Here's a thought-provoking paragraph from Arthur Krystal's profile of historian Jacques Barzun, who is about to celebrate his centennial:
Barzun's declinist views about Western civilization are no secret. One reason that 'From Dawn to Decadence,' a eight-hundred-page history of Western civilization from 1500 to the present, which he published at the age of ninety-two, was such an improbable best-seller ('the damnedest story you'll ever read,' David Gates called it in Newsweek) was its contention that Western civilization is winding down, that 'the forms of art as of life seem exhausted.' But, when Barzun insists that he sees 'the end of the high creative energies at work since the Renaissance,' his tone is less that of someone appalled by what's happening than of someone simply recording the ocean currents.
Here's a thought: If Barzun is right about the decadence of the West (which he understands primarily in artistic and cultural terms) - and there's no reason immediately to conclude that he is - what comes next?