Decadence and Decline

From Italy to the world mayhap

https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/non-usciamo-dal-fatalismo-della-decadenza/

For a hundred years now, Italy, Europe and perhaps the West have been haunted by a word that we live as a destiny: decadence . The first signs were after the First World War, with the decline of the Central Powers and then the gradual dismantling of the British Empire. On the economic level, decadence became a crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1920s. And on the cultural level, the literature of the crisis exploded a hundred years ago, in the wake of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Then came the Second World War and from there a decadent society was born, except for a few periods of economic and social well-being, like those linked to the boom between the late 1950s and the 1960s. Decadence took over again from the 1970s onwards, and in the last fifty years it has been a continuous epochal undercurrent. Decadence produces discouragement, low vitality, depression. Italy has been in decadence for several decades, Italians are fleeing their country even when they stay at home. It is a form of mental emigration, which is even worse than real emigration, because it places them outside their own country, with their heads turned in an unspecified elsewhere. It is useless to deny it or attribute it only to a dull media and ideological game that wants to throw mud on this specific Italy, under this political leadership. The propaganda is there, the factious use of malaise too, of course; but the malaise is there, you can touch it with your hand. If we pretend that it does not exist, then we do not understand the rest. We must have the crude frankness to admit that the country is in decline, is exhausted, is discouraged. In the reality of our present we grasp the decadence in a series of empirical and objective factors, before psychological and philosophical ones, which make the decline evident. I will try to list in extreme synthesis the visible and invisible signs of decadence.

To begin with, deaths exceed births. The biological paradigm of death exceeding birth is already the objective representation of decadence. Then, connected to the previous one, the old surpass the young. That is, the average age rises and senility advances. Psychological corollary to the two biological notations: the expectation of the future is shortened, the future is perceived more as fear than as hope. The key phrase in the relationship between fathers and sons has been reversed: yesterday the concern was that the children lived a better, more comfortable life than their parents, today the anguish is that the children lose the comforts and standard of living of their parents. Biological decline also applies to the economic sphere and to the difficulties of businesses, not only due to globalization, from industry to commerce, to shops. Debts exceed credits, banking distress increases to the detriment of assets, consumption decreases. Every power is rejected and delegitimized. Major works are becoming sparser in every sense and in every field, despite the PNRR.

To the objective decadence must be added the perception of decadence that amplifies its effect. The psychosis of decadence is added to the real factors of decadence. The myth of progress has collapsed for some time now, the ideologies projected on the bright future have disappeared. The perception of living in a declining hemisphere compared to the younger and more vital Asian powers, to the growing demographics of the South of the world, but also to the desperate vitality of migrants, confirm to us that decadence is visible, thinkable, real and we are immersed in it.

The problem, if anything, is to periodize decadence, that is, to place it on a historical level, or to dramatize it as the course of a final decay. Here the historical vision comes to our aid, the comparison with the past and the cyclical recurrence of periods of decadence. Decadence was spoken of in reference to the ancient world, then to the Roman Empire, then to the autumn of the Middle Ages; decadence obsessed Machiavelli, it concerned empires and individual kingdoms, dynasties and civilizations.

For several years, there has been talk of Italian decadence in a broad sense, ranging from demography to economics and politics, from ethics to culture, from faith to customs, from gerontocracy to the sclerosis of the country and the weariness of living. The empty spaces of the declining birth rate are being filled by crowds of migrants. The country no longer believes in anything, has lost fervor, has no expectations and lives an unhappy and resentful old age.

But this vast and recurring scenario of decadence also shows that the concept of decadence cannot be absolutized, considered irreversible and definitive, to the point of confusing it with death. The naive optimistic scheme of infinite progress cannot be opposed to the bleak catastrophic and fatalistic scheme of infinite decadence. It is wiser to believe that history has its cycles, with its parables made of ascent and decline; decadence is placed at the end of an era.

Of course, it is not a political or constitutional reform, and it is not a Prince-President, a decision-making leader, a Dantesque Veltro, who can stop the decadence. A broader cultural mutation is needed, a widespread change of mentality, values, structures, priorities and paradigms. But this is a first effective level of response and we must first find great ideal and real motivations. To face the decadence, the foresight of principles and the incisiveness of princes are needed. In fact, however, the decadence leads us to consider the process greater than our will, written in the heavens or in history, unstoppable; therefore we resign ourselves and invent individual survival strategies, an ancient resource and alibi of Italians. The drama is not the decadence in progress, but the belief that it is unthinkable to get out of it. After having fought a total war against Destiny, feeling ourselves free protagonists of history, we have given ourselves over to a sordid fatalism that does not even allow us to hope that things can change. Call it progress…

(The Bourgeois)

Berdyaev: What does the word bourgeois actually mean? It has remained unexplained, though it has been so much used and so often misapplied. Even when superficially used it is a word with a magic power of its own, and its depth has to be fathomed. The word designates a spiritual state, a direction of the soul, a peculiar consciousness of beings. It is neither a social nor an economic condition, yet it is something more than a psychological and ethical one—it is spiritual, ontological. In the very depths of his being, or nonbeing, the bourgeois is distinguishable from the not bourgeois; he is a man of a particular spirit, or particular soullessness. The state of being bourgeois has always existed in the world, and its immortal image is for ever fixed in the gospels with its equally immortal antithesis, but in the nineteenth century it attained its climax and ruled supreme. Though the middle-class society of the last century is so spoken of in the superficial social-economic significance of the term, it is bourgeois in a deeper and more spiritual sense. This middle-class mentality ripened and enslaved human society and culture at the summit of their civilization. Its concupiscence is no longer restricted by man’s supernatural beliefs as it was past epochs, it is no longer kept in bounds by the sacred symbolism of a nobler traditional culture; the bourgeois spirit emancipated itself, expanded, and was at last able to express its own type of life. But even when the triumph of mediocrity was complete a few deep thinkers denounced it with uncompromising power: Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Leon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiev—all foresaw the victory of the bourgeois spirit over a truly great culture, on the ruins of which it would establish its own hideous kingdom.