Post-truth politics

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics 

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture where true/false, honesty/lying have become a focal concern of public life and are viewed by popular commentators and academic researchers alike as having an important causal role in how politics operates at a particular point in history (especially influenced by new communication and media technologies). Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was "Post-truth", citing a 20-fold increase in usage compared to 2015 and noted that it was commonly associated with the noun "post-truth politics." Popularized as a term in news media, and a dictionary definition, post-truth has developed from a short-hand label for the abundance and influence of misleading or false political truth claims into a concept empirically studied and theorized by academic research.

Since post-truth politics are primarily known through public truth statements in specific media contexts (commentary on major broadcasting networks, podcasts, YouTube videos, and other social media), it is especially studied as a media and communication studies phenomenon with particular forms of truth-telling: intentional rumors, lying, conspiracy theories, and fake news (subsequently gaining philosophers' attention). Post-truth politics' historical nature has also been discussed with regard to more traditional areas of communication and journalism studies such as propaganda.

As of 2018, political commentators and academic researchers have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably Australia, Brazil, China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others.

History of terminology

The term post-truth politics appears to have developed from other adjectival uses of "post-truth," such as "post-truth political environment," "post-truth world," "post-truth era," "post-truth society," and very close cousins, such as "post-fact society" and "post-truth presidency." According to Oxford Dictionaries, the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich may have been the first to use the term post-truth in a 1992 essay in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate (1972–1974), more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal (1985–1987) and Persian Gulf War (1990–1991) demonstrates that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world." However, as Harsin (2018) notes, the term was in academic circulation in the 1990s. The media studies scholar John Hartley used the term "post-truth as the title of a chapter, "Journalism in a Post-truth Society," in his 1992 book The Politics of Pictures.

In 2004 Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title. In it he argued that deception is becoming more prevalent in the current media-driven world. According to Keyes, lies stopped being treated as something inexcusable and started being viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, which supposedly led to the beginning of the post-truth era. The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11 in 2001. In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the phrase "post-democracy" to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments," but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams". Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics. More recently, scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs, where strategic use of emotion is becoming key to gaining truth for truth statements.

The term "post-truth politics" may have originally been coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010. Roberts defined it as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)". Post truth was used by philosopher Joseph Heath to describe the 2014 Ontario election. The term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in the United States and for the 2016 "Brexit" referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom.

Concepts

Information disorder has been proposed as an umbrella term for the wide variety of poor or false information being used for political purposes in post-truth politics.

Post-truth

Scholars and popular commentators disagree about whether post-truth is a label that is newly generated but can be applied to phenomena such as lying in any historical period; or whether it is historically specific, with empirically more recent observable causes (especially new social and political relations enabled by new digital communication technologies) and is only simplistically reduced to the age-old phenomenon of political lying. Scholars and popular commentators also disagree about the degree to which emotion should be emphasized in theories of post-truth, despite the emphasis on emotion in the Oxford Dictionary's original definition of the word. While the term "post-truth" had no dictionary entry before Oxford Dictionaries' entry in 2016, the Oxford entry was inspired by the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign; it was thus already implicitly referring to politics. Further, in the original Oxford Dictionaries' entry's (even today, more of a press release than traditional dictionary entry) justification for their choice, they say that it is often used in noun form of "post-truth politics." Thus, post-truth is often used interchangeably with post-truth politics.

Post-truth politics is a subset of the broader term post-truth, whose use precedes the recent focus on political events. While Oxford Dictionaries influentially named post-truth its 2016 word-of-the-year, current academic development of post-truth as a concept does not entirely reflect their original emphasis on "circumstances" where appeals to "objective facts" fail to influence as much as "appeals to emotion and personal belief" (see "Drivers" section below).

Some uses of the concept are more general, referring not to historical conditions of widely empirically documented distrust or a context of promotional capitalism, easily accessible and hard-to-control amateur mass communication of social media, but to the presence of lying and distrust in politics and bias in journalism (and commentators' opinions that people of the day were distrustful or that political lying was common). Reducing the concept of post-truth to dishonest political communication and different styles thereof, some scholars argue that what one identifies as post-truth politics today is really a return of previous periods of politics. Jennifer Hochschild, H.L. Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, has described the rise of post-truth as a return to 18th- and 19th-century political and media practices in the United States, followed by a period in the 20th century where the media was relatively balanced and rhetoric was toned down. Such a view nonetheless also conflicts with those in other countries at other times. For example, in 1957 scientist Kathleen Lonsdale remarked in the British context that "for many people truthfulness in politics has now become a mockery.... Anyone who listens to the radio in a mixed company of thinking people knows how deep-seated is this cynicism." Similarly, New Scientist characterised the pamphlet wars that arose with the growth of printing and literacy, beginning in the 1600s, as an early form of post-truth politics. Slanderous and vitriolic pamphlets were cheaply printed and widely disseminated, and the dissent that they fomented contributed to starting wars and revolutions such as the English Civil War (1642–1651) and (much later) the American Revolution (1765–1783).

Drivers

Communication and media scholars and philosophers tend to view the definition, origins, and causes of post-truth slightly differently. Media and communication scholars emphasize the historical revolution in communication technologies, which has fundamentally altered social life, including our ways of knowing socially (social epistemology), our authorities, and trust in institutions. Some also do not see post-truth as primarily a problem of knowledge, but rather of confusion, disorientation, and distrust. Philosophers tend to cite media and communications changes but claim that philosophical and cultural movements themselves, such as postmodernism, have influenced society, resulting in a situation where feeling and belief create an epistemic crisis for politics.

The "circumstances" surrounding post-truth (politics) noted by the original Oxford Dictionaries' definition have been expanded to denote a historical period, defined by the convergence of numerous empirically documented shifts. As opposed to early commentators who described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes, several scholars point to a host of empirical changes that are contemporary and are the core of the concept. For these scholars, post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts in public life by pointing to a cultural and historical convergence of several developments:

1. An abundance of competing truth claims, partly due to accessible technologies of communication production, personal websites, videos, micro-blogging, and chat groups;
2. A lack of shared authorities for adjudicating truth claims, especially with the demise of traditional journalism as a gatekeeper of issues and public truth claims;
3. A fragmented public space, facilitated by algorithms, where truth claims appear unchallenged or unexamined by a larger public in attendance to them, sometimes associated with false knowledge effects of echo chambers and filter bubbles;
4. A well-resourced influence or persuasive industry in public relations, marketing, advertising, and big data analytics, whose goals are especially to influence, not inform or educate;
5. A cultural backdrop of "promotional culture," characterized by self-promoting, self-branding, user-generated content, about image as much as truth;
6. A resorting to emotion and cognitive bias as a means to practically deal with the competition and confusion;
7. A far-reaching context of social distrust to which post-truth political communication contribute and are affected by;
8. Communication technologies corresponding to a culture of acceleration, distraction, and "hot cognition; and, perhaps, changing historical ethics about how much misleading or "spin" is acceptable.

In 2015 media and politics scholar Jayson Harsin coined the term "regime of post-truth" which encompasses many aspects of post-truth politics. He argues that a convergent set of historical developments have created the conditions of post-truth society and its politics: the political communication informed by cognitive science, which aims at managing perception and belief of segmented populations through techniques like microtargeting, which includes the strategic use of rumors and falsehoods; the fragmentation of modern, more centralized mass news media gatekeepers, which have largely repeated one another's scoops and their reports; the attention economy marked by information overload and acceleration, user-generated content and fewer society-wide common trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate; the algorithms which govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, based on what users want (per algorithm) and not on what is factual; and news media which have been marred by scandals of plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda, and changing news values. These developments have occurred on the background of economic crises, downsizing and favoring trends toward more traditional tabloid stories and styles of reporting, known as tabloidization and infotainment. In this view, post-truth cannot be understood without regard for the revolution in communication technologies and social life, their effects on cognition (the way people are disposed to think online), in a backdrop of social acceleration. In terms of entertainment, scholars such as Corner and Pels (2003) and Harsin (2018, 2021) argue that citizens' orientations towards politics are dispositions formed first as audiences in relation to entertainment forms such as reality television, which can be shown to be transposable to their evaluation of political communication.

While some of these phenomena (such as a more tabloidesque press) may suggest a return to the past, the effect of the convergences is a socio-political phenomenon which exceeds earlier forms of journalism in deliberate distortion and struggle. Fact-checking and rumor-busting sites abound, but they are unable to reunite a fragmented set of audiences (attention-wise) and their respective trustful-/distrustfulness. Harsin has called it a "regime of post-truth" instead of merely post-truth politics, with professional pan-partisan political communication manipulating the communication competitively in a context where institutions and discourses (such as science and news media) were interdependent on one another to stabilize the public circulation of truth. Cosentino (2019) expands the concept of regime of post-truth to a geo-political level, analyzing political communication cases in the non-Western as well as Western world.

Other scholars, such as the philosopher Lee McIntryre (2018), who focuses on "post-truth" generally but makes reference to politics, argue that rising social distrust of scientific expertise and postmodern academic discourse, allegedly promoting a devaluing of or disregard for truth, have combined with cognitive biases to produce conditions where feeling triumphs over facts. While several of these scholars cite distrust as an agent of post-truth social and political effects, the origin of the distrust is less clear. McIntyre sees public relations efforts to undermine scientific truths, on, for example, the effects of tobacco, as important factors (in addition to the alleged influence of academic postmodernism on conservative politics, though this link is not empirically established). As another specific example of corporate interests undermining truths for which there exists scientific consensus, McIntyre cites previous donations of BP to organizations which deny climate change. However, public relations is just one part of a larger culture of promotionalism (consumer capitalism), where truth has long been the last concern in strategies to influence people to feel positively or negatively towards brands as businesses, countries, products, parties, and politicians. Furthermore, the scandals in journalism around plagiarism and "cheerleading" for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, combine with promotional culture, ethically questionable professional strategic political communication, potential viral mediascapes, algorithmically customized presentation of information, among other factors to reproduce various forms of specific and generalized distrust—trust being crucial for recognition of legitimate public truth-tellers.

While many popular treatments of post-truth (sometimes used interchangeably with fake news) claim or imply a growth in political lying, Kalpokas (2018), Harsin (2015, 2017, 2018, 2021), and Cosentino (2019) see lying as only one feature of post-truth (which cannot historically distinguish it as new), instead focusing on problems of distinguishing true and false (common authorities for inducing belief being scarcer), or on disorientation, confusion, misperception, and distraction. The appeals to scientific expertise (though minority views in their fields), as with anti-vaccine supporters, demonstrates that across the board, people do in fact respect scientific experts, or the idea thereof. But science and expertise have been politicized, making it harder for the unknowing to identify legitimate authorities (all of whom may hold advanced degrees). Furthermore, it may not be so much that post-truth is manifest trust in one's emotions before truth claims as one's identification of emotional truth-tellers as authentic, honest, and therefore trustworthy.

Misinformation

Misinformation is inadvertently false or misleading information used in political discourse.

Disinformation

Disinformation is purposely and intentionally misleading information, for example, in propaganda.

Fake news

Fake news is "fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent."

Description

A Vote Leave poster with a contested claim about the EU membership fee, cited as an example of post-truth politics

In modern professionalization of political communication (tied to marketing and advertising research), a defining trait of post-truth politics is that campaigners continue to repeat their talking points, even when media outlets, experts in the field in question, and others provide proof that contradicts these talking points. For example, during campaigning for the British EU referendum campaign, Vote Leave made repeated use of the claim that EU membership cost £350 million a week, although later began to use the figure as a net amount of money sent directly to the EU. This figure, which ignored the UK rebate and other factors, was described as "potentially misleading" by the UK Statistics Authority, as "not sensible" by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and was rejected in fact checks by BBC News, Channel 4 News and Full Fact. Vote Leave nevertheless continued to use the figure as a centrepiece of their campaign until the day of the referendum, after which point they downplayed the pledge as having been an "example", pointing out that it was only ever suggested as a possible alternative use of the net funds sent to the EU. Tory MP and Leave campaigner Sarah Wollaston, who left the group in protest during its campaign, criticised its "post-truth politics". The justice secretary Michael Gove controversially claimed in an interview that the British people "Had had enough of experts".

Michael Deacon, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Daily Telegraph, summarised the core message of post-truth politics as "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic." He added that post-truth politics can also include a claimed rejection of partisanship and negative campaigning. In this context, campaigners can push a utopian "positive campaign" to which rebuttals can be dismissed as smears and scaremongering and opposition as partisan.

In its most extreme mode, post-truth politics can make use of conspiracism. In this form of post-truth politics, false rumors (such as the "birther" or "Muslim" conspiracy theories about Barack Obama) become major news topics. In the case of the "pizzagate" conspiracy, this resulted in a man entering the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and firing an AR-15 rifle.

In contrast to simply telling untruths, writers such as Jack Holmes of Esquire describe the process as something different, with Holmes putting it as: "So, if you don't know what's true, you can say whatever you want and it's not a lie". Finally, scholars have argued that post-truth is not simply about clear cut true/false statements and people's failure to distinguish between them but about strategically ambiguous statements that may be true in some ways, from some perspectives and interpretations, and false in others. This was the case around the disinformation campaigns of the UK and US in promoting the US invasion of Iraq (Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda "ties" or "links" and Weapons of Mass Destruction), which have been described as watershed moments of the post-truth era.

Major news outlets

Several trends in the media landscape have been blamed for the perceived rise of post-truth politics. One contributing factor has been the proliferation of state-funded news agencies like CCTV News and RT, and Voice of America in the USA which allow states to influence Western audiences. According to Peter Pomerantsev, a British-Russian journalist who worked for TNT in Moscow, one of their prime objectives has been to de-legitimize Western institutions, including the structures of government, democracy, and human rights. As of 2016, trust in the mainstream media in the US had reached historical lows. It has been suggested that under these conditions, fact checking by news outlets struggles to gain traction among the wider public and that politicians resort to increasingly drastic messaging.

Many news outlets desire to appear to be, or have a policy of being, impartial. Many writers have noted that in some cases, this leads to false balance, the practice of giving equal emphasis to unsupported or discredited claims without challenging their factual basis. The 24-hour news cycle also means that news channels repeatedly draw on the same public figures, which benefits PR-savvy politicians and means that presentation and personality can have a larger impact on the audience than facts, while the process of claim and counter-claim can provide grist for days of news coverage at the expense of deeper analysis of the case.

Social media and the Internet

Social media adds an additional dimension, as user networks can become echo chambers possibly emphasised by the filter bubble where one political viewpoint dominates and scrutiny of claims fails, allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop, which can repeat post-truth claims without rebuttal. In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them as being motivated by bias. The Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner laid some of the blame on the rise of clickbait, articles of dubious factual content with a misleading headline and which are designed to be widely shared, saying that "chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity" undermines the value of journalism and truth. In 2016, David Mikkelson, co-founder of the fact checking and debunking site Snopes.com, described the introduction of social media and fake news sites as a turning point, saying "I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump."

The digital culture allows anybody with a computer and access to the internet to post their opinions online and mark them as fact which may become legitimized through echo-chambers and other users validating one another. Content may be judged based on how many views a post gets, creating an atmosphere that appeals to emotion, audience biases, or headline appeal instead of researched fact. Content which gets more views is continually filtered around different internet circles, regardless of its legitimacy. Some also argue that the abundance of fact available at any time on the internet leads to an attitude focused on knowing basic claims to information instead of an underlying truth or formulating carefully thought-out opinions. The internet allows people to choose where they get their information, allowing them to reinforce their own opinions.

In 2017, a rise in national protests sparked against the 2016 United States presidential election and the victory of Donald Trump attributed to the fake news stories posted and shared by millions of users on Facebook. Following this incident, the spread of misinformation was given the word "post-truth," a term coined from Oxford Dictionaries as the "word of the year."

Polarized political culture

The rise of post-truth politics coincides with polarized political beliefs. A Pew Research Center study of American adults found that "those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views—and very distinct from each other". Data is becoming increasingly accessible as new technologies are introduced to the everyday lives of citizens. An obsession for data and statistics also filters into the political scene, and political debates and speeches become filled with snippets of information that may be misconstrued, false, or not contain the whole picture. Sensationalized television news emphasizes grand statements and further publicizes politicians. This shaping from the media influences how the public views political issues and candidates.

Dissenting views

Unlike some academic treatments of post-truth that see it as historically specific and closely associated with shifts in journalism, social trust, and new media and communication technologies, several popular commentators (pundits and journalists), equating post-truth with lying or sensational news, have proposed that post-truth is an imprecise or misleading term and/or should be abandoned. In an editorial, New Scientist suggested "a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually any more dishonest than they used to be", and hypothesized that "fibs once whispered into select ears are now overheard by everyone". David Helfand argues, following Edward M. Harris, that "public prevarication is nothing new" and that it is the "knowledge of the audience" and the "limits of plausibility" within a technology-saturated environment that have changed. We are, rather, in an age of misinformation where such limits of plausibility have vanished and where everyone feels equally qualified to make claims that are easily shared and propagated.

Toby Young, writing for The Spectator, called the term a "cliché" used selectively primarily by left-wing commentators to attack what are actually universal ideological biases, contending that "[w]e are all post-truthers and probably always have been". The Economist has called this argument "complacent", however, identifying a qualitative difference between political scandals of previous generations, such as those surrounding the Suez Crisis and the Iran–Contra affair (which involved attempting to cover-up the truth) and contemporary ones in which public facts are simply ignored. Similarly, Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute said that political lies were not new and identified several political campaigns in history which would now be described as "post-truth". For Mantzarlis, the "post-truth" label was—to some extent—a "coping mechanism for commentators reacting to attacks on not just any facts, but on those central to their belief system", but also noted that 2016 had been "an acrimonious year for politics on both sides of the Atlantic". Mantzarlis also noted that interest in fact checking had never been higher, suggesting that at least some reject "post-truth" politics.

In addition, The Guardian's Kathryn Viner notes that while false news and propaganda are rampant, social media is a double-edged sword. While it has helped some untruths to spread, it has also restrained others; as an example, she said The Sun's false "The Truth" story following the Hillsborough disaster, and the associated police cover-up, would be hard to imagine in the social media age.

By country

Post-truth politics has been applied as a political buzzword to a wide range of political cultures; one article in The Economist identified post-truth politics in Austria, Germany, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Germany

In December 2016 "postfaktisch" (post-factual) was named word of the year by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (German language society), also in connection with a rise of right-wing populism from 2015 on. Since the 1990s, "post-democracy" was used in sociology more and more.

India

Amulya Gopalakrishnan, columnist for The Times of India, identified similarities between the Trump and Brexit campaigns on the one hand, and hot-button issues in India such as the Ishrat Jahan case and the ongoing case against Teesta Setalvad on the other, where accusations of forged evidence and historical revisionism have resulted in an "ideological impasse".

Indonesia

Post-truth politics have been discussed in Indonesia since at least 2016. In September 2016, the incumbent governor of Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, during a speech to citizens of Thousand Islands, said that some citizens were being "deceived using Verse 51 of Al Maidah and other things," referring to a verse of the Quran used by his political opponents. The video was later edited to omit a single word, misrepresenting his statement and instigating a political scandal that resulted in a blasphemy charge and two-year imprisonment. Since this event, post-truth politics have played a more significant role in political campaigns, as well as interactions between Indonesian voters. Yoseph Wihartono, researcher in crimonology at the University of Indonesia, identified social media outlets and "internet mobbing" as sources of post-truth dynamics that have potentially "opened wide" the opportunity for religious populism to expand.

South Africa

Health care and education in South Africa was substantially compromised during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki due to his HIV/AIDS denialism.

United Kingdom

An early use of the phrase in British politics was in March 2012 by Scottish Labour MSP Iain Gray in criticising the difference between Scottish National Party's claims and official statistics. Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy also described an undercurrent of post-truth politics in which people "cheerfully shot the messenger" when presented with facts that didn't support their viewpoint, seeing it among pro-independence campaigners in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and Leave campaigners in the then-upcoming EU membership referendum.

Post-truth politics has been retroactively identified in the lead-up to the Iraq War, particularly after the Chilcot Report, published in July 2016, concluded that Tony Blair misrepresented military intelligence to support his view that Iraq's chemical weapons program was advanced.

The phrase became widely used during the 2016 UK EU membership referendum to describe the Leave campaign. Faisal Islam, political editor for Sky News, said that Michael Gove used "post-fact politics" that were imported from the Trump campaign; in particular, Gove's comment in an interview that "I think people in this country have had enough of experts..." was singled out as illustrative of a post-truth trend, although this is only part of a longer statement. Similarly, Arron Banks, the founder of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, said that "facts don't work ... You've got to connect with people emotionally. It's the Trump success." Andrea Leadsom—a prominent campaigner for Leave in the EU referendum and one of the two final candidates in the Conservative leadership election—has been singled out as a post-truth politician, especially after she denied having disparaged rival Theresa May's childlessness in an interview with The Times in spite of transcript evidence.

United States

Further information: Trumpism and Alternative facts

In conjunction with the rise of new media and communication technologies (especially the Internet and blogging) and the professionalization of political communication (political consulting), scholars have viewed the periods following 9/11 and the George W. Bush administration's strategic communication as a seminal moment in the emergence of what has subsequently been called post-truth politics, before the term and concept exploded in public visibility in 2016. The Bush administration's talking points about "links" or "ties" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (repeated in parallel by the Tony Blair government), and Hussein's alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (both highly contested by experts at the time or later disproven and shown to be misleading) were viewed by some scholars as part of a historical shift. Despite age-old precedents of political and government lying (such as the systematic lying by the U.S. government documented in The Pentagon Papers), these propaganda efforts were seen as more sophisticated in their organization and execution in a new media age, part of a complicated new public communication culture (between a wide number of cable and satellite TV, online, and legacy news media sources). In the U.S., the distrust and deception identified with strategic communication of Karl Rove, George W. Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, were a close historical precedent to controversies around truth (as accuracy and/or honesty) that entered the media agenda of U.S. public life, drawing significant news and new media attention and producing measurable confusion and false belief. The most spectacular examples studied by scholars include the presidential candidacy of John Kerry in 2004 (accusations by the Republican consultant-directed "Swift boat Veterans for Truth" that he lied about his war record) and then, several years later (prior to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign), that then candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim, despite his declaration that he was Christian, and was using a fake birth certificate (allegedly born in Kenya).

In its original formulation, the phrase "post-truth politics" was used to describe the paradoxical situation in the United States where the Republican Party, which enforced stricter party discipline than the Democratic Party, was nevertheless able to present itself as more bipartisan, since individual Democrats were more likely to support Republican policies than vice versa. The term was used by Paul Krugman in The New York Times to describe Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign in which certain claims—such as that Barack Obama had cut defense spending and that he had embarked on an "apology tour"—continued to be repeated long after they had been debunked. Other forms of scientific denialism in modern US politics include the anti-vaxxer movement, and the belief that existing genetically modified foods are harmful despite a strong scientific consensus that no currently marketed GMO foods have any negative health effects. The health freedom movement in the US resulted in the passage of the bipartisan Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which allows the sale of dietary supplements without any evidence that they are safe or effective for the purposes consumers expect, though the FDA has begun regulation of homeopathic products.

In a review for the Harvard Gazette, Christopher Robichaud—a lecturer in ethics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School—described conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of elections and politicians, such as the "birther" idea that Barack Obama is not a natural-born US citizen, as one side-effect of post-truth politics. Robichaud also contrasted the behavior of the candidates with that following the contested result of the 2000 election, in which Al Gore conceded and encouraged his supporters to accept the result of Bush v. Gore. Similarly, Rob Boston, writing for The Humanist saw a rise in conspiracy theories across US public life, including Birtherism, climate change denialism, and rejecting evolution, which he identified as a result of post-truth politics, noting that the existence of extensive and widely available evidence against these conspiracy theories had not slowed their growth.

In 2016, the "post-truth" label was especially widely used to describe the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, including by Professor Daniel W. Drezner in The Washington Post, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Chris Cillizza in The Independent, Jeet Heer in The New Republic, and James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, and by several professors of government and history at Harvard. In 2017, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others, have pointed out lies or falsehoods in Trump's statements after the election. Former president Barack Obama stated that the new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true".

Environmental politics

Although the consensus among scientists is that human activities contribute to global warming, several political parties around the world have made climate change denial a basis of their policies. These parties have been accused of using post-truth techniques to attack environmental measures meant to combat climate changes to benefit industry donors. During the course of the 2016 election, the United States has seen numerous climate change deniers rise to power, such as new Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt replacing Barack Obama's appointee Gina McCarthy. In Australia, the repeal of carbon pricing by the government of Tony Abbott was described as "the nadir of post-truth politics" by The Age.

Solutions

Solutions from Nayef Al-Rodhan

Both technology companies and governments have started to make efforts to tackle the challenge of "post-truth politics". In an article for the journal Global Policy, professor Nayef Al-Rodhan suggested four particular responses:

1. Improve the technological tools for fact checking. For example, Germany has already asked Facebook to introduce a fake news filtering tool.
2. Greater involvement and visibility for scientists and the scientific community. The UK, for instance, has a series of Parliamentary committees at which scientists are called to testify, and present their research to inform policy-making. Similarly in Canada, the role of Chief Science Advisor was re-established and each department with even a small scientific capability was required to develop a policy for scientific integrity.
3. Stronger government action. In countries such as the Czech Republic, new units have been set up to tackle fake news. The most important challenge here is to ensure that such state-led efforts are not used as a tool for censorship.
4. Securitizing fake news. It is important to treat post-truth politics as a matter of security and devise global efforts to counter this phenomenon. In March 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE, and the Organization for American States issued a Joint Declaration on "Freedom of Expression and Fake News, Disinformation and Propaganda" to warn against the effects of fake news but, at the same time, condemn any attempts at state-mandated censorship.

Solutions from Sophia Rosenfeld

In her 2019 book, Democracy and Truth: A Short History, American historian Sophia A. Rosenfeld recommends the following as potential solutions for dealing with "post-truth politics":

1. Encourage truth-telling and fact-checking as ethical commitments to which people should commit themselves in public life. Rosenfeld recommends that society urge journalists and public figures to search for and share "empirically sound, carefully verified information" rather than speculation.
2. Avoid reopening "settled debates," such as the earth's flatness, in an effort to ensure "balance." Doing so, she writes, provides a platform to claims and ideas which offer little value to the existing body of knowledge.
3. Pressure tech and social media companies to combat disinformation campaigns. Rosenfeld argues that social media sites allow flashy disinformation campaigns to spread much more rapidly than verified information.
4. Shift away from free-speech absolutism. She asserts that permitting false claims—such as the unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting—to be disseminated needlessly spreads harm.
5. Protect the integrity of political institutions. Election integrity and independent judiciaries, argues Rosenfeld, are key to protecting society from the dangers of post-truth politics. She warns of the "distorting influence" of money on the information voters see and read leading up to elections. Courts, she writes, are integral both to protecting truth-seekers and to determining truth itself in matters of political, civil, and criminal dispute.
6. Improve society's information literacy through education. Rosenfeld recommends that, beginning with elementary and secondary education, students should learn how to evaluate the veracity of claims they encounter as well has what qualifies as trustworthy evidence.
7. Encourage nonviolent protest against lying and corruption and in support of truth-telling. Rosenfeld cites protests in support of police body cameras as well as the 2017 March for Science as examples.

Decadent movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadent_movement 

 

Félicien Rops, Pornokratès, 1878

 

A Decadent Girl, by Ramón Casas, 1899

The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The visual artist Félicien Rops's body of work and Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature (1884) are considered the prime examples of the decadent movement. It first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by a belief in the superiority of human creativity and pleasure over logic and the natural world.

Overview

The concept of decadence dates from the 18th century, especially from the writings of Montesquieu, the Enlightenment philosopher who suggested that the decline (décadence) of the Roman Empire was in large part due to its moral decay and loss of cultural standards. When Latin scholar Désiré Nisard turned toward French literature, he compared Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general to the Roman decadence, men sacrificing their craft and their cultural values for the sake of pleasure. The trends that he identified, such as an interest in description, a lack of adherence to the conventional rules of literature and art, and a love for extravagant language were the seeds of the Decadent movement.

French Decadent movement

The first major development in French decadence appeared when writers Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress". Baudelaire referred to himself as decadent in his 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal and exalted the Roman decline as a model for modern poets to express their passion. He later used the term decadence to include the subversion of traditional categories in pursuit of full, sensual expression. In his lengthy introduction to Baudelaire in the front of the 1868 Les Fleurs du mal, Gautier at first rejects the application of the term decadent, as meant by the critic, but then works his way to an admission of decadence on Baudelaire's own terms: a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.

The Belgian Félicien Rops was instrumental in the development of this early stage of the Decadent movement. A friend of Baudelaire, he was a frequent illustrator of Baudelaire's writing, at the request of the author himself. Rops delighted in breaking artistic convention and shocking the public with gruesome, fantastical horror. He was explicitly interested in the Satanic, and he frequently sought to portray the double-threat of Satan and Woman. At times, his only goal was the portrayal of a woman he'd observed debasing herself in the pursuit of her own pleasure. It has been suggested that, no matter how horrific and perverse his images could be, Rops' invocation of supernatural elements was sufficient to keep Baudelaire situated in a spiritually aware universe that maintained a cynical kind of hope, even if the poetry "requires a strong stomach". Their work was the worship of beauty disguised as the worship of evil. For both of them, mortality and all manner of corruptions were always on their mind. The ability of Rops to see and portray the same world as they did made him a popular illustrator for other decadent authors.

The concept of decadence lingered after that, but it was not until 1884 that Maurice Barrès referred to a particular group of writers as Decadents. He defined this group as those who had been influenced heavily by Baudelaire, though they were also influenced by Gothic novels and the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Many were associated with Symbolism, others with Aestheticism. The pursuit of these authors, according to Arthur Symons, was "a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life", and their achievement, as he saw it, was "to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul".

In his 1884 decadent novel À rebours (English: Against Nature or Against the Grain), Joris-Karl Huysmans identified likely candidates for the core of the Decadent movement, which he seemed to view Baudelaire as sitting above: Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière, Theodore Hannon and Stéphane Mallarmé. His character Des Esseintes hailed these writers for their creativity and their craftsmanship, suggesting that they filled him with "insidious delight" as they used a "secret language" to explore "twisted and precious ideas".

Not only did Against Nature define an ideology and a literature, but it also created an influential perspective on visual art. The character of Des Esseintes explicitly heralded the work of Gustave Moreau, Jan Luyken and Odilon Redon. None of these artists would have identified themselves as part of this movement. Nevertheless, the choice of these three established a decadent perspective on art which favored madness and irrationality, graphic violence, frank pessimism about cultural institutions, and a disregard for visual logic of the natural world. It has been suggested that a dream vision that Des Esseintes describes is based on the series of satanic encounters painted by Félicien Rops.

Capitalizing on the momentum of Huysmans' work, Anatole Baju founded the magazine Le Décadent in 1886, an effort to define and organize the Decadent movement in a formal way. This group of writers did not only look to escape the boredom of the banal, but they sought to shock, scandalize, and subvert the expectations and values of society, believing that such freedom and creative experimentation would improve humanity.

Not everyone was comfortable with Baju and Le Décadent, even including some who had been published in its pages. Rival writer Jean Moréas published his Symbolist Manifesto, largely to escape association with the Decadent movement, despite their shared heritage. Moréas and Gustave Kahn, among others, formed rival publications to reinforce the distinction. Paul Verlaine embraced the label at first, applauding it as a brilliant marketing choice by Baju. After seeing his own words exploited and tiring of Le Décadent publishing works falsely attributed to Arthur Rimbaud, however, Verlaine came to sour on Baju personally, and he eventually rejected the label, as well.

Decadence continued on in France, but it was limited largely to Anatole Baju and his followers, who refined their focus even further on perverse sexuality, material extravagance, and up-ending social expectations. Far-fetched plots were acceptable if they helped generate the desired moments of salacious experience or glorification of the morbid and grotesque. Writers who embraced the sort of decadence featured in Le Décadent include Albert Aurier, Rachilde, Pierre Vareilles, Miguel Hernández, Jean Lorrain and Laurent Tailhade. Many of these authors did also publish symbolist works, however, and it unclear how strongly they would have identified with Baju as decadents.

In France, the Decadent movement is often said to have begun with either Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (1884) or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. This movement essentially gave way to Symbolism when Le Décadent closed down in 1889 and Anatole Baju turned toward politics and became associated with anarchy. A few writers continued the decadent tradition, such as Octave Mirbeau, but Decadence was no longer a recognized movement, let alone a force in literature or art.

Beginning with the association of decadence with cultural decline, it is not uncommon to associate decadence in general with transitional times and their associated moods of pessimism and uncertainty. In France, the heart of the Decadent movement was during the 1880s and 1890s, the time of fin de siècle, or end-of-the-century gloom. As part of that overall transition, many scholars of Decadence, such as David Weir, regard Decadence as a dynamic transition between Romanticism and Modernism, especially considering the decadent tendency to dehumanize and distort in the name of pleasure and fantasy.

Distinction from Symbolism

Symbolism has often been confused with the Decadent movement. Arthur Symons, a British poet and literary critic contemporary with the movement, at one time considered Decadence in literature to be a parent category that included both Symbolism and Impressionism, as rebellions against realism. He defined this common, decadent thread as "an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity". He referred to all such literature as "a new and beautiful and interesting disease". Later, however, he described the Decadent movement as an "interlude, half a mock interlude" that distracted critics from seeing and appreciating the larger and more important trend, which was the development of Symbolism.

It is true that the two groups share an ideological descent from Baudelaire and for a time they both considered themselves as part of one sphere of new, anti-establishment literature. They worked together and met together for quite a while, as if they were part of the same movement. Maurice Barrès referred to this group as decadents, but he also referred to one of them (Stéphane Mallarmé) as a symbolist. Even Jean Moréas used both terms for his own group of writers as late as 1885.

Only a year later, however, Jean Moréas wrote his Symbolist Manifesto to assert a difference between the symbolists with whom he allied himself and this the new group of decadents associated with Anatole Baju and Le Décadent. Even after this, there was sufficient common ground of interest, method, and language to blur the lines more than the manifesto might have suggested.

In the world of visual arts, it can be even more difficult to distinguish decadence from symbolism. In fact, Stephen Romer has referred to Félicien Rops, Gustave Moreau, and Fernand Khnopff as "Symbolist-Decadent painters and engravers".

Nevertheless, there are clear ideological differences between those who continued on as symbolists and those who have been called "dissidents" for remaining in the Decadent movement. Often, there was little doubt that Baju and his group were producing work that was decadent, but there is frequently more question about the work of the symbolists.

In a website associated with Dr. Petra Dierkes-Thrun's Stanford University course, Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents (2014), a student named Reed created a blog post that is the basis for much of what follows.

On nature

Both groups reject the primacy of nature, but what that means for them is very different. Symbolism uses extensive natural imagery as a means to elevate the viewer to a plane higher than the banal reality of nature itself, as when Stéphane Mallarmé mixes descriptions of flowers and heavenly imagery to create a transcendent moment in "Flowers".

Decadence, in contrast, actually belittles nature in the name of artistry. In Huysmans’ Against Nature, for instance, the main character Des Esseintes says of nature: "There is not one of her inventions, no matter how subtle or imposing it may be, which human genius cannot create ... There can be no doubt about it: this eternal, driveling, old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace her by artifice."

On language and imagery

Symbolism treats language and imagery as devices that can only approximate meaning and merely evoke complex emotions and call the mind toward ideas it might not be able to comprehend. In the words of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé:

Languages are imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing...no one can utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate...how impossible it is for language to express things...in the Poet's hands...by the consistent virtue and necessity of an art which lives on fiction, it achieves its full efficacy.

Moréas asserted in his manifesto on symbolism that words and images serve to dress the incomprehensible in such a way that it can be approached, if not understood.

Decadence, on the other hand, sees no path to higher truth in words and images. Instead, books, poetry, and art itself as the creators of valid new worlds, thus the allegory of decadent Wilde's Dorian Gray being poisoned by a book like a drug. Words and artifice are the vehicles for human creativity, and Huysmans suggests that the illusions of fantasy have their own reality: "The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself."

On reality, illusion, and truth

Both groups are disillusioned with the meaning and truth offered by the natural world, rational thought, and ordinary society. Symbolism turns its eyes toward Greater Purpose or on the Ideal, using dreams and symbols to approach these esoteric primal truths. In Mallarme's poem "Apparition", for instance, the word "dreaming" appears twice, followed by "Dream" itself with a capital D. In "The Windows", he speaks of this decadent disgust of contentment with comfort and an endless desire for the exotic. He writes: "So filled with disgust for the man whose soul is callous, sprawled in comforts where his hungering is fed." In this continuing search for the spiritual, therefore, Symbolism has been predisposed to concern itself with purity and beauty and such mysterious imagery as those of fairies.

In contrast, Decadence states there is no oblique approach to ultimate truth because there is no secret, mystical truth. They despise the very idea of searching for such a thing. If there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment. The heroes of Decadent novels, for instance, have the unquenchable accumulation of luxuries and pleasure, often exotic, as their goal, even the gory and the shocking. In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, decadent Gustave Flaubert describes Saint Anthony's pleasure from watching disturbing scenes of horror. Later Czech decadent Arthur Breisky has been quoted by scholars as speaking to both the importance of illusion and of beauty: "But isn't it necessary to believe a beautiful mask more than reality?"

On art

Ultimately, the distinction may best be seen in their approach to art. Symbolism is an accumulation of "symbols" that are there not to present their content but to evoke greater ideas that their symbolism cannot expressly utter. According to Moréas, it is an attempt to connect the object and phenomena of the world to "esoteric primordial truths" that cannot ever be directly approached.

Decadence, on the other hand, is an accumulation of signs or descriptions acting as detailed catalogs of human material riches as well as artifice. It was Oscar Wilde who perhaps laid this out most clearly in The Decay of Lying with the suggestion of three doctrines on art, here excerpted into a list:

1. "Art never expresses anything but itself."
2. "All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals."
3. "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life"

After which, he suggested a conclusion quite in contrast to Moréas' search for shadow truth: "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."

Influence and legacy

Collapse of the Decadent movement

In France, the Decadent movement could not withstand the loss of its leading figures. Many of those associated with the Decadent movement became symbolists after initially associating freely with decadents. Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé were among those, though both had been associated with Baju's Le Décadent for a time. Others kept a foot in each camp. Albert Aurier wrote decadent pieces for Le Décadent and also wrote symbolist poetry and art criticism. Decadent writer Rachilde was staunchly opposed to a symbolist take over of Le Décadent even though her own one-act drama The Crystal Spider is almost certainly a symbolist work. Others, once strong voices for decadence, abandoned the movement altogether. Joris-Karl Huysmans grew to consider Against Nature as the starting point on his journey into Roman Catholic symbolist work and the acceptance of hope. Anatole Baju, once the self-appointed school-master of French decadence, came to think of the movement as naive and half-hearted, willing to tinker and play with social realities, but not to utterly destroy them. He left decadence for anarchy.

The Decadent movement beyond France

While the Decadent movement, per se, was mostly a French phenomenon, the impact was felt more broadly. Typically, the influence was felt as an interest in pleasure, an interest in experimental sexuality, and a fascination with the bizarre, all packaged with a somewhat trangressive spirit and an aesthetic that values material excess. Many were also influenced by the Decadent movement's aesthetic emphasis on art for its own sake.

Bohemia

Czech writers who were exposed to the work of the Decadent movement saw in it the promise of a life they could never know. They were neither aristocrats nor bored bourgeoisie. They were poor and hungry for something better. The dreams of the decadents gave them that something better, but something that was hopelessly unattainable. It was that melancholy that drove their art. These Bohemian decadent writers included Karel Hlaváček, Arnošt Procházka, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, and Louisa Zikova. One Czech writer, Arthur Breisky, embraced the full spirit of Le Décadent with its exultation in material excess and a life of refinement and pleasure. From the Decadent movement he learned the basic idea of a dandy, and his work is almost entirely focused on developing a philosophy in which the Dandy is the consummate human, surrounded by riches and elegance, theoretically above society, just as doomed to death and despair as they.

Britain

Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock Skirt, illustration for Oscar Wilde's Salome, 1892

Influenced through general exposure but also direct contact, the leading decadent figures in Britain associated with decadence were Irish writer Oscar Wilde, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, as well as other artists and writers associated with The Yellow Book. Others, such as Walter Pater, resisted association with the movement, even though their works seemed to reflect similar ideals. While most of the influence was from figures such as Baudelaire and Verlaine, there was also very strong influence at times from more purely decadent members of the French movement, such as the influence that Huysmans and Rachilde had on Wilde, as seen explicitly in The Picture of Dorian Gray. British decadents embraced the idea of creating art for its own sake, pursuing all possible desires, and seeking material excess. At the same time, they were not shy about using the tools of decadence for social and political purpose. Beardsley had an explicit interest in the improvement of the social order and the role of art-as-experience in inspiring that transformation. Oscar Wilde published an entire work exploring socialism as a liberating force: "Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody." Swinburne explicitly addressed Irish-English politics in poetry when he wrote "Thieves and murderers, hands yet red with blood and tongues yet black with lies | Clap and clamour – 'Parnell spurs his Gladstone well!'" In many of their personal lives, they also pursued decadent ideals. Wilde had a secret homosexual life. Swinburne had an obsession with flagellation.

Italy

Medardo Rosso, Sick child, 1903–04

Italian literary criticism has often looked at the decadent movement on a larger scale, proposing that its main features could be used to define a full historical period, running from the 1860s to the 1920s. For this reason, the term Decadentism, modelled on "Romanticism" or "Expressionism", became more substantial and widespread than elsewhere. However, most critics today prefer to distinguish between three periods. The first period is marked by the experience of Scapigliatura, a sort of proto-decadent movement. The Scapigliati (literally meaning "unkempt" or "dishevelled") were a group of writers and poets who shared a sentiment of intolerance for the suffocating intellectual atmosphere between the late Risorgimento (1860s) and the early years of unified Italy (1870s). They contributed to rejuvenate Italian culture through foreign influences and introduced decadent themes like illness and fascination with death. The novel Fosca (1869) by Igino Ugo Tarchetti tells of a love triangle involving a codependent man, a married woman and an ugly, sick and vampire-like figure, the femme fatale Fosca. In a similar way, Camillo Boito's Senso and his short stories venture into tales of sexual decadence and disturbing obsessions, such as incest and necrophilia. Other Scapigliati were the novelists Carlo Dossi and Giuseppe Rovani, the poet Emilio Praga, the poet and composer Arrigo Boito and the composer Franco Faccio. As for the visual arts, Medardo Rosso stands out as one of the most influential European sculptors of that time. Most of the Scapigliati died of illness, alcoholism or suicide. The second period of Italian Decadentism is dominated by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Antonio Fogazzaro and Giovanni Pascoli. D'Annunzio, who was in contact with many French intellectuals and had read the works of Nietzsche in the French translation, imported the concepts of Übermensch and will to power into Italy, although in his own particular version. The poet's aim had to be an extreme aestheticization of life, and life the ultimate work of art. Recurrent themes in his literary works include the supremacy of the individual, the cult of beauty, exaggerated sophistication, the glorification of machines, the fusion of man with nature, the exalted vitality coexisting with the triumph of death. His novel The Pleasure, published one year before The Picture of Dorian Gray, is considered one of the three genre-defining books of the Decadent movement, along with Wilde's novel and Huysmans's Against Nature. Less flashy and more isolated than D'Annunzio, and close to the French symbolists, Pascoli redefined poetry as a means of clairvoyance to regain the purity of things. Finally, the third period, which can be seen as a postlude to Decadentism, is marked by the voices of Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello and the Crepusculars. Svevo, with his novel Zeno's Conscience, took the idea of sickness to its logical conclusion, while Pirandello proceeded to the extreme disintegration of the self with works such as The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. On the other side, the Crepuscular poets (literally "twilight poets") turned Pascoli's innovations into a mood-conveying poetry, which describes the melancholy of everyday life in shady and monotonous interiors of provincial towns. These atmospheres were explored by the painters Mario Sironi, Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. Guido Gozzano was the most brilliant and ironic of the Crepusculars, but we can also remember Sergio Corazzini, Marino Moretti and Aldo Palazzeschi.

Russia

Portrait of Euphemia Pavlova Nosova [ru] by Nikolai Kalmakov [ru]

The Decadent movement reached into Russia primarily through exposure to the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. The earliest Russian adherents lacked idealism and focused on such decadent themes as subversion of morality, disregard for personal health, and living in blasphemy and sensual pleasure. Russian writers were especially drawn to the morbid aspects of decadence and in the fascination with death. Dmitry Merezhkovsky is thought to be the first to clearly promote a Russian decadence that included the idealism that eventually inspired the French symbolists to disassociate from the more purely materialistic Decadent movement. The first Russian writers to achieve success as followers of this Decadent movement included Konstanin Balmont, Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, and Zinaida Gippius. As they refined their craft beyond imitation of Baudelaire and Verlaine, most of these authors became much more clearly aligned with symbolism than with decadence. Some visual artists adhered to the Baju-esque late Decadent movement approach to sexuality as purely an act of pleasure, often ensconced in a context of material luxury. They also shared the same emphasis on shocking society, purely for the scandal. Among them were Konstantin Somov, Nikolai Kalmakov [ru], and Nikolay Feofilaktov.

Spain

Some art historians consider Francisco de Goya one of the roots of the Decadent movement in Spain, almost 100 years before its start in France. His works were a cry of denouncement against injustice and oppression. However, Ramón Casas and José María López Mezquita can be considered the model artists of this period. Their paintings are an image of the social conflicts and police repression that was happening in Spain at the time. Spaniard writers also wanted to be part of this movement. Emilia Pardo Bazán with works like Los Pazos de Ulloa where terror and decadent topics appear. El monstruo (The Monster), written by Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent belongs to Decadent movement. But the Decadent movement is overlapped by the Fin de Siglo Movement with the authors of the Generación del 98 being part-decadent: Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Unamuno and Pío Baroja are the most essential figures of this period.

United States

Few prominent writers or artists in the United States were connected with the Decadent movement. Those who were connected struggled to find an audience, for Americans were reluctant to see value for them in what they considered the art forms of fin de siècle France. An exception to this is the decadent poet George Sylvester Viereck, who wrote (1907) "Nineveh and Other Poems". Viereck states in his "The Candle and the Flame" (1912)

I have no reason to be ungrateful to America. Few poets have met with more instant recognition... My work almost from the beginning was discussed simultaneously in the most conservative periodicals and the most ultra-saffron complexioned journals I have given a new lyric impetus to my country I have loosened the tongue of young American poets. I have been told by many of our young singers that my success of Nineveh [1907] encouraged them to break the harassing chains of Puritan tradition [Introduction p.xv]

Poet Francis Saltus Saltus was inspired by Charles Baudelaire, and his unpracticed style occasionally was compared to the French poet's more refined experimentation. He embraced the most debauched lifestyle of the French decadents and celebrated that life in his own poetry. At the time, mostly before Baju's Le Décadent, this frivolous poetry on themes of alcohol and depravity found little success and no known support from those who were part of the Decadent movement. The younger brother of Francis, writer Edgar Saltus had more success. He had some interaction with Oscar Wilde, and he valued decadence in his personal life. For a time, his work exemplified both the ideals and style of the movement, but a significant portion of his career was in traditional journalism and fiction that praised virtue. At the time when he was flourishing, however, multiple contemporary critics, as well as other decadent writers, explicitly considered him one of them. Writer James Huneker was exposed to the Decadent movement in France and tried to bring it with him to New York. He has been lauded to his dedication to this cause throughout his career, but it has been suggested that, while he lived as a decadent and heralded their work, his own work was more frustrated, hopeless, and empty of the pleasure that had attracted him to the movement in the first place. Largely, he focused on cynically describing the impossibility of a true American decadence.

Critical studies

German doctor and social critic Max Nordau wrote a lengthy book titled Degeneration (1892). It was an examination of decadence as a trend, and specifically attacked several people associated with the Decadent movement, as well as other figures throughout the world who deviated from cultural, moral, or political norms. His language was colorful and vitriolic, often invoking the worship of Satan. What made the book a success was its suggestion of a medical diagnosis of "degeneration", a neuro-pathology that resulted in these behaviors. It also helped that the book named such figures as Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Paul Verlaine, and Maurice Barrès, members of the Decadent movement who were in the public eye.

In 1930 Italian art and literature critic Mario Praz completed a broad study of morbid and erotic literature, translated and published in English as The Romantic Agony (1933). The study included decadent writing (such as Baudelaire and Swinburne), but also anything else that he considered dark, grim, or sexual in some way. His study centered on the 18th and 19th Centuries. The danger of such literature, he believed it unnaturally elevated the instinctive bond between pain and pleasure and that, no matter the artists' intention, the essential role of art is to educate and teach culture.

Social degeneration

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_degeneration

Social degeneration was a widely influential concept at the interface of the social and biological sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 18th century, scientific thinkers including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans shared a common origin but had degenerated over time due to differences in climate. This theory provided an explanation of where humans came from and why some people appeared differently from others. In contrast, degenerationists in the 19th century feared that civilization might be in decline and that the causes of decline lay in biological change. These ideas derived from pre-scientific concepts of heredity ("hereditary taint") with Lamarckian emphasis on biological development through purpose and habit. Degeneration concepts were often associated with authoritarian political attitudes, including militarism and scientific racism, and a preoccupation with eugenics. The theory originated in racial concepts of ethnicity, recorded in the writings of such medical scientists as Johann Blumenbach and Robert Knox. From the 1850s, it became influential in psychiatry through the writings of Bénédict Morel, and in criminology with Cesare Lombroso. By the 1890s, in the work of Max Nordau and others, degeneration became a more general concept in social criticism. It also fed into the ideology of ethnic nationalism, attracting, among others, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and the Action Française. Alexis Carrel, a French Nobel Laureate in Medicine, cited national degeneration as a rationale for a eugenics programme in collaborationist Vichy France.

The meaning of degeneration was poorly defined, but can be described as an organism's change from a more complex to a simpler, less differentiated form, and is associated with 19th-century conceptions of biological devolution. In scientific usage, the term was reserved for changes occurring at a histological level – i.e. in body tissues. Although rejected by Charles Darwin, the theory's application to the social sciences was supported by some evolutionary biologists, most notably Ernst Haeckel and Ray Lankester. As the 19th century wore on, the increasing emphasis on degeneration reflected an anxious pessimism about the resilience of European civilization and its possible decline and collapse.

Theories of degeneration in the 18th century

In the second half of the eighteenth century, degeneration theory gained prominence as an explanation of the nature and origin of human difference. Among the most notable proponents of this theory was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. A gifted mathematician and eager naturalist, Buffon served as the curator of the Parisian Cabinet du Roi. The collections of the Cabinet du Roi served as the inspiration for Buffon's encyclopedic Histoire Naturelle, of which he published thirty-six volumes between 1749 and his death in 1788. In the Histoire Naturelle, Buffon asserted that differences in climate created variety within species. He believed that these changes occurred gradually and initially affected only a few individuals before becoming widespread. Buffon relied on an argument from analogy to contend that this process of degeneration occurred among humans. He claimed to have observed the transformation of certain animals by their climate and concluded that such changes must have also shaped humankind.

Buffon maintained that degeneration had particularly adverse consequences in the New World. He believed America to be both colder and wetter than Europe. This climate limited the number of species in the New World and prompted a decline in size and vigor among the animals which did survive. Buffon also applied these principles to the people of the New World. He wrote in the Histoire Naturelle that the indigenous people lacked the ability to feel strong emotion for others. For Buffon, these individuals were incapable of love as well as desire.

Buffon's theory of degeneration attracted the ire of many early American elites who feared that Buffon's depiction of the New World would negatively influence European perceptions of their nation. In particular, Thomas Jefferson mounted a vigorous defense of the American natural world. He attacked the premises of Buffon's argument in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, writing that the animals of the New World felt the same sun and walked upon the same soil as their European counterparts. Jefferson believed that he could permanently alter Buffon's views of the New World by showing him firsthand the majesty of American wildlife. While serving as minister to France, Jefferson wrote repeatedly to his compatriots in the United States, pleading them to send a stuffed moose to Paris. After months of effort, General John Sullivan responded to Jefferson's request and shipped a moose to France. Buffon died only three months after the moose's arrival, and his theory of New World degeneration remained forever preserved in the pages of the Histoire Naturelle.

In the years following Buffon's death, the theory of degeneration gained a number of new followers, many of whom were concentrated in German-speaking lands. The anatomist and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach praised Buffon in his lectures at the University of Göttingen. He adopted Buffon's theory of degeneration in his dissertation De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. The central premise of this work was that all of mankind belonged to the same species. Blumenbach believed that a multitude of factors, including climate, air, and the strength of the sun, promoted degeneration and resulted in external differences between human beings. However, he also asserted that these changes could easily be undone and, thus, did not constitute the basis for speciation. In the essay “Über Menschen-Rassen und Schweine-Rassen,” Blumenbach clarified his understanding of the relationship between different human races by calling upon the example of the pig. He contended that, if the domestic pig and the wild boar were seen as belonging to the same species, then different humans, regardless of skin color or height, must too belong to the same species. For Blumenbach, all people of the world existed as different gradations on a spectrum. Nevertheless, the third edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, published in 1795, is famed among scholars for its introduction of a system of racial classification which divided humans into members of the Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malayan, or American races.

Blumenbach's views on degeneration emerged in dialogue with the works of other thinkers concerned with race and origin in the late eighteenth century. In particular, Blumenbach participated in fruitful intellectual exchange with another prominent German scholar of his age, Immanuel Kant. Kant, a philosopher and professor at the University of Königsberg, taught a course on physical geography for some forty years, fostering an interest in biology and taxonomy. Like Blumenbach, Kant engaged closely with the writings of Buffon while developing his position on these subjects.

In his 1777 essay “Von der verschiedenen Racen der Menschen,” Kant expressed the belief that all humans shared a common origin. He called upon the ability of humans to interbreed as evidence for this assertion. Additionally, Kant introduced the term “degeneration,” which he defined as hereditary differences between groups with a shared root. Kant also arrived at a meaning of “race” from this definition of degeneration. He claimed that races developed when degenerations were preserved over a long period of time. A group could only constitute a race if breeding with a different degeneration resulted in “intermediate offspring." Although Kant advocated for a theory of shared human origin, he also contended that there was an innate hierarchy between existing races. In 1788, Kant wrote “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien.” He maintained in this work that a human's place in nature was determined by the amount of sweat the individual produced, which revealed an innate ability to survive. Sweat emerged from the skin. Therefore, skin color indicated important distinctions between humans.

History

The concept of degeneration arose during the European enlightenment and the industrial revolution – a period of profound social change and a rapidly shifting sense of personal identity. Several influences were involved.

The first related to the extreme demographic upheavals, including urbanization, in the early years of the 19th century. The disturbing experience of social change and urban crowds, largely unknown in the agrarian 18th century, was recorded in the journalism of William Cobbett, the novels of Charles Dickens and in the paintings of J M W Turner. These changes were also explored by early writers on social psychology, including Gustav Le Bon and Georg Simmel. The psychological impact of industrialisation is comprehensively described in Humphrey Jennings' masterly anthology Pandaemonium 1660 - 1886. Victorian social reformers including Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth voiced concerns about the "decline" of public health in the urban life of the British working class, arguing for improved housing and sanitation, access to parks and recreational facilities, an improved diet and a reduction in alcohol intake. These contributions from the public health perspective were discussed by the Scottish physician Sir James Cantlie in his influential 1885 lecture Degeneration Amongst Londoners. The novel experience of everyday contact with the urban working classes gave rise to a kind of horrified fascination with their perceived reproductive energies which appeared to threaten middle-class culture.

Secondly, the proto-evolutionary biology and transformatist speculations of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and other natural historians—taken together with the Baron von Cuvier's theory of extinctions—played an important part in establishing a sense of the unsettled aspects of the natural world. The polygenic theories of multiple human origins, supported by Robert Knox in his book The Races of Men, were firmly rejected by Charles Darwin who, following James Cowles Prichard, generally agreed on a single African origin for the entire human species.

Thirdly, the development of world trade and colonialism, the early European experience of globalization, resulted in an awareness of the varieties of cultural expression and the vulnerabilities of Western civilization.

Finally, the growth of historical scholarship in the 18th century, exemplified by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire (1776–1789), excited a renewed interest in the narratives of historical decline. This resonated uncomfortably with the difficulties of French political life in the post-revolutionary nineteenth century.

Degeneration theory achieved a detailed articulation in Bénédict Morel's Treatise on Degeneration of the Human Species (1857), a complicated work of clinical commentary from an asylum in Normandy (Saint Yon in Rouen) which, in the popular imagination at least, coalesced with de Gobineau's Essay on The Inequality of the Human Races (1855). Morel's concept of mental degeneration – in which he believed that intoxication and addiction in one generation of a family would lead to hysteria, epilepsy, sexual perversions, insanity, learning disability and sterility in subsequent generations – is an example of Lamarckian biological thinking, and Morel's medical discussions are reminiscent of the clinical literature surrounding syphilitic infection (syphilography). Morel's psychiatric theories were taken up and advocated by his friend Philippe Buchez, and through his political influence became an official doctrine in French legal and administrative medicine.

Arthur de Gobineau came from an impoverished family (with a domineering and adulterous mother) which claimed an aristocratic ancestry; he was a failed author of historical romances, and his wife was widely rumored to be a Créole from Martinique. De Gobineau nevertheless argued that the course of history and civilization was largely determined by ethnic factors, and that interracial marriage ("miscegenation") resulted in social chaos. De Gobineau built a successful career in the French diplomatic service, living for extended periods in Iran and Brazil, and spent his later years travelling through Europe, lamenting his mistreatment at the hands of his wife and daughters. He died of a heart attack in 1882 while boarding a train in Turin. His work was well received in German translation—not least by the composer Richard Wagner—and the leading German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin later wrote extensively on the dangers posed by degeneration to the German people. De Gobineau's writings exerted an enormous influence on the thinkers antecedent to the Third Reich – although they are curiously free of anti-Semitic prejudice. Quite different historical factors inspired the Italian Cesare Lombroso in his work on criminal anthropology with the notion of atavistic retrogression, probably shaped by his experiences as a young army doctor in Calabria during the risorgimento.

In Britain, degeneration received a scientific formulation from Ray Lankester whose detailed discussions of the biology of parasitism were hugely influential; the poor physical condition of many British Army recruits for the Second Boer War (1899–1902) led to alarm in government circles. Psychiatrist Henry Maudsley initially argued that degenerate family lines would die out with little social consequence, but later became more pessimistic about the effects of degeneration on the general population; Maudsley also warned against the use of the term "degeneration" in a vague and indiscriminate way. Anxieties in Britain about the perils of degeneration found legislative expression in the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 which gained strong support from Winston Churchill, then a senior member of the Liberal government.

In the fin-de-siècle period, Max Nordau scored an unexpected success with his bestselling Degeneration (1892). Sigmund Freud met Nordau in 1885 while he was studying in Paris and was notably unimpressed by him and hostile to the degeneration concept. Degeneration fell from popular and fashionable favor around the time of the First World War, although some of its preoccupations persisted in the writings of the eugenicists and social Darwinists (for example, R. Austin Freeman; Anthony Ludovici; Rolf Gardiner; and see also Dennis Wheatley's Letter to posterity). Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1919) captured something of the degenerationist spirit in the aftermath of the war.

Psychology and Emil Kraepelin

Degeneration theory is, at its heart, a way of thinking, and something that is taught, not innate. A major influence on the theory was Emil Kraepelin, lining up degeneration theory with his psychiatry practice. The central idea of this concept was that in “degenerative” illness, there is a steady decline in mental functioning and social adaptation from one generation to the other. For example, there might be an intergenerational development from nervous character to major depressive disorder, to overt psychotic illness and, finally, to severe and chronic cognitive impairment, something akin to dementia. This theory was advanced decades before the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and their application to medicine in general and to psychiatry in particular. Kraepelin and his colleagues mostly derived from degeneration theory broadly. He rarely made a specific references to the theory of degeneration, and his attitude towards degeneration theory was not straightforward. Positive, but more ambivalent. The concept of disease, especially chronic mental disease fit very well into this framework insofar these phenomena were regarded as signs of an evolution in the wrong direction, as a degenerative process which diverts from the usual path of nature.

However, he remained skeptical of over-simplistic versions of this concept: While commenting approvingly on the basic ideas of Cesare Lombroso's "criminal anthropology", he did not accept the popular idea of overt "stigmata of degeneration", by which individual persons could be identified as being "degenerated" simply by their physical appearance. While Kraepelin and his colleagues may not have focused on this, it did not stop others from advancing the converse idea.

An early application of this theory was the Mental Deficiency Act supported by Winston Churchill in 1913. This entailed placing those deemed “idiots” into separate colonies, and included those who showed sign of a “degeneration”. While this did apply to those with mental disorders of a psychiatric nature, the execution was not always in the same vein, as some of the language was used to the those “morally weak”, or deemed “idiots”. The belief in the existence of degeneration helped foster a sense that a sense of negative energy was inexplicable and was there to find sources of “rot” in society. This forwarded the notion the idea that society was structured in a way that produced regression, an outcome of the “darker side of progress”.

Those who had developed the label of "degenerate" as a means of qualifying difference in a negative manner could use the idea that this “darker side of progress” was inevitable by having the idea society could “rot". Considerations to the pervasiveness an allegedly superior condition were, during the nineteenth century, frighteningly reinforced the language and habits of destructive thinking.

The "dark side" of progress

The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were in fact often used interchangeably in the 19th century.

The rapid industrial, political and economic progress in 19th-century Europe and North America was, however, paralleled by a sustained discussion about increasing rates of crime, insanity, vagrancy, prostitution, and so forth. Confronted with this apparent paradox, evolutionary scientists, criminal anthropologists and psychiatrists postulated that civilization and scientific progress could be a cause of physical and social pathology as much as a defense against it. This led to the emergence of a general theory of degeneration, never reduced to a concrete, simple theory or axiom. Instead, the concept of degeneration was produced and refined within and between several discourses, including the human sciences, the natural sciences, fictional narratives and socio-political commentaries. A broad outline of the theory, however, can be formulated, and it runs as follows.

According to the theory of degeneration, a host of individual and social pathologies in a finite network of diseases, disorders and moral habits could be explained by a biologically based affliction. The primary symptoms of the affliction were thought to be a weakening of the vital forces and will power of its victim. In this way, a wide range of social and medical deviations, including crime, violence, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and pornography, could be explained by reference to a biological defect within the individual. The theory of degeneration was therefore predicated on evolutionary theory. The forces of degeneration opposed those of evolution, and those afflicted with degeneration were thought to represent a return to an earlier evolutionary stage. This can be seen socially when mixed race marriages started becoming more frequent as the 19th century progressed. Such mixed marriages, all but unthinkable in 1848 but now on the rise among Indo-European and even full-blood European women with native men, were attributed to the increasing impoverishment and declining welfare of these women on the one hand an "intellectual and social development" among certain classes of native the other. The issue, however, was rarely addressed since the gender hierarchy of the argument was contingent on assuming those who made such conjugal choices were neither well-bred nor deserved European standing. As more people began to mix with a race or people that was seen as lesser, degeneration theory became intertwined with development in a racial and colonial sense and more of these examples became common.

The poetics of degeneration was a poetics of social crisis. In the last decades of the century; Victorian social planners drew deeply on social Darwinism and the idea of degeneration to figure the social crises erupting relentlessly in the cities and colonies. Heightened debates converged with domestic and colonial social reform, cementing an offensive of a somewhat different order. It targeted the "dangerous" in paupered residuum and the growing population impoverished Indo-Europeans, the majority of whom were of mixed but legally classified as European. The world, being more globalized than ever before, continued to have more “crises” similar to these had by the leading classes, deterring the other as the enemy or downfall of society.

By the end of the 1870s, Britain was foundering in severe depression, and throughout the 1880s class tensions, the suffragette movement, a socialist revival, swelling poverty and the dearth of housing and jobs fed deepening middle class fears.

Selected quotes

"The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means that the people no longer has the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood....in fact, the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so-called, is a different being from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages....I think I am right in concluding that the human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood...." Arthur de Gobineau (1855) Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.

"When under any kind of noxious influence an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species, which, like all others, possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form - gaps in development, malformations and infirmities..." Bénédict Morel (1857) Treatise on Degeneration.

"...Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration...." Ray Lankester (1880) Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism.

"We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: 'What is to come next ?' " Max Nordau (1892) Degeneration.

"It has become the fashion to regard any symptom which is not obviously due to trauma or infection as a sign of degeneracy....this being so, it may well be asked whether an attribution of "degeneracy" is of any value, or adds anything to our knowledge..." Sigmund Freud (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Development of the degeneration concept

The earliest uses of the term degeneration can be found in the writings of Blumenbach and Buffon at the end of the 18th century, when these early writers on natural history considered scientific approaches to the human species. With the taxonomic mind-set of natural historians, they drew attention to the different ethnic groupings of mankind, and raised general enquiries about their relationships, with the idea that racial groupings could be explained by environmental effects on a common ancestral stock. This pre-Darwinian belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics does not accord with modern genetics. An alternative view of the multiple origins of different racial groups, called "polygenic theories", was also rejected by Charles Darwin, who favored explanations in terms of differential geographic migrations from a single, probably African, population.

The theory of degeneration found its first detailed presentation in the writings of Bénédict Morel (1809–1873), especially in his Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (Treatise on Degeneration of the Human Species) (1857). This book was published two years before Darwin's Origin of Species. Morel was a highly regarded psychiatrist, the very successful superintendent of the Rouen asylum for almost twenty years and a fastidious recorder of the family histories of his variously disabled patients. Through the details of these family histories, Morel discerned an hereditary line of defective parents infected by pollutants and stimulants; a second generation liable to epilepsy, neurasthenia, sexual deviations and hysteria; a third generation prone to insanity; and a final generation doomed to congenital idiocy and sterility. In 1857, Morel proposed a theory of hereditary degeneracy, bringing together environmental and hereditary elements in an uncompromisingly pre-Darwinian mix. Morel's contribution was further developed by Valentin Magnan (1835–1916), who stressed the role of alcohol—particularly absinthe—in the generation of psychiatric disorders.

Morel's ideas were greatly extended by the Italian medical scientist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) whose work was defended and translated into English by Havelock Ellis. In his L'uomo delinquente (1876), Lombroso outlined a comprehensive natural history of the socially deviant person and detailed the stigmata of the person who was born to be criminally insane. These included a low, sloping forehead, hard and shifty eyes, large, handle-shaped ears, a flattened or upturned nose, a forward projection of the jaw, irregular teeth, prehensile toes and feet, long simian arms and a scanty beard and baldness. Lombroso also listed the features of the degenerate mentality, supposedly released by the disinhibition of the primitive neurological centres. These included apathy, the loss of moral sense, a tendency to impulsiveness or self-doubt, an unevenness of mental qualities such as unusual memory or aesthetic abilities, a tendency to mutism or to verbosity, excessive originality, preoccupation with the self, mystical interpretations placed on simple facts or perceptions, the abuse of symbolic meanings and the magical use of words, or mantras. Lombroso, with his concept of atavistic retrogression, suggested an evolutionary reversion, complementing hereditary degeneracy, and his work in the medical examination of criminals in Turin resulted in his theory of criminal anthropology—a constitutional notion of abnormal personality that was not actually supported by his own scientific investigations. In his later life, Lombroso developed an obsession with spiritualism, engaging with the spirit of his long dead mother.

In 1892, Max Nordau, an expatriate Hungarian living in Paris, published his extraordinary bestseller Degeneration, which greatly extended the concepts of Bénédict Morel and Cesare Lombroso (to whom he dedicated the book) to the entire civilization of western Europe, and transformed the medical connotations of degeneration into a generalized cultural criticism. Adopting some of Charcot's neurological vocabulary, Nordau identified a number of weaknesses in contemporary Western culture which he characterized in terms of ego-mania, i.e., narcissism and hysteria. He also emphasized the importance of fatigue, enervation and ennui. Nordau, horrified by the anti-Semitism surrounding the Dreyfus affair, devoted his later years to Zionist politics. Degeneration theory fell from favour around the time of the First World War because of an improved understanding of the mechanisms of genetics as well as the increasing vogue for psychoanalytic thinking. However, some of its preoccupations lived on in the world of eugenics and social Darwinism. It is notable that the Nazi attack on western liberal society was largely couched in terms of degenerate art with its associations of racial miscegenation and fantasies of racial purity—and included as its target almost all modernist cultural experiment.

The role of women in furthering development of the concept of degeneration was reviewed by Anne McClintock, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, who found that women who were ambiguously placed on the so-called "imperial divide" (nurses, nannies, governesses, prostitutes and servants) happened to serve as boundary markers and mediators. These women were tasked with the purification and maintenance of boundaries and what was seen as "inferior" places in society they held at the time.

Degenerationist devices

See also: Decadent movement

 

Pornocrates by Félicien Rops (1878)

Towards the close of the 19th century, in the fin-de-siècle period, something of an obsession with decline, descent and degeneration invaded the European creative imagination, partly fuelled by widespread misconceptions of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Among the main examples are the symbolist literary work of Charles Baudelaire, the Rougon-Macquart novels of Émile Zola, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—published in the same year (1886) as Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis—and, subsequently, Oscar Wilde's only novel (containing his aesthetic manifesto) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy explores the destructive consequences of a family myth of noble ancestry. Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen showed a sensitivity to degenerationist thinking in his theatrical presentations of Scandinavian domestic crises. Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1890/1894), with its emphasis on the horrors of psychosurgery, is frequently cited as an essay on degeneration. A scientific twist was added by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895) in which Wells prophesied the splitting of the human race into variously degenerate forms, and again in his The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) wherein forcibly mutated animal-human hybrids keep reverting to their earlier forms. Joseph Conrad alludes to degeneration theory in his treatment of political radicalism in the 1907 novel The Secret Agent.

In her influential study The Gothic Body, Kelly Hurley draws attention to the literary device of the abhuman as a representation of damaged personal identity, and to lesser-known authors in the field, including Richard Marsh (1857–1915), author of The Beetle (1897), and William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), author of The Boats of the Glen Carrig, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land. In 1897, Bram Stoker published Dracula, an enormously influential Gothic novel featuring the parasitic vampire Count Dracula in an extended exercise of reversed imperialism. Unusually, Stoker makes explicit reference to the writings of Lombroso and Nordau in the course of the novel. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories include a host of degenerationist tropes, perhaps best illustrated (drawing on the ideas of Serge Voronoff) in The Adventure of the Creeping Man.