Is civilizational decadence a meaningful concept? What causes it?

by StoatStonksNow

Many narratives of civilizational decline focus on some kind of moral decay, or decadence, as a primary causal factor. But "decadence" is often only very loosely defined, relying on cherry-picked data and the biases of the author - Glubb's "The Fate of Empires" being a preeminent example, along with essentially the entire genre of Roman Decadence analysis.

Have there been any rigorous attempts to formally define "decadence," that explain what it is, where it comes from, and why it causes empires to collapse?

fleischblitz

Since nobody has (yet) taken a stab at addressing your question I'd like to provide some feedback that can hopefully get the ball rolling for you. This will be in bullet form as the point is not to offer a narrative, but rather some technical critique of the question itself. To this end, please don't interpret any terseness in my language as contempt -- and please interpret everything as literally as possible (i.e. without subtext). To wit,

  1. I'm NOT addressing your second question which I think can be reworded to something like "What is history of the concept of 'decandence'?". Note that this is not the same as asking whether decadence (whatever that means) causes/correlates with civilization decline (whatever that means) and if so, by what mechanisms?
  2. Depending on exactly what you mean by "formal" (I can't be sure), there's no such thing as a "formal definition" in a field like history. There is concensus and common usage, but it's unclear (to me) what 'formal' would mean in this context. If I had to guess what you might have meant (I hate doing this) it might be closer to "concensus". This may feel like a trivial semantic nitpick, but note that I have to guess what you mean in order that we avoid getting stuck at a non-answer. I may have been correct (I have no idea) but it's not hard to imagine that I had assumed something incorrectly, and carry on providing information for something completely orthogonal to what your original intention. In any case, if we reword your first question to accomodate for "concensus" we find something like "Is there any concensus among historians on the notion of civilizational "decadence"?". I can't answer this question, but it leads me to my next point,
  3. I suspect you would find more luck in finding a satisfying answer to your question if you teased apart what you mean by decadence. If I was born & raised in Europe and asked "Who's the greatest football player of all time?" and I heard back "Tom Brady" (I don't know anything about the NFL, don't dwell on this if this is a garbage take) then no doubt I'd be unsatisfied. In this vein, if you found out that historians do in fact have some academic definition of decadence, but it's not in line with what you had originally asked yourself, then the answer may not even be relevant to your intentions (it may still be interesting, but it's not addressing your question). In any case, what I'm recommending here is to list what you believe to be attributes of "decadence" and follow-up by substituting those words/definitions for "decadence" in your original question.
  4. Elaborating a bit on point (3), it's maybe not unreasonable to suppose that an attribute of a "decadent" civilization is high degrees of income inequality (at least it does based on my intuition -- whether or not anyone agrees with this intuition is not so much the point right now). Suppose other attributes include low degrees of social mobility (socioeconomically, geographically, whatever -- take your pick), high rates of substance abuse, etc etc. To substitute those notions into the place of "decadence" is something along the lines of stating "'Decadence' is a complicated word that I suspect many people will interpret completely differently. For this reason I'll skip the middle man and just directly examine what I believe to be instances of decadence in different situations". As long as you make it clear what those instances are then I would argue it's fine. If you're familiar with mathematics I'm suggesting something like "Let 'decadence' refer to a bundle of phenomena including 'low degrees of social mobility', 'high rates of subtsance abuse', etc. etc.". From there one can reword your question to "What causes X, where does X come from, and why does X influence/cause civilizational collapse?", where X is now each one of the instances we isolated earlier.
  5. It's worth noting that in (4) I conciously chose phenomena that can be assessed relatively quantitatively (i.e. things that are (probably) well-defined). When googling "decadence" I'm faced with a definition along the lines of "moral degradation and self-indulgence which leads to cultural/civilization decline" (whatever 'decline' means in this context -- presumably something like a loss of prestige but that's a just a guess). I find this definition to be not very useful from the perspective on trying to come up with an answer based on premises that everyone can agree. It's taking one ill-defined concept that no doubt varies wildly in how it's interpreted and replaces it with another ill-defined concept that no doubt varies wildly in how it's interpreted. In particular, it's not hard to see how reliant "moral decline" is on the assumptions that 1) there is an absolute most virtuous civilization and 2) we (can) know what it is.