If young people are taught to look at history only through the lenses of power and oppression, they will conclude that power and oppression are everything. Conversely, let them be introduced first to the genuinely great historical deeds, philosophical ideas, literary creations, and works of art of which humans have been capable. Then they will discover the ideals that moved our predecessors.

Decadence, in the sense of sustained, apparently irreversible decline, is a notoriously slippery concept. When considering an entire culture or society, so many metrics can be used, so many different aspects can be assessed, that one should be wary of making overly general claims.

Nonetheless, it seems hard to dispute that in recent years our society has been plagued by what could be described as multiple institutional failures across completely different fields. Political institutions, like Congress and the two major parties, are broadly viewed as seriously dysfunctional. Public education is in a deep crisis in many parts of the country. Public health institutions did not fare well during the pandemic. The mainstream media are widely distrusted. The military has lost much of its prestige. The leaders of large corporations like Disney and Boeing have proven to be corrupt or incompetent. Many professional societies seem to have become hostage to political interest groups. Even Scientific American is no longer “scientific.” The list goes on and on.

One can certainly argue that these failures are counterbalanced by some success stories, but it is hard to avoid the impression that there is a pattern of widespread institutional decline. Time will tell whether it amounts to long-term decline, but for now, we can ask whether any common factor unites these disparate phenomena.

Explanations for Institutional Decline

Both the political Left and Right have their favorite explanations. The Left tends to blame “neoliberalism”; allegedly, the shift toward market-based solutions and privatization, which started with Ronald Reagan, weakened America’s public institutions, both by depriving them of funding and by fostering a selfish and individualistic mindset. The Right typically counters that the weakening of traditionally liberal institutions like academia and the media is self-inflicted and due to extreme politicization, which alienates them from the public they ought to serve and makes them the playground of a new, highly ideological elite.

In my opinion, the two explanations simply illuminate two different aspects of the same phenomenon. On one hand, today’s great private economic powers are perfectly comfortable with progressive political ideology. On the other hand, the progressive professional and managerial classes are perfectly comfortable with, and benefit from, advanced capitalism, and liberal intellectuals give it ideological cover. Political polarization is deep, but as far as the elites are concerned, right-wing “market” ideology and left-wing “woke” ideology are not in serious conflict. As many surveys have shown, the Western ruling class is “socially liberal and economically conservative.”

I would say, then, that the root cause of social decline today is the prevalence among our social elites of what could be called “bourgeois individualism,” be it in the traditional economic-libertarian form or the more recent progressive-politicized version. In this view, people pursue only their private interests along different tracks (either raw accumulation of financial resources, or accumulation of cultural, bureaucratic, and managerial power) and society suffers. As Blessed Antonio Rosmini once wrote in The Philosophy of Politics,

when society has reached a stage when the immediate object of the masses is no longer social, but private—a period when the only stimulus to action is selfishness…society exists only accidentally, that is, it does not exist as a result of any force it receives from the spirit of its members, but solely as a result of the material solidity of its constitution—in other words, through its inertia. It stands like a stiffened corpse ready to fall at the first blow.

A Return to Ideals: A Solution to Institutional Decay

This answer, however, is not completely satisfactory. At the very least, one needs to ask a further question: how did we get to this point? Is it a matter of a purely moral decay, in the sense that people have simply become worse, more selfish?

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