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and absurdities), because he sees it as containing the seeds of everything
that followed. Still, Nazism, World War II, and the Soviet Revolution
shou Id have been given more space. In the last cha pter, "Demotic Li fe
and Times," he provides in the past tense a catalogue of what ails us as
if he were a chronicler in some future time (year 2300). The prologue to
the future, which ends the book, foresees a "renascent culture," based
on a renewed interest in and a creative misappropriation of the past that
the book has surveyed. This renascent culture "has resurrected enthusi–
asms in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to
be alive," echoing Wordsworth's early rapture in the wake of the French
Revolution. For Barzun decadence is not an occasion for despair, but
rather a kind of clearing of the cultural space in which revival will take
place.
Questions remain: Is Barzun, the historian, justified in characterizing
our time as decadent? And specifically, what are some of the features of
that decadence? Separatism, for one, by which he means the undermin–
ing of what he considers "the greatest political creation of the West, the
nation-state." The examples are extensive: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the
Basques, Chechnya, Kosovo, Bosnia, and so on. Modern violence on a
grand scale is the result not of nationalism, but of its undoing. (Or is it
the result of the undoing of empire?) Barzun is describing what may be
true of the second, not the first half of the twentieth century. (And what
about globalization? Is it an alternative to both nationalism and sepa–
ratism?) Barzun goes on to indict the excesses of the welfare state (its
encouragement of an ethos of victimization and dependency), though
not the welfare state itself, which "in a culture based as it was on a
machine was inescapable," the corruption of representative government
by money and the sound "byte" of television in which character is
attacked and issues bypassed, the demotic "lifestyle" (a word that the
linguistically fastidious Barzun encloses in quotation marks) in which
standards, conventions, and good taste are flouted, and the loss of self–
confidence, indeed the loss of selfhood often characterized as an iden–
tity crisis. (Compared to the horrors of two world wars, the Holocaust,
and other genocides, these instances of decadence are pale indeed. They
seem less defining of our terrible century.)
A reader may agree with some or all of Barzun's instances of the sec–
ond half of our century, but then ask whether there are no counter–
vailing examples of positive achievement in the arts, sciences, politics,
and the moral life, which would make decadence a theme rather than
the definition of our time. He acknowledges the extraordinary achieve–
ments of the sciences, though he believes that in the second half of our
