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And yet, oddly, the U.S. probably seemed more decadent, or at any rate, considerably more disturbed, eight or ten years ago than it does now. In the midst of the Viet Nam War, the ghetto riots, the assassinations, the orgasmic romanticism of the counterculture, the national rage was more on the surface.
Says Milwaukee Sociologist Wayne Youngquist: "There is decadence in our society, but it is an ebb, not a rising tide. Our institutions are healing, the age of moral ambiguity and experimentation is in decline."
Americans must beware, however, of looking for decadence in the wrong places. The things that can make the nation decay now are not necessarily what we think of when we say decadence: they are not Roman extravagances or Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, or Wilde's scented conceits. Nor, probably, do they have much to do with pornography, license or bizarre sexual practice. It is at least possible that Americans should see the symptoms of decadence in the last business quarter's alarming 3.8% decline in productivity, or in U.S. society's catastrophic dependence upon foreigners' oil, or in saturations of chemical pollution. It is such symptoms that betoken "a race which has reached its final hour."
But the word decadence, like an iridescent bubble, can be blown too large; it will burst with too much inflation of significance. In any case, decadence is too much a word of simplification. The U.S. is too complicated, housing too many simultaneous realities, to be covered with one such concept. Sub cultures of decadence exist, as they have in all societies. The amplifications of the press and television may make the decadence seem more sensational and pervasive than it really is.
A sense of decay arises also from all of society's smoking frictions of rapid change, the anxiety caused by a sense of impermanence. The nation's creative forces, however, remain remarkably strong — in the sciences, for example, where achievements in physics, mathematics, biology and medicine rank beside anything so far accomplished on the planet. Before anyone tries to use too seriously the awful and thrilling word decadence, he ought to distinguish between the customary mess of life and the terminal wreckage of death.