Barzun lives in San Antonio, Texas. TWQ editor Charlotte Hays talked with him about the state of civilization, why artists try to be immoral, and whether women have been oppressed throughout Western history. You propose in From Dawn to Decadence that our civilization is decadent. Because so many of our institutions and purposes are falling away from their original intention. The nation-state is splitting up and its sovereignty is breached everywhere.
Representative government is stagnant.
It's very difficult to get anything done, and even when a law is passed, after much wrangling, its enforcement is often nil. The public school is a wonderful idea, but we've lost that idea. The universities are in turmoil over irrelevant things, and the offerings that they make to students are often ludicrous. The notion of individual rights has gone so far that our rights get into a tangle with the rights of others. We, in short, are in a condition of confused effort and small result.