‘Aging, comfortable and stuck’: what happens culture when society gets old?

Sorry to disturb your Saturday morning nap, but has it ever occurred to you that we live in an age of stagnation, entropy and inevitable decline? American author and columnist Ross Douthat thinks so.

Douthat, a Catholic conservative with an engagingly singular take on many issues of the day, has just published a new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, which rejects the received wisdom that this is an exciting era of high-speed technological change, social fracture and profound cultural shifts. All of these, he argues, are illusions created by the magic of the internet.

In reality, our contemporary society is sluggish and bereft of big new ideas.

“We are aging, comfortable and stuck,” he wrote in the New York Times recently. “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 farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilisation has entered into decadence.”

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The Decadent Society was only published this week, but some critics have already pushed back against its thesis, arguing its portrait of a society too comfortable for its own good fails to take adequate account of the real tensions caused by social injustice and inequality. I have yet to read the book, but one of its core arguments is, I think, going to become increasingly central over the next few years.

Line-up

It’s a question which shouldn’t just bother cultural and social conservatives, although they’ve made most of the the running on it so far: what does a society look like when the old greatly outnumber the young? What do you do when there aren’t enough people to populate the cities and towns? And what does that mean for culture?

We can perhaps detect some of the answers in the changing face of mass popular entertainment, which generally tends to respond fastest to market shifts.

This week All Together Now, the Waterford music festival which is now one of the largest in the country, announced more details of its line-up this summer. In addition to the already-announced septuagenarian Iggy Pop, other headliners include Jarvis Cocker, Sinéad O'Connor, Goldfrapp and Rufus Wainwright, none of whom will ever see 50 again. The slightly younger Lauryn Hill is largely trading on the enduring popularity of one (brilliant) solo album released 22 years ago. Meanwhile, over at this year's larger-than-ever Electric Picnic, the sole headliners announced so far are gnarly 1990s agit-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

It’s not that these acts don’t necessarily have something to offer. But you would have to be well into your 40s now to have had the opportunity to see any of them when they were at the height of their careers.

Modern music festivals, with their podcast stages, child-friendly areas and boutique campsites, do target a broader age-span, but I’d wager the median age of the attendees at All Together Now or Electric Picnic won’t be 45. Yet the promoters, in their wisdom, have decided these are the most attractive acts to put on for their target markets.

Outlier

And yes, there will be younger, more recent acts on smaller stages, but putting Iggy and RATM at the top of their respective bills surely says something about the hegemony of older people’s music. It’s notable that Longitude, the only large-scale festival featuring headliners who’ve emerged in the last 10 years, is the outlier rather than the norm.

This might seem a relatively trivial example of the phenomenon Douthat describes. And those who venture to pontificate on how (delete as applicable) music/movies/everything isn't as great as it used to be deserve the derision they get. Also, what harm if Iggy Pop is making a living as the Andre Rieu of the moshpit generation?

But the hollowing out of the youth-oriented mass entertainment industry of the 20th century is a harbinger of things to come. As societies get older, cultural norms will shift. The tastes of the old will become more important, and those of the young less so. You don’t have to be prejudiced against older people to worry about the consequences for cultural creativity.

Douthat paints a troubling picture: “It’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.”

Get back to your nap.