhov’s civil servant — the tormented soul prone to mental nosebleeds was in the ascendant. Towards the second half of the 20th century, the neurotics gave way to losers, lowlifes, degenerates, or self-destructive types — characters living on skid row morally (the prose of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Eduard Limonov, and many others). As taboos were dismantled, graphic descriptions of sex and violence became de rigueur; nothing was too indecent or too shocking. The contemporary novel is partial to a new kind of hero — the defenseless victim. In Édouard Louis’s autobiographical History of Violence (2016), the narrator, a young Frenchman, is raped by a young Algerian-born man in a cruising experience gone wrong — rich terrain for reflections on colonial revanchism, if nothing else.

Whether art informs society or merely reflects it, is hard to say, but the modern zeitgeist is certainly not propitious to virtuous heroes. The process of de-heroization has gone hand in hand with an uncivil society marked by random violence. Barzun notes that a hundred years ago, urban crime was professional; killing had a motive. He does not provide statistics to back that up, but he doesn’t need to — before the second half of the 20th century, America did not seem to have a “gun problem.” Society en masse has become desensitized to violence, whether it is confined to the media or spills into the streets. Hard data are unnecessary; a walk down the street in my city (and very possibly yours) is sufficient to see that incivilities abound; they have become so ingrained in our nature we no longer even think of them as incivilities (consider the incessant honking that, in the vast majority of cases, is used not to express imminent danger, its intended objective, but the driver’s impatience). Random violence is on the rise, too; in my hometown, there has been a notable spike in unprovoked attacks over the last two years, never mind the last one hundred.

Modern man is listless and emasculated. Barzun is keenly aware of it, but he doesn’t tackle the problem head-on, preferring a roundabout way. The paradoxical truth is that while technology has greatly expanded the world and our understanding of it, bringing the most far-flung corners of the planet to the living room, the scope of action has been reduced. In the past, you could go to the nearest port looking for work and sail for Java the next day; this is now either impossible or requires navigation through a bureaucratized snakes-and-ladders hiring process. Unless pursuing a trade, a young worker today will most likely be tethered to a computer screen. This saps our energy; the temperamentally active are left without an outlet. Drawing his own conclusions, Barzun believes that it is this need for action that attracts some to white-collar fraud: “Work had lost its power to satisfy the spirit. Yielding no finished object, taking place only abstractly on papers and in words over a wire, it starved the feeling of accomplishment. It was drudgery without reward, boredom unrelieved; the factory assembly line had more reality . . . By contrast, the most routine entertainment had color and shape, and by depicting violence and sexuality it stirred the deadened senses.” Hence the proliferation of different lifestyles and identities that are only so many desperate attempts to get the vital juices flowing.

Barzun is especially scathing about the use of sexuality to “give the illusion of real life” and stir one’s deadened senses. The West may have reached full sexual emancipation, but the sexualization of society has had the opposite effect — it has made life asexual. “Desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing,” Barzun writes. In other words, taboos and limitations heighten desire; it is the mystery that titillates. When taboos are removed and sex is turned into an object of nearly laboratory scrutiny (as it is when the education system makes sex part of the curriculum), excitement is blunted. Modern society is highly sexualized but unsexy; it is also sexually frustrated. Easily accessible, online pornography is the most flagrant manifestation of this. It reduces the individual to passivity and voyeurism; as in his other pastimes, he is an observer and not a doer. Online porn tempts the modern man with the prospect of shaking his life out of its habitual stupor — quickly and gratis. Both the means and the result are not especially glorious. To quote Hemingway, “And in the end the age was handed / the sort of shit that it demanded.” It would be a mistake to assume that Western men who undertake sexual pilgrimages to humid metropolises in Southeast Asia and other low-cost areas of carnality are doing it because they “can’t get any” back home; more to the point, there is nothing to get back home. In many cases, sex tourists are merely seeking to lift their flagging spirits. Whether they find what they are looking for is a different story.

Do the present demotic times deserve all this opprobrium? And can we trust ourselves to make sound judgments about the present? Even the past is tricky to decipher. As Barzun mentions repeatedly, the past is never static. It is a broad canvas constantly retouched by the “whirligig of taste.” Historical periods and the people who defined them are continuously reappraised, often through a misguided application of modern standards. Ben Jonson was the top dramatist in the age of Shakespeare, who was considered vastly inferior to Jonson, and Baroque music was eschewed for some 150 years (Vivaldi had to wait until the 20th century for his resurrection). As for the present, it is a bit like the warning on cars: objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Our view of the present can only be distorted. Barzun writes that the second half of the 20th century had no seminal thinkers of which to boast, and he singles out Ortega y Gasset as one of the last members of the constellation of greats worth talking about. But, writing a century ago, Ortega y Gasset decried the infertility of modern art. He accused Debussy of dehumanizing music and refrained from talking about Dostoevsky because he thought his reputation was overestimated (see his essays “The Dehumanization of Art” and “Notes on the Novel”). Such are the perils of judging one’s own age: in the long run, even the smartest people might end up looking silly. In 2300, if humans are still around, someone might write wistfully, “Where are the Barzuns of our age?” In short, let the owl of Minerva spread her wings. Barzun’s vision of the future, written by an imaginary chronicler in the year 2300, is unlikely to have much in common with the real version. But even that vision — an efficient technocracy that will have eradicated most social cankers at the price of relentless boredom — ends on a note of optimism. A group of restless radicals, led by cadres from the upper classes, eventually takes over the lethargic system to bring about change. The reformers do so by studying old literary and photographic texts that are a record of a “fuller life”; collections of works and art previously considered too dull are rediscovered. The glorious past is then used to refashion the present. The reformers reinstate “enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive.” Prince Myshkin’s reported prophecy will be fulfilled; beauty will have saved the world. This Humanist vision is quaint and perhaps naive, but it is certainly not pessimistic.

Any number of errors can be expected in a work of this scope. I am in no position to fact-check the text, but with such a historical bird’s eye view, the room for nuance is certainly limited. For example (going off the top of my head now), descriptions of the trials and tribulations of Giordano Bruno might lead the reader to conclude that Bruno was a victim of religious intolerance. Actually, he was a victim of politics and the religious conflict caused by the Reformation, as was Galileo Galilei. Barzun praises Rousseau’s pedagogical system, omitting that Rousseau never thought of applying it to his own children, whom he dropped off at a hospital for foundlings just after their birth. The First World War is discussed at length, but the reader might wonder if the Second World War had happened at all (possibly this is because Barzun considers it a byproduct of its predecessor). But these are cavils. From Dawn to Decadence is a formidable text. Instead of a bibliography, Barzun peppers the book with “The book to read is . . .” or “The book to browse in is . . .” suggestions to steer the reader to appropriate sources. I am afraid that for many his own work would be a book to browse in; it really should be a book to read.