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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10171 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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An attempt to summarise the decadence discourse

This has been the most interesting debate on the Motte for several months, possibly because it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of the US culture war. Given the messy debate across multiple top-level posts with various allegations of strawmanning, I thought it was worth trying to isolate what we still disagreed on.

Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake. I am decidedly pro-D, but my goal in this post is to identify consensus and disagreement, not to engage in the debate.

Things both sides appear to agree on

(At least within the local Overton window)

  • The most literal, stupid interpretation of "hard times make strong men" - i.e. that growing up in material poverty makes you a better soldier, is straightforwardly false. Richer societies normally (but not always) produce better soldiers than poorer ones. We don't agree how many people posting versions of "hard times make strong men" on Twitter believe this literal, stupid, wrong interpretation - the pro-D side suspect large numbers of them do, the anti-D side think that the pro-Ds are strawmanning.
  • Civilisations don't last for ever. Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".
  • It is possible for states to become militarily ineffective in a way that is not immediately obvious. States which this has happened to will collapse surprisingly quickly if attacked by a determined (if not particularly strong) enemy. The states most at risk of this phenomenon are powerful states that have enjoyed an extended period of peace. When it happens, it looks like good times making weak men in the ex-hegemon and hard times making strong men in the periphery.
  • Moral factors and human capital matter in war, and one of the way militarily ineffective societies sometimes lose wars is by producing large, expensively-equipped armies which then can't or won't fight.
  • The process where this happens is gradual, over timescales of at least a generation and sometimes longer.
  • It is very hard for a state which has become militarily ineffective in this way to recover, but it can take a long time for the collapse to come if the state was sufficiently hegemonic before it became militarily ineffective.
  • This is roughly the popular meaning of the term "decadence". (And "decadence" doesn't have a technical meaning distinct from the popular one).
  • This may have already happened to the United States of America. It has almost certainly already happened to the countries of Western Europe.
  • The trope maker for this process is the Roman Empire (and later the Western Roman Empire after Diocletian splits the Empire), which was militarily ineffective by 410AD at the latest and ceased to exist as a result in 476AD.
The disagreement
  • Pro-D think that "decadence" is a word like "dormitive virtue" which people use to sound sophisticated while obfuscating their lack of understanding of the phenomenon they are talking about. Anti-D think that the popular meaning of "decadence" describes a well-understood process and the connotations of the word accurately reflect what is going on in a decadent society.
  • Pro-D think that the way societies become "decadent" is complex and multifaceted, and is sufficiently different in each case that trying to define a single overarching model is fruitless, but it probably has something to do with the decay of institutions. Anti-D think that the process is sufficiently simple and sufficiently consistent over space and time that something like Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings serves as a timeless warning comprehensible to normies, and the primary driver is moral decay of individuals (and particularly the individuals who are supposed to be warrior elites).
  • Anti-D think that decadence has specific visible markers:
  1. Decline in "warrior values" or "warrior ethos"
  2. Increased emphasis on physical comfort among elite-class males
  3. Decreased willingness to inflict physical pain, including reduced use of harsh training and corporal punishment
  4. Decline in sexual morality and/or traditional gender roles
  5. Increasing willingness of people who are not battle-tested warrior elites (including priests, merchants, politicians, women, REMFs etc.) to interfere with military decision making
  6. Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this)
  • Pro-D think this is a bunch of hooey, and that militarily ineffective societies can and frequently do maintain the outward appearance of warrior ethos and traditional masculinity right up to the point where they lose on the battlefield.
  • Anti-D think that material wealth is at least somewhat causative of a decline into decadence such that "Good times make weak men" is a useful way of thinking about the process. Pro-D think decadence is associated with wealth because we call military weakness in rich societies decadence and military weakness in poor societies something else.
  • Devereaux argues in another thread that Rome declines as a result of the 3rd century Crisis and that all earlier decadence-callouts in the Latin literature, including Cato the Elder's call for austerity and Augustus' bachelor tax, are therefore wrong. Anti-D think that the early decadence-callouts are accurate early warnings of a long-term negative trend. There hasn't been much discussion of Rome specifically on the Motte.
Things that are peripheral to the disagreement
  • The subthread about Sparta. Devereaux thinks Sparta is Stupid Evil, most but not all anti-Ds think there is something to learn from Sparta about cultivating martial virtue.
  • @SecureSignals digression about dysgenics.
  • An argument about whether the Somali fraud ring in Minnesota should be counted as a successful invasion.

*It is very hard for a state which has become militarily ineffective in this way to recover, but it can take a long time for the collapse to come if the state was sufficiently hegemonic before it became militarily ineffective. [...] *This may have already happened to the United States of America. It has almost certainly already happened to the countries of Western Europe.

As a fellow pro-D, I would take a bit of issue with that framing.

In 1700, Europe contained the most advanced military forces of the planet. While there is some debate over why they had such an advantage over other continents, it seems rather clear why most polities within Europe participated in the military race: the ones were conquered in very short order, interstate anarchy and all that.

But in two world wars, we did learn that the winning move in industrial warfare is not to play if you can avoid it, and have had the most prosperous eighty years ever when we decided not to reneg on the border between France and Germany once every generation or two using artillery and poison gas.

Sure, the fraction of our GDP we invest in the military is pitiful and would make the Prussians of old rotate in their graves, but that is because we do not anticipate a huge ROI from it, neither do we want to conquer nor do we anticipate having to defend ourselves against conquerors -- what Putin gained as a threat with his ambition for territorial conquest he lost as a threat by not being able to defeat Ukraine. Modern Russia simply is not going to conquer Europe in the way people thought the USSR might, nor does it seem likely that the US or China would want to invade.

I am sure that when the first amphibians crawled to the land, there were naysayer fishes who thought it was a terrible idea, that the one constant in life was water, and that their useful fins would give way to useless feet and eventually even the webbing of their feet would atrophy, and eventually there would be a flood and all the foolish animals who had left the water behind would drown. As a land-dwelling animal, I am not convinced by them. Sure, the oceans might rise and we might have to retreat, some of us might drown, but simply embracing the oceans and growing fins would not work out for us. (While the cetaceans are doing fine (Problematic sexual behavior aside), they also did not get around to building an industrial civilization yet, and I do not like fish.)

So when I hear people proclaim that Europe is doomed because in its decadence it decided not to keep top-notch armies, I can not help but think of them as the priests of the Goddess of Cancer chanting "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER". The Goddess of Everything Else has shown us how to live with our neighbors without sacrificing millions to Cancer in the trenches every few decades, and we will not go back to the Old Ways of doing things.

Europe had such an advantage because of its technological worldview stemming from the influence of Western Christianity. There's a historical pattern where technology gets invented in China or the middle east or somewhere, gets used marginally, and then is brought back to Europe by Italian traders, where the guildsmen perfect it and Europeans adopt it en masse. Your link talks about firearms, and fair, they're an immediately militarily relevant example. But it also applies to the printing press(literally perfected mostly due to the Roman Catholic Church's habit of buying every copy of relevant books they could get their hands on leading to a supply crunch- the printing press only makes sense as a technology when large clients are placing bulk orders), spinning wheels, and clocks. Spinning wheels in particular is worth paying attention to because it was work done by low-status women who weren't willing to do sex work, the cheapest labour in any society that has ever existed, including ours. Europeans just really liked new technology and mechanization.

Isn't it also that when you've got a ton of different kingdoms and principalities and duchies and fiefs and city-states, that it's a lot easier to find someone willing to take a chance on a new technology (and then once adopted, it'll spread) than convincing a single strong ruler choosing to adopt and spread a new and potentially destabilizing technology?

The pattern was well established before India and thé Islamic world became consolidated, and east Asia also went through significant fragmentation during the era.

I feel like Scott must have intended the Straussian reading that The Goddess of Everything Else is just the Goddess of Cancer but better at her job.

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