What To Do About Decadence?

Last updated on: October 14, 2014 at 1:39 pm by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

What To Do About Decadence? 2014-10-14T13:39:05+01:00 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Helen Andrews is a very erudite and talented writer, and she has a great little essay contrasting present-day decadence and the decadence of the late 19th century. I really recommend the essay.

At one point, she riffs off an essay I wrote, arguing that one of the motives for the current “decadence” is a disordered understanding of risk. Here is what Andrews writes:

Among the anti- and post-decadents of a century ago, there was a marked tendency to swing to the other extreme, trading the effete cult of refinement for the manly cult of muscle. […] Call it the Gabriele D’Annunzio fallacy. Strangely enough, it is a Frenchman who recently came closest to endorsing this form of reaction. In his rich essay on James Poulos’s idea of the pink police state, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry closes by recommending “a reinvigorated and rethought military service.”

Modified universal conscription does not necessarily put Gobry into D’Annunzio territory, but neither is it the right prescription for his diagnosis. I think Gobry is right that “what we need is to find some way to reeducate most people to risk,” but there is quite enough risk in the modern decadent lifestyle already. The problem is blindness to it. Instead of overamplifying our praise for anti-decadent masculine virtues—which is the one thing I am saying we must not do—conservatives should continue to point out how the misery young people feel is directly attributable to psychologically, sexually, and spiritually risky behavior.

Mercifully, Andrews does not quite put me in D’Annunzio territory.

Here’s what I would say about our disordered approach to risk. Andrews is quite right that there is “quite enough risk in the modern decadent lifestyle already.” My analysis of the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough risk, my analysis is that people don’t understand risk. The very notion of risk is a Modern one, it appears in the 16th century.

My analysis of the problem is a very Knightian one of the distinction between risk and uncertainty: people think that risk is domesticable and so they are quite willing to take very serious risks as long as it is within a framework where they think they can control it. Think of the financial crisis and Nassim Taleb’s critique of quantitative finance: financiers were quite willing to take objectively quite risky decisions because they also believed that that risk was fundamentally known and therefore manageable. It turned out that it wasn’t. Which leads to excesses in “both” directions at the same time: when it is thought that risk occurs within a controlled framework, there is an overeagerness; when the risk rears its head within a framework that is not contained, there is a holy terror. Hookups are thought non risky because you “practice safe sex”; unintended pregnancy is terrifying because the risks are uncontrollable.

The pedagogical value of conscription, then, within my argument (which I mostly put forward as a heuristic rather than a proposal) has nothing to do with any “manly cult of muscle” (of which I am quite bereft–just look at my midsection), but rather with teaching that it is uncertainty, not risk that is primordial, a fact which war is extremely apt at demonstrating. Once we have made our peace with uncertainty, and understood this at a gut level and not just an intellectual level, (or so my argument goes anyway), we can then have a properly ordered attitude towards risk-taking.

I have, of course, ample contempt for the cult of the macho, and have consistently written against the idea that a return to “traditional gender roles” understood in this narrow way both cannot and must not be a way out of our current predicament.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

October 13, 2014

Quick Bulletpoints on the #Synod14 Relatio

Next Post

October 15, 2014 "The Two Standards"

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Elsewhere Mary New Distributism Parish of PEG Synod for the Famiy Theology of Women Uncategorized What I'm Reading

Select a Month June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

How long did it take to rebuild Jerusalem's walls under Nehemiah?

Select your answer to see how you score.

12 months 40 days 7 years 52 days