One of the most curious blind spots in the contemporary
imagination, as I have suggested more than once in these essays,
can be traced in the way that the concept of decline has
vanished from our collective discourse about the future. What
makes this blindness even more curious is that it is a very
recent thing. A century ago the possibility that the modern
western world might reach a peak, and then retrace history’s
familiar path down to the common fate of civilizations, was on
many minds. The art of Aubrey Beardsley and the novels of
Joséphin Péladan, to name only two leading figures of the
Decadent movement, announced, and at times wallowed in, the
approaching decline that Oswald Spengler detailed a few years
later in his magisterial prose. The belief in decline was never
universally held, or even a majority view – those who prophesied
the imminence of Utopia through progress or violent revolution
had at least as large an audience, and apocalyptic fantasies
were never hard to find – but the idea was there,