Slippery Slope : THE IDEA OF DECLINE IN WESTERN HISTORY.<i> By Arthur Herman</i> .<i> The Free Press: 440 pp., $30</i>

Day after day, in column after column and book after book--Allan Bloom to Robert Bork--the authorities announce we’re going to hell. Our foundations are rotting, we’re falling away from the standard. We’re mired deeper and deeper in decline.

Listen to the Op-Ed voices in today’s local paper. (Note: My local paper isn’t the Los Angeles Times.) Four columnists hold forth, each of them troubled by where America or some other place is headed. Columnist A writes about presidential fund-raising and regrets the renting of bedrooms in the White House--Hotel Clinton--for big bucks. (He thinks earlier, less tacky ages wouldn’t have tolerated such sleaze.) Columnist B writes about the parting of Disney and Michael Ovitz and regrets the passing of a time when people were paid $50-million-plus only if they earned it. (Back then, writes Columnist B, “civics class economic lessons” and “bourgeois economic moralities” had teeth; not now.)

Columnist C also writes about Ovitz, calling him “Hollywood’s last tycoon,” linking him with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s individualistic movie mogul hero and regretting the takeover, by bloodless corporate America, of the movie industry. Columnist D writes about Jewish settlements in Hebron and regrets that the sane realism prevailing 70 years ago in the Revisionist Zionist Movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky has no influence on either Benjamin Netanyahu or his hard-right critics.

Four for four: a higher average than usual, but hardly unprecedented. The morning’s opinionizers are male, smart, concerned--and very much in the mainstream. Rumination about imminent or ongoing catastrophe has become a staple of contemporary prose, a cultural convention, an established way of organizing experience. Is this a sensible way of organizing experience or a cliche due for junking? Should we trust declinists? What does knee-jerk pessimism clarify, obscure or omit?

Arthur Herman’s “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” a challenging, broadly informed, rather smug book, deserves large credit for raising the question, whatever your view of its answers. (My view, as will appear, is carping.) Herman, “coordinator” of the Smithsonian Institution’s program in Western civilization, explores the making of the modern declinist mind--the shaping of the belief that the West is finished.

His flashiest claim is that fascism, Nazism, Third World communism, black power and radical environmentalism have roots in the same wrongheaded cultural pessimism. He sees as the core of this pessimism a particular set of assumptions, namely that “mass democracy corrupts true political freedom, that technology and positivist science systematically degrade the human spirit; that industrial capitalism tears to tatters the socio-cultural fabric of community (Gemeinschaft); and that all these trends bring an erosion of vitality and a decadence in arts and manners that spell the imminent end of the West.”

As early as 1920, by Herman’s reckoning, deep pessimism about the future was so “ingrained in discussions of modern culture and society that to deny [it] would have prompted doubt and suspicion.” His explanation of how it became ingrained is structured as a series of biographical sketches of contributors to the great ocean of Western self-hatred: Rousseau to Marx, Nietzsche to Spengler, Freud to Marcuse, DuBois to Fanon and many more. Repellent characters dot the cast, not all of them minor, and Herman’s profiles omit no unappetizing aspect of their natures. Many chapters in “The Idea of Decline” derive plausibility and readability from that circumstance.

The argument opens with an account of the chief “languages of decline,” beginning with the language Rousseau invented, which “reversed the poles of civilization and barbarism” set in place by the Enlightenment. Addressing panegyrics to primitive man, who lived in harmony with both nature and his fellow human creatures, Rousseau slammed Parisian refinement and said No! in thunder to the idea of history as progress.

“Ownership of property,” he insisted, “gave birth to competition and exploitation; complex social interaction gave birth to pride and envy. The arts made men soft and effeminate. Human beings became physically weak, unhappy and highly strung. Worst of all, the progress of civil society brought not political freedom, but its opposite.” Poets and social theorists who, in their naivete, thought Rousseau was right commenced talking about civil society as a failure and about getting and spending as a disaster. The declinist mind-set was forming.

It needed more substance, though, for full nourishment--some sort of impressive-sounding jargon, for instance, suitable for descanting on the theme of human diminishment by racial dilution. A phony Norman aristocrat, Arthur de Gobineau (born in 1816), met this need in his essay on the “Inequality of the Human Races.” The essay avowed that our original, noble stock--Aryan, of course--had undergone fatal weakening over the centuries as a result of “racial miscegenation.” Purporting to trace the history of 10 historical civilizations descended from “Aryan war bands,” De Gobineau’s loony but widely studied treatise was filled with images of ruins, because ruins were “the visible traces of a people superior to because prior to ourselves. . . .” The author predicted that, as Aryan blood suffered further dilution, “the white species will disappear henceforth from the face of the Earth.”

De Gobineau helped the declinist cause, but even with Rousseau singing backup, he wasn’t enough. The gone-to-hell party required, in addition, fresh terms with which to defame equality and democracy--values enshrined by French revolutionaries--and, beyond this, needed a language capable of contesting upbeat interpretations of Darwin and biological evolution. Historian Jacob Burkhardt began the political work of toughening the traditional anti-democratic critique. He added a new fear, namely that “popular rule threatens the cultural life of society as a whole.” Nietzsche, Wagner and others carried the politico-cultural work forward by giving heroically intense voice to the will to resist mob mediocrity.

Hopefulness about evolution was blasted, in its turn, by “degeneration theory.” In Herman’s opinion, the pessimistic view of the outlook for modern civilization presented in this theory was “ultimately more influential than anything propagated by De Gobineau, Nietzsche or their disciples.”

The theory implanted the notion that beneath the Westerner’s “sunny civilized surface lay an explosive mixture of barbarism and cruelty.” Popularizers of degeneration theory included Emile Zola, Robert Louis Stevenson (“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”), Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker; intellectual scaffolding for the theory was supplied by criminologist Cesare Lombroso, as well as by Durkheim and Freud. (“Freud’s theory of psychological regression replaces physiological degeneration in explaining the movement from reason and order to irrationality and disorder. Regression occurs in the individual, but also in society as a whole.”)

Herman’s four chapters on the languages of decline take up a third of the book, and obviously they’re fairly remote from Ovitz and overnight rates for the Lincoln room in the White House. (My summary of these chapters leaves out, among other items, the author’s meticulous probe of eugenics and the redoubled Jew-baiting that accompanied the rise of degeneration theory.)

But the balance of the book deals with subjects closer to our time and our national history. The middle third investigates the collapse of the vision of America as a redeemer nation certain to restore realistic hope for the progress of mankind (special attention to several members of the Adams family and to W.E.B. DuBois) and the definition by Oswald Spengler, and at length by Hitler himself, of a pseudo-exalted mission for Germany. (Germany, Spengler wrote, was a nation “young enough to experience world-historical problems [like decline] and solve them.”)

The book’s closing section treats major mid-20th century figures as responsible for “The Triumph of Cultural Pessimism.” The initial focus is on the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and other foes of the “authoritarian personality,” and on modern French prophets of doom (Sartre, Foucault, Fanon). The final chapters arrive at highly familiar Op-Ed preoccupations--multiculturalists (Ronald Takaki, Houston Baker, Leonard Jeffries among many others) and “Eco-Pessimism” (the school of thought embracing Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Jonathan Schell and, most recently, Vice President Al Gore).

Not the least impressive accomplishment of “The Idea of Decline” is its demonstration, as it takes apart Gore’s “Earth in the Balance,” that the vice president’s thought owes extremely large debts to the writers assessed in the book’s earlier chapters. “Gore’s modern civilization,” Herman asserts, “is also Nietzsche’s civilization, distorting and destroying human spiritual power and the sense of the sanctity of the world around us.” Gore’s civilization “is shallow--’the pursuit of happiness and comfort’ are its paramount values, along with ‘the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products.’ This leads us to ‘forget what we really feel and abandon the search for authentic purpose and meaning in our lives.”’

At some moments, Herman says, the vice president sounds like Sartre and Heidegger, bemoaning human entrapment in “inauthentic substitutes for direct experience with real life.” At other moments, Gore sounds like Bergson, lamenting “the loss of ‘a direct connection to the vividness, vibrancy and aliveness of the rest of the natural world.”’ At still other moments, Gore signs on to the claim, made by a raft of radical ecologists, that “the entire biological evolution of man is driven by his ‘lust for new tools’ and technology.”

Herman contends that the vice president “pushes cultural pessimism to a new extreme, concluding that the human community was doomed from the very start.” His dissection of Gore’s text is closer to creative deconstruction than to pedantic source-hunting and has a solid point: Declinist assumptions are alive and well at the highest echelons of U.S. policymaking.

Back to the question: Is this a good thing? Should we worry that “cultural pessimism” powerfully influences elected officialdom as well as Op-Ed regulars? Yes, indeed, we should, is Herman’s answer.

I like this answer--but I found Herman’s way of supporting it less than compelling. His attack on declinists depends too heavily on conservative cant--tired disparagements of “eagle-eyed intellectuals,” lyrics to trickle-down affluence that lifts all boats (it doesn’t), huffy scolding of writers whose sin is “contempt for the bourgeoisie,” master-class whining. (Example: Herman bad-mouths Maya Angelou for mentioning, in her Inauguration Day poem, the Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, West Indians--”everyone except the ethnic group that originally created the American republic.”)

The larger problem is that the conceptual structure of “The Idea of Decline,” built entirely on “optimism” and “pessimism,” is too coarse to engage the complex realities it has in view. The rise of the languages of decline--”culture criticism” in general--coincides with the running of fresh tides of democratization, and the wisest minds have always been aware of the resulting tensions: the obligation to invent means of serving conflicting values, the need to avoid committing to either side of the optimism-pessimism seesaw.

The 19th century thinkers who remain interesting (Matthew Arnold and William Morris among them) succeed at times not only in speaking persuasively on behalf of conflicting goods--traditional excellence, broadened access--but in imagining practical ways in which privileged, educated elites can forward causes hard to reconcile without demanding intellectual labor. The same holds for many of the genuinely valuable intellectual workers of our own age, from Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to Mina Shaughnessy and Mike Rose. It is not broad-brush optimism or pessimism that shapes their work but a variety of motives and feelings--the sense of duty and of opportunity, complicated hope, complicated despair. Herman lacks their nuanced responsiveness to the present contradiction-ridden cultural moment.

It doesn’t follow from this, though, that “The Idea of Decline” is a negligible book. Herman stimulates thought, as I said. He also punctures some inflated reputations and is finely appreciative of several under-recognized heroes.

I admire his salute to the brainy, courageous German biologist Rudolf Virchov, who sailed in the 1880s against the wind of the myth of “the Aryan race,” who worked for years on a massive craniological study of German schoolchildren, noting which were of Jewish origin and which were not. “The results showed conclusively that there were no physiological differences between Jews and non-Jews and that the supposedly Teutonic racial type--blond hair and blue eyes--constituted less than a third of the German Empire’s population, and actually included many Jews.” Virchov aimed to eliminate nonsense, but he and his research were chewed to pieces by attackers who complained that he was a Jew (they were wrong).

I also admire the directness of Herman’s assault on the Frankfurt School’s reading of anti-Semitism. Adorno, Marcuse and others drained the Holocaust of meaning by seeing it as a function of “a sterile industrial order . . . a ‘sick’ Western Civilization,” instead of as the result of a specifically Nazi program of genocide meant to counter “the threat of Jewish pollution.”

It will take a better book--probably several better books--than Arthur Herman has produced to shake the Op-Ed tribe, and the rest of us, out of the banalities of knee-jerk pessimism. But “The Idea of Decline” puts the subject in play at last and sharpens consciousness of the truly momentous issues at stake. For those reasons, it deserves a significant audience.