I refute it THUS!
I finished From Dawn to Decadence the other day. The author, Jacques Barzun, celebrated his one hundredth birthday last year. In the interview he said that Western civilization has been going downhill since at least 1914. It's hard to disagree with him, particularly after reading his magnum opus. The last two hundred pages are the most vivid in my memory. It is difficult to overemphasize how... crazy, for lack of a better term, the world became during and after World War I. That title is something of a misnomer since there were world wars in the eighteenth century. WWI was not only a world-wide conflict but it was also another "people's war" the likes of which had not been seen since the Thirty Years War.

It's difficult to grasp the enormity of war. We read popular histories and think, "Oh wow, over 450,000 Americans died in WWII." How many of them were budding young writers, poets, artists, musicians, architects, or scientists? Barzun eschews the standard political-military-centric nature of other popular histories. The subtitle says the book is a survey of Western culture. Among many things it provides a short history of the detective story, Surrealist literature (which Barzun defends), Bauhaus architecture, Renaissance art, Humanist satires, Enlightenment plays, etc. Barzun believes the twenty years from 1885 to 1905 - which he calls the nineties - and the Cubist decade from 1905 to 1914 saw promising developments in all the fields of human endeavor, all cut short by WWI. The war derailed some of these budding young schools of thought, or diverted them into strange cul de sacs from which some have yet to emerge.

Ours is an Absurdist culture. What capital "A" absurd means is working at cross purposes. We spend billions on public education and push our children to EXCELLENCE because America has to be THE BEST at everything, yet we pounce on any individual display of superiority as elitism. We deplore violence and sexual promiscuity in young people, yet the violence and pornography in movies, the internet, books, television, and music cannot be suppressed in the interest of "free speech." Speech, in the United States anyway, has come to include actions. Burning the flag is a statement of opinion. This legalistic understanding of speech would seem to authorize assassination.

Barzun is generally conservative, but I think everyone could learn a lot from this. At 800 pages it's no light reading. You can read it profitably from start to finish like I did, or you can open up to any page and learn something new and interesting.