The era of decadence: it’s all downhill from here

LET’S not exaggerate. This is not the end of days. It is merely the end of civilisation as we know it.

That is the sobering argument made in Decadence: Decline of the Western World. Five years in the making, the Australian documentary proposes that the West peaked in 1969 and is now dying.

”The West as we know it today begins with the Magna Carta in 1215,” Pria Viswalingam, who wrote, produced and appears in the documentary, says.

‘Then came the Renaissance, the founding of America and the Enlightenment, before the West peaked with the social revolutions of the 1960s.

”And 1969 was the peak. The Russians and the Americans took us beyond our earthly bounds, the My Lai Massacre shattered the image of us as the good guys and then there was all the sheer exuberance and peace, love and rock’n’roll of Woodstock before the Rolling Stones ‘end of the ’60s’ concert at Altamont. Decadence depicts the West’s decline ever since.”

Viswalingam is a former SBS TV presenter whose credits include Fork in the Road and Class. Having devoted a career to analysing culture and society, he says the symptoms of decay and decadence are unmistakeable.

Those symptoms include soaring suicide rates and the West’s addiction to antidepressants. They include rampant individualism, emptying churches, a faltering sense of community and disintegrating families. And they include the West’s obsessive devotion to money as the only true measure of worth.

”Treadmill consumption, growing income disparity, B-grade leadership, they’re obvious signs of a culture adrift,” he says.

Rather than a lone voice, Viswalingam belongs to a swelling chorus of cultural doomsayers. He belongs to a new school of thought branded ”declinology”, which has seen the publication of scores of books with titles including How the West Was Lost, Last Days of Europe and Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide.

”[In] France, declinology has become a national art,” Madeleine Bunting wrote in The Guardian in January. ”In Germany, declinology has assumed hysterical proportions.”

Viswalingam broached the subject in Decadence: The Meaninglessness of Modern Life, a six-part TV series which aired on SBS in 2006. He says the topic has only become more timely since then, as revealed by the Occupy Wall Street protests.

And the issues raised by the film are not confined to the West. ”The rest of the world is aspiring to the West. We have a billion middle-class consumers coming online in China and India. No one is going to stop them.

”Decadence is really an ode to the West. I mean, I love the hard-won Western values of liberalism, law and freedoms that we now take for granted – to live as I choose, to be able to sue a government and win, the weekend. But it’s also a call to arms because China is still ruled by big bad Animal Farm-types and India has got another 200 years before its 99 per cent comes anywhere near the notion of social equitability.”

Supporters of his thesis include the philosopher Noam Chomsky and the Episcopalian bishop John Spong.

”Every civilisation will fall,” says Spong in the film, which premieres on Thursday. ”The question is when.”

Jacinta Dunn, the film’s co-writer, says the answer may be soon. ”Just before the fall of the Roman Empire, they were all feasting on lark’s tongue and nightingale hearts. They were obsessed with food. I don’t think George Calombaris will be dishing up lark’s tongue any time soon, but we are undoubtedly obsessed with food. I certainly think it’s decadent.”