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Players in the game can pile up examples but still have difficulty arriving at any generality. Decadence, in one working definition, is pathology with social implications: it differs from individual sickness as pneumonia differs from plague. A decadent act must, it seems, possess meaning that transcends itself and spreads like an infection to others, or at least suggests a general condition of the society. Decadence (from the Latin decadere, "to fall down or away," hence decay) surely has something to do with death, with a communal taedium vitae; decadence is a collection of symptoms that might suggest a society exhausted and collapsing like a star as it degenerates toward the white dwarf stage, "une race à sa derniere heure," as a French critic said.
Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners sometimes spent their Sunday afternoons at Bedlam mocking the crippled and demented.
In Florence during Michelangelo's time, countless victims of stabbings by hit men were seen floating under bridges. In London during the Age of Enlightenment, gangs roamed the streets committing rape. Says Critic George Steiner: "Our sense of a lost civility and order comes from a very short period of exceptional calm—from the 1860s to 1914, or the interlude between the Civil War and World War I."
One of the problems with the concept of decadence is that it has such a long moral shoreline, stretching from bleak and mountainously serious considerations of history to the shallow places where ideas evaporate 30 seconds after they splash. For all the range of its uses, decadence is a crude term. It houses fallacies. People think of decadence as the reason for the collapse of Rome, but the point is arguable. Rome at the height of its imperial power was as morally depraved as in its decline. Perhaps more so.