Abstract

The picture he paints is not a pretty one. “Societies,” he writes in the first section of the volume, “do not decay and fall into ruin because of what happens to them from the outside but rather as a result of an internal process.” One of the most important indicators of social decadence, Tonsor thinks, is the breakdown of traditional political forms, which is itself the result of the decay of aristocratic norms and republican virtue. The contemporary secular, anti-Christian culture promoted by our academic and media elites, in Tensor’s judgment, has replaced its traditional calling of providing uplifting intellectual and artistic standards. In providing evidence of decadence, Tonsor hardly needs to call attention to the breakdown of the family, the dissolution of conventional morality, the increase in crime and use of addictive drugs, and a declining birth rate. Troubling, he thinks, is the transformation of the army from a citizen body to a professional army of paid mercenaries and the propensity of the government to radiate its power outward to world conquest and domination. Above all, Tonsor is concerned about the nation’s loss of the moral tradition represented in the country’s founding documents. Can a civilization survive, he asks, without the unity provided by a common core of values? The crisis of Western civilization, detected early in the last century and addressed by philosophers as different as Husserl, Heidegger, and Santayana, remains. The denial of the Christian and classical sources of Western civilization and the cultural hostility to religion as found among our governing elites has created a moral vacuum. When a consensus with respect to the desired goals of society disappears there is no basis for an ordered civic life. Tonsor fears that absent virtue in the people, it is inevitable that a dictator or authoritarian regime will arise to impose order from without. Tonsor tries to avoid the outright pessimism of Spengler and Toynbee by pointing out that man is not fated but chooses his own life. There is, he believes, a parallel between the personal and the social. Of the twenty-six essays collected for the volume, only three in the first part are devoted to the topic of “decadence.” Others are organized under such headings as “Equality,” “Historiography,” “Intellectual History,” and “Politics.” Throughout the volume we find a highly informed, philosophical mind at work, one fully equipped to address the pressing issues of the day.