The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford

that its modern equivalent is more of a religion. A contemporary essay on the defence of cosmetics, however broadly the term might be construed, could only be a conservative reaction against the shocking radicalism of greens and feminists.
    One could, of course, make out an apologetic case for Decadent Movements on the grounds that they helped lay the groundwork for subsequent movements like Surrealism and Modernism, and offered useful exemplars to writers as varied as Gide, Cocteau, Céline and Genet, but that would be rather weak-kneed. The Decadents themselves certainly did not intend to be a passing phase on the way to something more worth while; they thought they were harbingers of the apocalypse, and they wanted to reach an extreme which could not be surpassed. Had they been able to anticipate the extent of their failure to achieve those extremes which were realized within forty or fifty years of their passing they would probably have been depressed – but because they were Decadents, they were no strangers to depression, and one more impuissant shrug of the shoulders would have been no big deal.
    Let us, then, in remembering the celebrants of Decadence, try to discover something more appropriate to say than they they added a few extra drops to the great stream of literary history. Let us try to find something which they say directly to modern readers, which modern readers need to hear.
    If we do this, we will find that there are two elements of the Decadents’ gospel which have neither been falsified nor over-familiarized. Both, as might be expected, are denials of things which the people of the 1880s would very much like to have believed, and which the people of the 1990s are still trying to believe. The Decadents were right, and are right, about two matters – one important and one admittedly trivial – which have not yet been universally conceded, but ought to be.
    The important matter about which the Decadents were right is their opinion of the veneration of Nature. They thought that it was stupid; it was; and it is. Where they had to live with the legacy of Rousseau we have to live with a growing Ecological Mysticism which is a lethal pollutant of green politics and the parent of an indiscriminate hostility to exactly those aspects of technological progress which might yet save us from the filthy mess which we are making of the world. There is a widespread popular misconception to the effect that turning forests into deserts and rivers into sewers is the perogative of modern men armed with sophisticated technologies, and that if only technological progress could be reversed all would be well. In the ears of people who believe such nonsense there is no more euphonious word than “natural”, which has come to be a synonym for “good”.
    The Decadents treated such ideas with a scorn which they thoroughly deserve. They recognised that all the triumphs of mankind are based in artifice, and that the principal condition of the success of human life is a secure and complete control of nature. The Decadents would have condemned as shallow fools those critics who find something perverse and unnatural in the notion of taking control of genetic processes so that we may become true governors of creation, and they would have been right to do so. The Decadents might have remained pessimistic about the actual project of deploying sophisticated techniques of genetic engineering in time to save the world from ruin, but they would have had no doubts about its propriety. If one can speak at all about a Decadent Ideal World (and one has to admit that there is a certain paradox in the notion) then that Ideal World would be a world in which people had total control over all matters of biology, including their own anatomy, physiology and physical desires; it is an Ideal which we can and ought to share, though far too few of us actually do.
    The trivial matter about which the Decadents were right, although this point might arguably