“My own favoured explanation, in The Decadent Society, is adapted from the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s arguments about how cultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: the problem for the Western world is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the baby boomers (and the pre-boomer innovators they followed) were too culturally triumphant and their elders put up too little resistance, such that the fruitful tension between innovation and tradition gave way to confusion, mediocrity, sterility.” – New Statesman
