Very interesting. Douthat clearly off the mark, and I think Ganz nails it. If we're talking about 'decadence' as part of the historical cycle, some of it is clearly survivorship bias (the only polities that we care about when they collapse are once that hit some level of material comfort and cultural distinction), and some is simply a more moralistic framing for institutional capture. Society generates wealth, and power accumulates in the hands of the wealthy, in ways that may run counter to the aims of the state. And as rents grow, the incentives to fight over control of those rents grows too.
"Complaints about decadence leave me cold. All ages are decadent, it’s just the decadence is unevenly distributed" Sorry no. The decay of language and institutions affect all. Weimar decadence includes the the ideal formalism of rational empiricism and the Bauhaus: designing deckchairs for the Titanic: overdetermined, manneristic: inflexible. Hypertrophied orthodoxy was a thing wasn't it. Aesthetics is the manifestation of ethics. Don't buy into the lies of modernism and modern "projects" Israel was a "project" too.
Very interesting. Douthat clearly off the mark, and I think Ganz nails it. If we're talking about 'decadence' as part of the historical cycle, some of it is clearly survivorship bias (the only polities that we care about when they collapse are once that hit some level of material comfort and cultural distinction), and some is simply a more moralistic framing for institutional capture. Society generates wealth, and power accumulates in the hands of the wealthy, in ways that may run counter to the aims of the state. And as rents grow, the incentives to fight over control of those rents grows too.
But he does maintain that science has stagnated. Read his book; I think his piece sort of assumes you have already read that first.
"Complaints about decadence leave me cold. All ages are decadent, it’s just the decadence is unevenly distributed" Sorry no. The decay of language and institutions affect all. Weimar decadence includes the the ideal formalism of rational empiricism and the Bauhaus: designing deckchairs for the Titanic: overdetermined, manneristic: inflexible. Hypertrophied orthodoxy was a thing wasn't it. Aesthetics is the manifestation of ethics. Don't buy into the lies of modernism and modern "projects" Israel was a "project" too.
Just like how the Ergodic Hypothesis attempts to mess up thermodynamics (https://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2010/10/dreaming-boltzmann-brains.html), and Archotropism demonstrates a conservation of political power (https://www.blackbirdpodcast.com/p/a-brief-overview-of-archotropism?s=r), this idea might start to allow the creation of "Decadentropy" or constant concentration of degeneracy.
Things to consider: MacLeod and the cycle of the firm, or how corporations ends by senior executives exiting the company, and middle management are becoming a sclerosis in calcified dysfunction (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/02/04/the-genealogy-of-the-gervais-principle/), and how this corresponds to the "loss of cellular identity" (wrong cells in the wrong organ) theory of aging (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/808642v1).
If these ideas all converge, it begs the question: in the height of the stable society, where is the degeneracy contained or concentrated? (https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-the-four-stroke-regime/) And how does it spill over to other demographics? (https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2020/04/three-layers-in-brief.html) Can this effect be reversed, and thus re-constituted into a single demographic?