In an essay titled, “Decadence and Its Critics,” Dr. Gleaves Whitney observes how difficult it has been for conservative cultural critics to get their message about the decline of Western civilization across to the public. He asserts three reasons why the prophets of Western decadence have been relegated to be “the Cassandras and Laocoöns of modern times.”
The first reason he gives is that while decadence assumes there is a standard from which civilization is falling, there is little consensus about what that standard actually is. Certainly a decline from something assumes a standard from which to “measure the fall.” Since public intellectuals have different understandings of what is declining in the West and are furthermore so disparate in their worldviews, they tend to speak right past each other.
The second reason has to do with the “the superficial understanding of decadence among the public.” Dr. Whitney suggests, the hoi poloi seem to derive their notions of decadence “from such ‘sword-and-sandals’ extravaganzas as Sodom and Gomorrah, Quo Vadis, and Ben Hur. There is, he argues, “a lack of sophistication [that is] not entirely the public’s fault” because there is little access to the concept of decadence as it is so often overshadowed by the heightened treatment of the concept of “progress.”
The third reason he offers is the “legitimate skepticism” the public has of the perceptions held by the conservative apocalyptic prophets. If Western civilization has been in such decline as each generation—and the generation before it—has claimed, “then why has not the West maneuvered itself back into the Neanderthal valley or Lascaux cave?” Why has the West not yet “gone to the dogs” if things are in such decline as is being claimed?
In sum, Dr. Whitney essays that “If conservative critics can pin down the idea of decadence with rigor while at the same time avoiding the shrill tones that lesser talents have resorted to, then they may go far in setting the agenda for what it means for a civilization to decline.” And in order to “pin down the idea,” he suggests a few salient questions must be answered: “If American civilization is decadent, if the West is in decline, in precisely what ways can the critic show them to be so? Precisely how has it fallen from a previously higher state of existence, whether measured in social, cultural, moral, or religious terms?”
One of the premiere objectives of this dissertation is to answer questions similar to the ones Dr. Whitney has raised in this article and then demonstrate that more than a few early twentieth-century Christian humanists have made some critical purchase on pinning down this idea of Western decadence; that is, these humanists tend to capture a standard for a higher state of existence and take a unique approach to showing precise ways in which the West is in decline.
More specifically, a few of these humanists have done so using what might be thought of as an inverse of Plato’s isometric metaphor of “the city being the soul writ large.” They have employed a powerful literary device to rigorously pin down the idea of decadence within the soul of the individual human being, and have thereby writ large the standard of measure for decadence in the West. To be sure, theirs is not a fallacy of composition because the nature of a priori knowledge, it will be argued, affords certain conceptual judgments universally acknowledged (e.g., number).
The Christian humanists of the early twentieth century have, in their various lectures and essays, argued well for a standard of human flourishing by which society and its cultural critics can measure the decline of the West, but it is the position of this author their strongest and most powerful arguments are manifest in their imaginative literature, particularly in their use of the grotesque.
By analyzing the writings of the 20th-century Christian humanists against the particular backdrop of early 20th-century modernism, especially their imaginative literature, and particularly their use of the grotesque in their imaginative literature, twenty-first century conservative cultural critics can borrow important ideas, features, and categories of thought from their 20th-century predecessors to pin down—and most likely do so with the rigor Whitney is calling for—the previously higher state of existence from which the West has fallen.
In other words, given the particularities of the early 20th-century, and the matured use of a very particular literary device by Christian humanists of the same period, the authors this dissertation will treat can provide 21st-century culture critics a new way of identifying and defining a standard for measuring the higher state of existence toward which all humans and societies can flourish.