I like the word decadent. All shimmering with purple and gold. It throws out the brilliance of flames and the gleam of precious stones. It is made up of carnal spirit and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of the Lower Empire: it conjures up the paint of courtesans, the sports of the circus, the breath of the tamers of animals, the bounding of wild beasts, the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets. —Paul Verlaine, circa 1886
It was partly the spectacle of Western decadence that aroused the Ayatullah Khomeini to orgies of Koranic proscription. Alcohol, music, dancing, mixed bathing all have been curtailed by the Iranian revolution. Americans find this zealotry sinister, but also quaint: How can almost childish pleasures (a tune on the radio, a day at the beach) deserve such puritanical hellfires? But Americans are also capable of a small chill of apprehension, a barely acknowledged thought about the prices that civilizations pay for their bad habits: If Iran has driven out its (presumably polluted) monarch and given itself over to a purification that demands even the interment of its beer bottles, then, by that logic, what punishment and what purification would be sufficient for America? The Ayatullah residing in some American consciences would surely have to plow under not just the beer bottles, but an uncomfortably large part of U.S. society itself.
The very idea of decadence, with all its fleshly titillations and metaphysical phosphorescence, excites that kind of Spenglerian anxiety. A lot of Americans seem inclined to think of themselves as a decadent people: such self-accusation may be the reverse side of the old American self-congratulation. Americans contemplate some of the more disgusting uses to which freedom of expression has been put; they confront a physical violence and spiritual heedlessness that makes them wonder if the entire society is on a steep and terminal incline downward. They see around them what they call decadence. But is the U.S. decadent? Does the rich, evil word, with its little horripilations of pleasure, and its gonging of the last dance, really have any relevant meaning?
Decadence is a wonderfully versatile idea—like a perfume that gives off different scents depending on a woman's body chemistry and heat. It arouses pleasure, disgust and bombast.
And sometimes elaborate denial. The critic Richard Oilman recently published Decadence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His elegant treatise argues that the term is almost impossible to define, is constantly misinterpreted and misused, and quite possibly should be deleted from the language.
Oilman makes a persuasive, if somewhat pedantic, point.
He argues that Americans overuse the word decadent, without knowing what they mean by it. They use it to describe a $50 bottle of Margaux, a three-hour soak in the tub, a 40-hour-a-week television habit, the crowds that tell the suicide to jump, a snort of cocaine. And yet Americans mean something by it. The notion of decadence is a vehicle that carries all kinds of strange and overripe cargo—but a confusing variety of meanings does not add up to meaninglessness. Decadence, like pornography (both have something of the same fragrance), may be hard to define, but most people think they know it when they see it.