It's curious, then, that the chief narrative about ageing should dwell so much on biomedical ideas of declining bodies requiring clinical solutions, and so little on the ways in which the environment is itself disabling for older people.
In "The Idea of Decline in Western History," after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.
But at a time when Detroit is associated in many American minds with ideas of decline and decay, it's refreshing to see an exhibition try to emphasise what the city is capable of .Another Look at Detroit: Parts 1 and 2" is on display at Marlborough Chelsea and Marianne Boesky Gallery until August 8th 2014.
They want to argue that Obama is in some way accepting the idea of American decline, and that's why he's not putting America at the forefront of every one of these crises.
Yet the idea of our decline is emotionally magnetic, because life is a long slide down, and the plateau just passed is easier to love than the one coming up.
Gibbon conceived the idea of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," he tells us, "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter".
It is inversion time in America as the people formerly known as the happy middle class rally by the millions for a Republican billionaire who is in love with the idea of national decline.
But he rejected the idea of American decline, saying that was an old theory, which had been repeatedly belied by the existence of "a vibrancy to our economic model, a durability to our political model, and a set of ideals that has sustained us through difficult times".The Economist went to press before the G20 summit ended.
Mr Fallows observes that while the jeremiad has a hallowed place in American ideological history, it was only with the launch of Sputnik that it began to involve rivalry with a foreign power:Only with America's emergence as a global power after World War II did the idea of American "decline" routinely involve falling behind someone else.
And because it's that time of the year again, here's Hitch in 2007 holding forth on Christmas (or at least trying to when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough isn't being an insufferable prick): Here Hitchens weighs in on the evolving ethnic makeup in the States, the rise of the Tea Party, and Americans failing to come to grips with the idea of the decline of their country as a lone superpower.
