What is "The West" and What Shaped It?

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life

Jacque Barzun’s From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life is like ambling along a river that’s winding and twisting through a lush landscape, and the atmosphere can’t help but give rise to rumination. Whether it’s the deep analysis of cultural life in the Victorian era or Barzun’s prose, it feels like Barzun joins you on the amble, and paints the culture of the West for the last five hundred years. Barzun’s breadth of knowledge, passion for the subject, and ruminating tones, delivers a masterpiece in understanding our cultural world and the modern West.

Background

From Dawn to Decadence examines the West, or, rather, what we consider the West. Some people tend to think of the West from the period of the early Greeks or from the Roman Empire, which would include the time of Jesus Christ. Yet the fall of the Roman Empire germinated the Judeo-Christian values which birthed the West. Barzun marks October 31st, 1517 A.D. as the day the Modern West was born. On that day Martin Luther posted his 95 propositions on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The start of Western decadence, or what you could arguably call cultural stagnation Barzun points to World War I.

Barzun delineates the West into 4 key cultural revolutions and these comprise the 4 sections of his book:

1. Religion

2. Monarchy

3. Liberal (not in the sense of left-leaning politics)

4. Social

Each section does not merely focus on one element. Rather each section title Barzun postulates as the key factor wielding the strongest cultural influence of a timeframe. For instance in part 1, Religion, Luther’s propositions in 1517 wielded the most effects and influence until the French Monarchy took the reign in the late 16th century.

Barzun dives into each time period looking at the philosophies, art, sexual mores, literature, and social fashions of that period. Since he analyzes cultural currents, he often takes the reader upstream to show the background of those currents such as portraying the influences and effects of Plato.

If you’ve ever heard of the Great Books and have wondered what the list is, why those old books matter, and why do some schools and colleges base a curriculum around them — Barzun’s work is like a tour through the Great Books. He exemplifies how certain ideas worked like a stone tossed into a pond and then ripples of the ideas, the cause and effect, then prompted another thinker or painter to toss another stone creating more cause and effect ripples. In other words, Barzun details the consequences, tradeoffs, and effects of ideas, and how all that influenced and imbued the culture of certain periods and how it molded the era we know and live in today. You can follow those currents right down to the culture of disrespect you come across in your regular living, like the current experience of air travel.

Deeper Background: Why From Dawn To Decadence Is Different Than You May Expect

People may jump into a book like this expecting a neat, concise this-then-that chronological formula coinciding with ample war coverage. Barzun does no such thing. He analyzes the culture of each period delineated and dissects the currents comprising the culture of each period. The influences shaping the currents of culture are vast, various, and variegated. Barzun forensically and conscientiously guides the reader to evaluate those influences; he takes the reader upstream to show where those currents come from and how those currents flow.

As mentioned, he covers the consequences, tradeoffs, and mingling of ideas and philosophies. For instance, Religious legalism coming up against liberalism (as far as loosening theocratic restrictions). Barzun peers into what elements of liberalism countered overt religious legalism, what led to those elements, and the result of religious legalism falling. On the flip side, Barzun gives light to the religious factions tired of the legalism, and embracing science, believing that science breathed depth, substance, and more proof into God. Naturally ideas like this clashing and aligning, shaped literature, art, politics, and worldviews.

Sex & Culture

The sexual mores throughout the last five hundred years is, as the kids say, juicy, but it’s illuminating into our culture and past cultures. Most authors would either shy away from the topic or inject their ideological views into it. Barzun, instead, details sexuality’s influence over culture and how it shows if a culture is healthy, conflicted, or flailing.

Our era has a recency bias with sexual mores. We believe that since we have things like widespread pornography, the 1960 sexual revolution, and how sex is now overwhelmingly permeating the public marketplace, that this means our ancestors and the preceding eras were fuddy duddies. That sex and sexual expression before us was boring, brief, stifling, and unsatisfying; that men were clueless on how to make a woman orgasm; that the primal and cerebral elements of our sexual expression were somehow inaccessible to our ancestors.

Sexuality is a part of human nature.

It’s innate.

We didn’t suddenly stumble upon new tricks and expressions in 1960.

Only man is capable of adding in the cerebral colors of sexual expression, whereas animals are not. Since sexuality constitutes a massive part of human nature it naturally influences culture. That reality, Barzun provides beautiful insight into, and insight into why our modern era looks grim due to the over commodification of sexuality, particularly the over commodification of lust.

Here’s a small taste of what he reveals.

As mentioned, most people believe the Sexual Revolution is relatively recent, that it occurred in 1960 with the advent of the pill, Playboy, sexual liberation movements, and feminism. Barzun shows that our chronological snobbery results from modern media and platforms like social media deluging sexuality into our culture. Barzun argues that the modern deluge — and all forms of its messaging from Manosphere to Onlyfans to academics — makes us believe that the 1960s was the true Sexual Revolution; the 1960s was not in fact the true Sexual Revolution. He pegs the true Sexual Revolution in 1895. Sexual liberation and pornography were becoming more of a thing beginning around the late 1800s, yet that wasn’t the cause of the Sexual Revolution. Rather, a group of women were reacting against a group of Victorian Era men.

The Victorian era was an era of morals and ideals steeped in classical and religious traditions. The relationship norms put a high value on both men and women’s chastity. Chastity, here, is in the classic definition: that it represents modesty and choosiness. And both signal self-respect, intelligence, virtuous behavior, and respecting the gravity of sex. It was not chastity in the modern cynical definition: prudish behavior forced upon us by the patriarchy resulting in an orgasm-less bedroom, where the woman is bound by duty to endure mindblowingly awful sex; nor the Manosphere definition of a trad woman who is not only a debt-free virgin but has never even come near a man and when married becomes a voracious porn star and an opinion-less mother to her husband. Also she gets violently ill when any other man comes near her.

Despite modern notions of Victorian era sexual mores, it was not a prude era. Plenty of physical intimacy with all the accruements of primal expression happened just as it happens today. Despite the Victorian emphasis on the classic Christian morals and the notion that a man should work to embody masculine and Godly virtues, a fringe group of insecure men would court women leveraging classic values, then due to sexual insecurities or some other issue, would moralize, shame, and demonize women for their sexual expression. And these men were like the current Manosphere, bombastic, hyperbolic, projecting (often always projecting their psycho-sexual fantasies) and dramatic with their cynical and deterministic theories on women. Tired of this group’s hypocritical bloviating, it, naturally, fueled bitter and jaded women. It fueled the women who had the unfortunate experience of being with these men. This group of bitter, resentful, and jaded women sowed the concepts of feminism we know today: monogamy as constraining, promiscuity as a pathway to self-actualization, and men are oppressive. Furthermore, as another reaction to that group of weak men, a group of both women and men wanted to show how hypocritical those moralizers were, and wanted to show that Victorian couples were in fact having sex and that it wasn’t fuddy duddy stuff. They reactively shoved the era’s pornography from the shadows into the public square to spotlight the sexual nature of even the most moral and pure couples.

Like all bad turns in our culture, weak, bitter, and insecure men are standing in the middle of it.

Barzun analyzes the cultural meaning of sexual expression via an eras art, literature, religious mores, and fashions. And when modern cameras thrust the erotic into the marketplace, Barzun dissects how the commodification of the erotic strangled us further and further into the cynical, where the focus is solely on the lustful parts of sexual expression. That fall into the cynical played a hand in cultural and societal enervation, contributing to our current state of decadence.

The Final Section

The final section is Barzun surveying our modern era. Nearly 25 years or more after From Dawn to Decadence was published, Barzun proves prescient. He gives no predictions, but he does survey the cultural landscape, he even surveys the over reliance on technology to handle our creativity and education, and his survey reveals how we’re wallowing in recycled ideas.

Barzun seemingly hails secular humanism through the first three parts of the book. Yet in the moments when he seems to nearly accuse faith of cultural suffocation, he makes sharp turns, explicitly and implicitly, to the teachings and sentiments of Blaise Pascal. Pascal, to Barzun, bridges a gap between God and science and reason. Pascal was of the sentiment that the more man empirically discovers truths along with what man disproves, combined with unknowns that will always exist, reveal the truth of God and Jesus Christ. Once Barzun introduces Pascal, the secular humanistic positions of Barzun untether.

Barzun in the final pages takes a turn, not explicitly towards Christianity, but towards a position of how a society denigrating the Judeo-Christian values, its norms, and its traditions, enervates cultural robustness and creative virility. That cultural enervation, Barzun keeps the sentiment of Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime and the Beautiful in the mind of the reader. The sublime meaning something evoking awe, terror, and distress, and it’s big, vast, and overwhelming. That sublime is a part of nature and human nature, yet, as Barzun postulates, a culture constantly cultivating from the cynical corners of the sublime becomes jaded and creatively impotent.

Barzun, as mentioned, argues that World War I brutally blunted creative fertilization, and stilled the beautiful ripple of ideas against ripples of other ideas. A few flickers occurred after World War I, but it was carry over from the momentum of concepts preceding the war. He explicitly calls out the deconstructionist movements, like the Cubist painters, the Dadaists, the postmodernists, and philosophers like, Simon de Beauvoir, and John Paul Sartre, among others. He also calls out novelists, bureaucracy, regulations, and philosophies of egregious solipsism. All of it, again, he puts on World War I, a war he sees as unnecessary, and he sees World War II more or less a result of World War I, and exemplified by Hitler’s influences, (eugenics, the edges of Darwinism, over-the-top Ubermensch concepts, and so forth).

It’s here in final sections when he turns his back to secular humanism and calls for the injection of Judeo-Christian values, mores, and norms. It’s not an outright proclamation, his ruminating style doesn’t explicitly call for a return to the past, but it’s clear in his rumination and sentiments that he laments for what Judeo-Christian values do for a society. That it pushes us towards truth and beauty.

Possible Reasons for You to Read From Dawn to Decadence

This is a beast of book, it’s THICC.

Thicc books tend to intimidate, and this one hits all the insecurities for reading: a lot of names and dates, various philosophies, literary analysis, metaphysical concepts, and cultural critiques — all written in the french style.

Who would enjoy it?

Or why should you commit to this book?

The easiest reason, if you’ve long been curious about reading The Great Books or at least, if you’ve long been curious about what makes the Great Books so great and so important From Dawn to Decadence is a superb primer, an analysis, and a substantive summary of the Great Books. 

Barzun carefully and warmly guides you through thinkers, philosophers, art, literature, theology, and music. Everything from Aristotle, the Stoics, Dostoyevski, Erasmus, Thomas More, Hemingway, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Hardy, Montaigne, Tolstoy, Twain, Rousseau, Bacon, Gibbon, Faust, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus, Cervantes, Milton, Locke, Burke, Yeats, Kant, and more are covered. All are names on the Great Books. All are analyzed in this work.

Along with the Great Books you may have heard of the following:

• The Enlightenment

• Impressionism

• Neo-classicalism

• Romanticism

• Realism

• Darwinism

• Humanism

• Stoicism

If you’ve ever had serious curiosity what those mean, and what makes Thomas Hardy a Victorian Realist and not a Romanticist, then this book will give wisdom. I doubt you were losing sleep over why Hardy is a Victorian Realist and not a Romanticist, but Thomas Hardy is great, his realist prose style is akin to the great oil painters of his time, and it’s a distinct style in time that Barzun’s analysis gifts more enjoyment if you do read Hardy.

You’re not going to walk away from this book and remember who is a Naturalist and who is a Realist or the concise differences between each. That’s not the point to read a book like this. But Barzun will have you understanding enough of the concepts that when you read a book or watch a movie or go to an art museum, having read this book will add sharper colors to the experience.

Last, if you’re seriously wondering what influenced our culture today, from the political correctness to the culture of disrespect, or why the Manosphere rants against women and why feminism has turned out so poorly, it’s in From Dawn to Decadence. But this isn’t a standard 250 page journalistic analysis, it goes back to 1500 A.D. I would not read this if you want to get a theory as to why we’re fallen. If you want a comprehensive analysis of the last 500 years, to better grasp literature, arts, mores and fashions, philosophical and theological influences, that’s the reason to read this book; if you want a deep cultural perspective, this is the book.

How To Read From Dawn to Decadence

It’s got a ton of names, a ton of dates, a ton of philosophies, a ton of literary analysis, and a ton of cultural analysis. Some concepts Barzun expects his target reader to at least have a passing understanding or a recognition, and it’s almost certain you will run into topics or names you at least recognize. But due to the scope of the work and how much is in it, at times From Dawn to Decadence will overwhelm you. That’s natural. That’s ok. That doesn’t make you dumb.

Regarding the names and dates, people fret too much over remembering names and dates. They think in order have read a book well, they need to remember every name and every date as if they’re going on Jeopardy tomorrow and any wrong answer results in death.

This book has too many names and dates to remember, so forget trying.

Barzun, however, deploys a unique call back and call forward tactic. He introduces a name or a topic, then points to a page where more can be found or as a refresher, which helps immensely.

My advice: if you come across something you recognize, and it will be hard not to, then spend time on it, especially if you’re curious.

For instance, Stoicism. Most people have heard of it, quite a few have read the Stoics or books mentioning Stoicism. Barzun mentions Stoicism a few times. He’s critical of Stoicism, not of its beneficial source of moral guidelines and psychological resiliency, but of how Stoicism sometimes rears its head in mass culture. Which it does from time to time. And it has a bit of a bad habit of morphing into doctrinaire posturing from those who view themselves as morally superior. It also supplants God and Faith for secularists who anoint themselves as having a better vision for society. That morphing Barzun argues, points to issues in the culture. And that’s intriguing. Many of you may remember how wildly popular Stoicism became around 2015, give or take. Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, statue accounts on Twitter, Stoic Silicon Valley bros, LinkedIn humblebrags, were all the rage until Covid hit. When Covid hit the Stoic personalities like Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pagliucci, and Donald Robertson became tinny for various reasons, and Stoicism’s popularity soured.¹ Barzun shows how this isn’t the first time that has happened, and how the popularizers signal a cultural smugness resentful of any form of creativity seeking the beautiful.

I mentioned the Victorian period, that’s a name of a period most people have heard of and have notions — true or false — of. You likely have heard of the debates between Protestantism and Catholicism and its profound consequences, Barzun covers it.

You may have heard of Kant, but are not familiar with his philosophy or the profound influence he has — yes still has — over our culture.

The list goes on.

Another tip, if you decide to read From Dawn to Decadence, it’s ok to look things up as you’re reading if you want to know more. Ask Grok, go on Wikipedia, whatever it is, it’s ok to look up something. Doing so will help you retain more.

My top suggestion to better retain From Dawn to Decadence: pick up and read one of the books or authors or thinkers Barzun mentions. Also sit with a few of the art pieces or musical pieces or composers he mentions. You can do the art and music when you come across the passage. The reading of a book or figure he mentions, I recommend doing that sometime soon after finishing From Dawn to Decadence. It doesn’t need to be right away, since you might need a few easy reads after this book to avoid burnout, but don’t wait years. For instance, soon after finishing, pick up Thomas Hardy or C.S. Lewis or Erasmus — in short pick up a book from a section that resonated most with you.

I read Hunger by Knut Hamsun after reading From Dawn to Decadence. Hunger is not mentioned by Barzun, nor his Hamsun. But Hunger is the book that kicked off the 20th century with a topic Barzun covers, psychological literature.² As of this writing, I just started Praise of Folly by Erasmus. Erasmus, as Barzun shows, is a figure who wielded enormous influence over the West.

So you can either pick up a book or an author he explicitly mentions (my suggestion), or you can try a book of a time period (my alternate suggestion) and reference Barzun to deeper understand the influences of the book you chose. Either will help you retain From Dawn to Decadence. 

Another suggestion: read a history of the time period he mentions, or something specific from a time period, or a biography of someone he mentions. For instance, you can read Andrew Robert’s biography of Napoleon. You can read Victor Davis Hanson’s book on World War II. Plenty of solid books exist that directly focus on time or a figure Barzun covers.

I’ll repeat my preference: go with a book or figure he mentions. Immersing in the topic or author will bring Barzun’s analysis to life.

Approaching Barzun’s Style of Writing

Barzun writes in the french style. It’s a gorgeous style. Like the title of his book on better writing, it’s simple and direct. But it’s not simple and direct in the style of the writing you’re familiar with: short sentences with Anglo words. His book Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers teaches how to convey concepts clearly through grammar, style, rhetoric, and word choice.

The french style works like tumbling ruminations. Or, as I opened with the first sentence, it’s like a river winding and twisting through a beautiful landscape. Like a winding and twisting river, it has eddies, fast flowing sections, sections that come to a near rest before flowing onwards. That’s how the french style works. The style ruminates, it “weaves” as Donald Trump calls his rambling style, but it always comes back to its point. It’s a gorgeous style. It takes a little getting used to if you’ve never read it. It can come across as rambling. But it’s an intimate style, it’s like you’re walking alongside Barzun’s ruminations and reflections. The style is unapologetic, it has no problems meandering, it has no problems using a big word, or a simple childlike word to describe something, yet in the end, it’s clear, beautiful, and gives an entire impression of what you’re reading.

Final Wisdom on Reading From Dawn to Decadence

Books of this size and substance require diligence and patience. You will feel overwhelmed in parts, you will feel like topics are flying over your head in other parts, and you’ll likely kick yourself for not remembering enough. You will feel like you’re not reading it fast enough, you will feel like it’s stopping you from reading an arbitrary number of books for the year. That’s all natural with a book of this nature. Have patience and be willing to forgive yourself if you don’t remember something. You will run into moments where you think you need to go faster and moments where you think reading it will hinder the goal of how many books you wanted to read for the year. This book is worthwhile. The number of books you read in a year is arbitrary. Take your time. It’s worth it.

You will not be an expert like Barzun on these topics. He spent the remaining years of his life, after a lifetime of study, exploring and writing about the West. Focus on the hits not the deep tracks. If you recognize names or themes, that’s a good place to engage. Just like if someone tells you to check out a band or artist, the easiest place to start is with the hits, and if you like the sound, you dig deeper. Let your curiosity act as a gauge. If you recognize a theme, and it intrigues you to a degree, that’s an easy area to spend a little time with the text. And spending time means, quickly reviewing some of the concepts preceding what you recognize, lingering a little with what you recognize, then paying attention to what follows. Barzun will often show what influenced the theme or person you recognize, then the counters or the influence left in the wake of that theme.

Again, forget worrying about reading speed or finishing fast enough. Reading Barzun is like a slow walk in nature along that beautiful winding river. Don’t rush it, enjoy it, and it’s ok to linger with his topics.

1. Some had Trump derangement syndrome, many kept shoehorning Progressive liberalism as Stoicism, they decried Christians, they hurled spite at those questioning vaccines and masks, and they claimed the Stoics would want Green initiatives, veganism, Black Lives Matters signs in your front yard; some went so far as to say working out is un-Stoic, questioning Covid mandates was deeply un-Stoic; and the ardent followers came across as smug, self-referential dorks who when questioned often went into theatrics

2. I half wonder if Hamsun is not mentioned due to his complicated legacy. Barzun does not shy away from other works and authors Hitler liked, but Hamsun’s legacy, to Barzun, a man who lived through two world wars, could be distasteful, and that’s understandable. And this is me wondering, it could also be that Barzun never thought this and never considered it, and Hamsun was in no way shape or form on his radar.