Democracy or Decadence? A Cultural
Aside to the “Golden Age” of the Pahlavi
Monarchy in Iran
In the years following the revolution of 1979 in Iran, since the
puritanical state of the Islamic Republic, by any means, sometimes through
downright contempt or sheer violence, has disrupted the most basic individual
and social freedoms of the Iranian citizens, such as the freedom to choose dress,
to display heterosexual affection in public, and to drink alcohol, a hugely
unscholarly assumption has taken shape among a portion of the malcontented
and disillusioned public that the Pahlavi monarchy was “democratic.” Given the
spontaneous existence of this assumption, a variety of the exile monarchists,
during recent years, especially after the dramatic upheavals of 2009, the
consequent severe suppression of the Iranian civil society, the general atrophy of
all the other forms of opposition to the regime, and the emergence of a pseudo
state of war between the West and the Islamic Republic, perceiving the ripeness
of the situation for obtaining hegemony and thus returning to power in Iran, in a
systematic manner, through activities like the regular posting of the pictures and
displaying of the films of that period with the accompaniment of nostalgic
captions and commentaries on their satellite channels, websites, Youtube,
Facebook, etc., have been struggling to promote the above-mentioned
assumption and to stress the good, old days of the “democratic monarchy.” In
this vein, they push as far as to call the last two decades of the Pahlavi
monarchy, the “Golden Age.” Thus, in this short article, my aim is, by
examining a number of the most prevalent cultural aspects of the last two
decades of the monarchy in Iran, to put this assumption to the test of historical
facts; to melt it in the crucible of history.
In this regard, I believe that while the popular advocates of this
assumption, as a retroactive means of escape in dire straits, mostly
unconsciously identify “democracy” with “decadence,” its political advocat es
quite consciously accentuate this identity. What I mean by decadence here is a
sociocultural phenomenon that is usually associated with an aura of
complacency, witticism, and sophistication, accompanied with psychological
games carrying erotic undertones all soaked in a luxuriously fashionable
ambiance among the urban middle or uppers classes. In a classic essay, called
The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893), Symons describes decadence as
such: “An interesting disease typical of an over-luxurious civilization,
characterized by an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research,
an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity.” Among the most well-known instances of this phenomenon in the
modem age could be counted the fin de siecle in France, the last years of the
Weimar Republic in Germany, and certain aspects of the pop culture and