Historical Cycles: Our Decadent Slide Into Tyranny

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Decadent Slide Into Tyranny

Paul Craig Roberts

May 17, 2000

Are we succumbing to decadence? Its signs surround us. Vices have taken over from virtues, shame no longer restrains behavior, the perverse is celebrated, and truth has been abandoned for propaganda.

Jacques Barzun is a pre-eminent cultural historian. In his recently published 800-page summing up of the modern epoch, "From Dawn to Decadence," Barzun says that decadence is our fate. This is because the ideas that launched our modern civilization have been carried to their logical conclusions and become used up. Exhausted, they have no more to offer.

That is one way to look at it. If Barzun is correct, we face a far more serious threat than an external enemy armed with weapons of mass destruction. If the ideas and purposes that have given us meaning are exhausted, decline is unavoidable.

Ideas do become exhausted. This is true even in science, where the struggle to grasp reality is, perhaps, most intense.

Neither the American public nor its leaders understand the threat of decadence. On the whole, people think of cultural decadence in terms of art, literature and sexual behavior. They see a lot of bad examples for children and teen-agers, but they don't think of decadence in terms of slipping back into tyranny.

But that's what decadence means. The ideas and purposes of the last 500 years lifted us from tyranny: the tyranny of superstition, of imposed religious dogma, of status-based legal privileges, of arbitrary and unaccountable power.

Barzun notes that the Inquisition has returned with political correctness, thought police and sensitivity training. These practices reflect a deeper decadence - the abandonment of constitutional protections of free speech and an intrusion into the freedom of conscience that is the basis of a liberal social order.

Decadence and the reappearance of tyranny are manifest in law, as my colleague Larry Stratton and I show in our just-published book, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions." In the Anglo-American legal tradition, law shields the individual from arbitrary government power. To protect this shield, law was made accountable to the people.

William Blackstone celebrated this shield as "the Rights of Englishmen." These rights consist of the attorney-client privilege, due process, equal standing in law with no group or class enjoying status-based privileges, and the prohibitions against retroactive law, self-incrimination and crimes without intent. To protect these rights, a political system evolved in which elected representatives were the only source of law.

Today, law in this fundamental sense is largely lost. Constraints on prosecutorial powers have fallen away as we have lost sight of the protective functions of law. The fevered pursuit of drug dealers, Wall Street insider-traders, environmental polluters, racial justice, S&L crooks and child abusers have eroded the Rights of Englishmen and left us all, innocent and guilty alike, exposed to arbitrary power.

Law ceased to be accountable with New Deal legislation that made the executive branch both interpreter and enforcer of law. Today wealthy and prominent Americans and business firms of all sizes are no more secure against frame-ups and coerced plea bargains (a form of self-incrimination) than suspected drug dealers.

Is Barzun right in concluding that decadence will now unwind our great achievements, or is there a more hopeful way to look at our plight? A case can be made that it is not constitutionalism that is exhausted but the belief dating from Jeremy Bentham that government power is a force for good and must be less restrained. Benthamism is the opposite of true liberalism.

The universal failure of government might give us pause and produce an intellectual rebirth that would again restrain government power, the injustice it causes and the evil it brings.

-- Heads Up (@ .), May 22, 2000

Answers

Any link to this study, or where it can be purchased? I do not think it is far to state an opinion based on someone's one page summary. It sounds, initially, to be hogwah, but I would like to give this author a fair chance.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), May 22, 2000.

OR TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY--A NATION WHO,S god IS PLEASURE IS DOOMED. AMERICA NEEDS TO REPENT---TURN BACK TO THE GOD OF THE BIBLE. OR WE GONNA REAP A VERY NASTY-CROP. 1ST THE PRIDE---THEN THE SLIDE.

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), May 22, 2000.

and modern thinkers?say SIN is old fashioned concept. the [BIBLE] say,s ''sin is a reproach to any nation'' alternitive-lifestyes[joke] NO =sin plain & simple. sin is like cancer--the last stages are killing. *THE BLOOD OF JESUS IS THE CURE*

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), May 22, 2000.

Actually, I think the posters above are being a bit negative. What the original post says is "decadence is our fate."

Now, look at this from an optimistic, polly point of view. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor. If decadence is the coming thing, then think decadent! Go for it; the possibilities are endless.

-- E.H. Porter (Just Wondering@About.it), May 22, 2000.


FutureShock -

I'm inferring from your post that you've never read any of Jacques Barzun's work. He's arguably one of the truly great minds of the past century. In the article cited, Paul Craig Roberts is discussing Mr. Barzun's latest work, From Dawn to Decadence - 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present, which I have not yet read, but fully intend to. From Amazon.com:

In the last half-millennium, as the noted cultural critic and historian Jacques Barzun observes, great revolutions have swept the Western world. Each has brought profound change--for instance, the remaking of the commercial and social worlds wrought by the rise of Protestantism and by the decline of hereditary monarchies. And each, Barzun hints, is too little studied or appreciated today, in a time he does not hesitate to label as decadent.

To leaf through Barzun's sweeping, densely detailed but lightly written survey of the last 500 years is to ride a whirlwind of world-changing events. Barzun ponders, for instance, the tumultuous political climate of Renaissance Italy, which yielded mayhem and chaos, but also the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo--and, he adds, the scientific foundations for today's consumer culture of boom boxes and rollerblades. He considers the 16th-century varieties of religious experimentation that arose in the wake of Martin Luther's 95 theses, some of which led to the repression of individual personality, others of which might easily have come from the Me Decade. Along the way, he offers a miniature history of the detective novel, defends Surrealism from its detractors, and derides the rise of professional sports, packing in a wealth of learned and often barbed asides.

Never shy of controversy, Barzun writes from a generally conservative position; he insists on the importance of moral values, celebrates the historical contributions of Christopher Columbus, and twits the academic practitioners of political correctness. Whether accepting of those views or not, even the most casual reader will find much that is new or little-explored in this attractive venture into cultural history. -- Gregory McNamee

Mr. Barzun is that rare individual about whom it can truthfully be said that they have forgotten more about history and culture than most of us know. Heard him on NPR the other day; I can only hope that I'm even half that sharp at 90 years old.

-- DeeEmBee (macbeth1@pacbell.net), May 23, 2000.



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