184
PARTISAN REVIEW
The trouble with such schemata, which have a recurring and
apparently indestructible life in the mind, is that they are fictions of a
particularly empty kind. As I have pointed out before, there is only the
most dubious historical evidence that civilizations do grow old, stag–
nate, and die, and none at all for the belief that this occurs according to
some iron law whose workings mirror the stages of an individual
destiny. The Roman Empire did not grow old and die; it underwent
assaults and transformations. The British Empire did not obey a
principle of decadence; it lost strength and was finally dissolved
through the operation of certain political and economic
facts,
none of
which was inexorable.
What history appears to show instead of a law of decadence are the
simultaneity of decline and advance ("There are no mere phenomena
of decay; every decline is also a rise," R. W. Collingwood has written),
and the potential convertibility of one form of human enterprise into
another. The evidently powerful produces the secretly so; the appear–
ance of weakness is discovered as actual strength, and the reverse;
culture wanes in order
to
renew itself; empires "die" so that their parts
may live; the immoral is the proof of the moral. There is an economy of
the manifestations of human behavior and activity in the realm of
values that might be compared to the principle of conservation of
energy in the material world.
In
light of this, the notion of decadence in societies and cultures
can be seen to be injurious
to
the integrity and wholeness of communal
experience.
If
there is a "falling away" from a standard it can mean that
the standard is outworn, lifeless, or an obstacle
to
growth, which has
been true in every period of innovation-at bottom a movement of
renewal-in the arts and other human realms.
If
a once strong society
has become weak or a once flourishing culture infertile, what is the
point of describing the new condition as "decadent," since it describes
itself? To add "decadence" to descriptions of human history is to
perform at best an act of supererogation, at worst one of radical
misunderstanding.
So much for decadence as a perspective upon civilizations, cultures
and their fates. What remains to be said is something about the word in
relation
to
the activities of particular human beings, its chief currency
now.
The peculiar power of fashion is to coerce us into doing what we
would not otherwise have done or thought of doing. Fashion arrives
