Can't change resolution grand ages rome
Aesthetically and intellectually it hints at exhaustion, finality - “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series,” in the words of the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov.īut it’s possible to distill a useful definition from all these associations. In the popular imagination, it’s associated with sex and gluttony, with pornographic romances and chocolate strawberries. Yeats’s line about the best lacking all conviction. In political debates, it’s associated with a lack of resolution in the face of threats - with Neville Chamberlain and W.B. The word “decadence” is used promiscuously but rarely precisely. The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens. The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we probably aren’t entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Our pessimists see crises everywhere our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.īut what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we - or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim - really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver? What if the meltdown at the Iowa caucuses, an antique system undone by pseudo-innovation and incompetence, was much more emblematic of our age than any great catastrophe or breakthrough?
Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look.