Jonathan Bowden on Decadence

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Editor’s Note:

This is the audio and transcript of the Q&A from Jonathan Bowden’s lecture “Lillith before Eve” at the London Forum on September 24, 2011. I want to thank J.H. for his help with the transcript. If you can spot any errors or make out the words marked “unintelligible” please post your suggestions below. The full text of this lecture is available in Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug, available here.

To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”

Jez Turner: Well, thank you Jonathan, an intellectual prior positionist par excellence. While I hand this glass around for any of you who hasn’t paid five pounds, you can ask some questions. So first question at the back, Martin, please.

Martin Webster: Yes. First of all, may I preface my question by referring to the previous speaker, Michelle Renouf. While you’ve all heard my two objections to part of the content of her speech, I’d like to thank her for educating me on the contribution which the Women’s Social and Political Union made to the subsequent fascist movement. That’s something that I was completely unaware of, and I’m grateful for her educating us all on that particular point. Yes.

So far as your talk, Jonathan, I’ve for long years heard Right-wingers, nationalists of various kinds, equate the downfall of our society with general immorality. And I often hear “Oh the downfall of Rome was caused by sexual license, depravity, blah, blah, blah.”

And yet in Rome, if you read about their culture, the Roman family and particularly the Roman matriarch, was [a] terribly important figure in their culture, and not just at the higher orders, but down through society.

Yet against this backdrop was the appalling, I regard as wickedness and degeneracy of the games. Not just cruelty to animals, but cruelty to humans and the sexual activities associated with those “entertainments.” And yet the Roman Empire became really great from about the death of Christ and went on another 400 or 500 years.

So can we really say that what, from a Christian, perhaps, point of view, we would regard as depravity or whatever is a contribution to the decline of a society, as such? Or are we barking up the wrong tree in trying to assert—because a lot of Right-wing people don’t tend to be very political, genuinely political, and they revert to mummy’s teachings or school teachings about Christianity and “goodness,” and that these are all mixed up, and that they’re wrong to do that.

Jonathan Bowden: Well, I think it’s the ethos in society. I don’t believe . . . I’m a Nietzschean essentially, so I don’t believe man’s naturally good anyway. All societies will be partly degenerate and decadent. It depends what type of decadence you get. In ancient Rome, if you have an ethos of extreme socially authoritarian imperialism, and that’s your ethos, you can have quite a lot of decadence mixed up in it.

My criticism of the 1960s is not the decadence, which you will always have. You can argue about the degree. My criticism is the ideas which came to power in the 1960s and thereafter. Decadence is part of human nature. It’s the ideas that you have about it, which summon up what you’re going to do and how you’re going to live.

If you’re in command of an army, some of your best troops will have a private life that isn’t worth mentioning, and every officer knows that. But you do not necessarily endorse ideologically what they do or wish to do as a norm and present it as, not just socially acceptable, but that which is beyond criticism and indeed should become a replacement norm.

You can order Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug here.

I’m basically arguing for the element of hypocrisy that vice inevitably gives to virtue.

Jez Turner: Kevin, your question?

Kevin: Jonathan, what would you say about the British attitude to prostitution? Because there’s such a lot of hypocrisy and mixed values. On the one hand you now have lap dancing clubs, which I have never been to, but they seem quite abhorrent in many ways. But if people enjoy them, they could be tolerated in a civilized society. But then prostitution itself is illegal for women [unintelligible] which would be much more civilized, as they used to have in Paris before the Second World War, a very cultured place where one could have conversation and drink, much [unintelligible]. And then there’s men being arrested for [unintelligible] for cat-calling syndrome. Men are demonized for doing what comes natural. And all these sorts of issues [unintelligible].

Jonathan Bowden: But the politics of it is such that, it never will be, basically because there is no, there’s no ramp of opinion, which is agreed as to what should be done. And basically what you don’t intend to get, is you have a “sin bin” zone. In the society, the issue falls down into a zone, what the police call the zone of toleration, where all of the tendencies are mixed together. The feminist tendency that’s deeply opposed to prostitution, the feminist tendency that’s in favor of it, the liberaler tendencies which are opposed to it, and the liberal tendencies, which are in favor of it. If you regard libertarianism as part of contemporary conservatism, Tories themselves will be divided on these issues. Prostitution is always a very difficult issue. I think [unintelligible] will always occur.

Another Speaker: I just read an interesting book, Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, all about the sex industry. Over hundreds of years, you can see how attitudes change. One time it was like Amsterdam with women in a certain part of London would perform in the window, and a lot more explicitly as well. One moment there is a tolerant attitude. The next moment there’s one more conservative and less tolerant. And it seems over hundreds of years, it will actually change. It’s like a cultural thing. It goes ’round in cycles.

Jonathan Bowden: Yes, that tends to the Spenglerian view that things are cyclical. And in a sense one hopes that they are, because it means that our ideas are due for a bit of a renaissance.

Jez Turner: Hey good! On that note . . .