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A second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict such a leap of civilization as the Renaissance. Ultimately, the process of decadence remains a mystery: Why has the tribe of Jews endured for so many centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words like corrupt or depraved to describe, say, punk rock, or murder in a gas line, but decadent is more popular because it contains a prophecy. To be decadent is to be not just corrupt, but terminally corrupt. "Decadence" speaks with the iron will of history and the punishment of the Lord. It is an accusation. "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion," wrote the prophet Amos, "and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria. Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory, who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils."
One could construct a kind of "worst-case scenario" to prove that the U.S., with the rest of the West, has fallen into dangerous decline. The case might be argued thus: the nation's pattern is moral and social failure, embellished by hedonism. The work ethic is nearly as dead as the Weimar Republic. Bureaucracies keep cloning themselves. Resources vanish. Education fails to educate. The system of justice collapses into a parody of justice. An underclass is trapped, half out of sight, while an opulent traffic passes overhead. Religion gives way to narcissistic self-improvement cults.
There is more. Society fattens its children on junk food and then permits them to be enlisted in pornographic films. The nation subdivides into a dozen drug cultures — the alcohol culture, the cocaine culture, the heroin culture, the Valium culture, the amphetamine culture, and combinations thereof. Legal abortions and the pervasive custom of contraception suggest a society so chary of its future that it has lost its will to perpetuate itself. Says British Author Malcolm Muggeridge: "What will make historians laugh at us is how we express our decadence in terms of freedom and humanism. Western society suffers from a largely unconscious collective death wish." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shares with Muggeridge an austere Christian mysticism, has been similarly appalled by Western materialism.