The Three Pamphleteers

Decline is relative. It took Edward Gibbon 3,180 pages in six volumes of my small-print Everyman edition to describe the Roman Empire’s slow and inevitable collapse over nearly one and a half millennia. Andrew Potter manages to dispatch our current screwed-up society in a mere 128. Because a short attention span is one of the most damnable characteristics of our particular decline — the simple answer: blame social media — we should be both grateful and unsurprised that Potter can take us down so rapidly. Granted, he doesn’t have nearly so many heresies and barbarian incursions to itemize as he traces our increasing inability and unwillingness to live up to the Enlightenment values that formed the basis of the now diminished idea of progress. It helps that we’ve essentially become our own barbarians — no need to point fingers elsewhere. And where there are no longer acknowledged collective truths or authorities, what used to be demonized as heresy has become hard to...