Famous Put-Downs: Céline vs. Sartre

Céline. Sartre. Crazy frogs. A recipe for a hilarious (and nearly deadly) exchange after the War, when Sartre accused Céline of collaboration with the occupying Germans. In fact, Sartre wrote in Les Temps Moderne (1 Dec 1945) that Céline was paid by the Germans to endorse their race theories. Such high-profile collaboration meant death in newly-liberated France. Céline - veteran of the Great War, as Sartre wasn't - was not happy:

'Assassin and genius? It's been known... after all... Perhaps it's the case with Sartre? Assassin he is, he'd like to be, agreed, but genius? Small turd in my genius arse? Him? Remains to be seen... yes, certainly that can blossom... become manifest... but J-P.S.? Those foetus's eyes? those mean shoulders? that little pot-belly? tape-worm, yes, human tape-worm, situated you know where... and philosopher! that's quite a few things... It seems that he liberated Paris on a bicycle. He has... in the theatre, in Society... played about with the war, tortures, prison, fire. But times are changing, and now he's growing, swelling enormously J-P.S.! He cannot control himself any more... doesn't recogise himself any more... from the embryo which he is, he's moving towards becoming a creature!'

We at Burning Pyre applaud his genius, and plug him/ us shamelessly once again:

Philosophy as career

Academia is for the most part either cosmopolitan and directionless (viz. Continental philosophy, which is literary criticism plus sociology), or provincial and trite (Analytic philosophy, which is scientific-reductionist). Synthesis, unity, and historical survey are outmoded and unacceptable ways to proceed in contemporary philosophy. What the grand institution of contemporary philosophy wants is not the reduction in the number of problems, but a great multiplication of them. The problems of philosophy, which for me are at the foundations of our thinking even today, are passed over in favour of trendy discussions within the framework of a vast number of philosophical ‘old boy networks’, discussions which do little more than name-drop the latest developments in culture, science and technology in the most dilettantish fashion, adding nothing to our genuinely-shared experience of the world. Surely we are witnessing the dawn of a Western mysticism in which even the desire to see the world in a charitably realistic fashion is rejected in favour of the demand for cultic initiations into esoteric interpretations of the world, interpretations whose main virtue in the eyes of an increasingly jaded public is precisely to invigorate the self-isolating initiate through obfuscating and complexifying what in reality should be simple and sociable.

I seek a montage understanding of man and the world.

Our World, the Peanut

Globalisation and the Consolidation of the World

Burning Pyre

The world is shrinking; it is being compressed by technological and economic forces into a single society – if not politically or culturally, then certainly as an idea. This is essentially the thesis propounded by, among others, McLuhan (1962), Harvey (1990), and Robertson (1992). I propose to examine the causes of the world’s shrinking and, of the consequences of this process, [to] provide an elucidation of the antagonistic dialectic that has developed between globalisation’s ethic of integration and its opponents, whose views are perhaps best expressed in the poet Valéry’s cynical remark (quoted by Robertson 1992, 49): ‘Nothing will be done anymore, without the whole world meddling in it.’

It would be impossible to trace comprehensively and step-by-step the origins and trials of the progress of machine technology to the point where global consciousness could arise. This, at any rate, presupposes that globalisation is the outcome of a linear process intended to bring about globalisation (unity) of the world’s disparate locales (distinctions). There are certainly important precedents, and among them some of the most important are political developments – for instance the Treaty of Versailles 1919 is seen by Giddens as ‘effectively the first point at which a reflexively monitored system of nation states came to exist globally,’ (Robertson 1992, 55). But the causes of World War One that lead to Versailles peace did not arise because of any explicitly ideological movement towards or against ‘globality’ as such. Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations was but the first (and a failed) attempt to regulate the diplomacy of civilised nation states in the aftermath of an unexpectedly nihilistic war between them. Nihilistic wars, if one takes nihilism to mean great destruction for little or no gain, are nothing new, if we recall the fate of Carthage (circa 146BC) and of the cities and states reduced by the Mongols across Asia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. What makes Versailles the culmination of disparate tendencies in world events into a precedent for a kind of integrated political ‘world-system’ is, following Harvey, the ‘compression of space-time’ (1990, part III) that was caused by the advent of radical forms of transportation and communication. The horse and the sail ship were the superior, i.e., swiftest, methods of transport from the beginning of human culture until the Europe’s industrial age many millennia hence, and with no improvement – such as the stirrup or quinquireme – so revolutionary as the actual abandonment of these methods in favour of machine-engines. Steam-engines and -ships drastically reduced the time taken to negotiate a distance; even more so the development of aeroplanes and jet aircraft. The world’s shrinking – its compression as such – is a process of the mastery of its distances and of the organisation of time into which more spaces than was formerly possible can be traversed (Lyotard calls this man’s ‘obsession with controlling time’; 1991, 73); objectively, of course, there is no such shrinking or compressing of the earth’s aspect, according to the Newtonian-Kantian schema. Robertson calls attention to the global idea that such organisation of time and space has given rise to:

‘Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole … [and] increasing acceleration in both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole in the twentieth century,’ (Robertson 1992, 8).

By no means does the compression of personal space and time necessarily lead to the consciousness of global unity. The easier travel became for people, the more restrictive were the national laws and preconditions for travel imposed upon individuals. Immigration quotas were brought into effect for the first time in America in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was augmented by 1924’s National Origins Act. The experience of the greater part of the globe in its ‘globality’ was limited to diplomats and the very wealthy. However, the possibility for unprecedented long-distant migrations was there, as the exclusionist legislation suggests. Still, the idea of the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ is presupposed by such acts of exclusion, of the partitioning of the world into discrete, geographically-demarcated spheres of interest. What is original in the phenomenon of ‘globalisation’ is the increasing co-determination of the ‘here’ and ‘there.’ The causality of the world’s actors has revealed itself gradually [and incrementally] to be patterns of a single image. Robertson calls attention to the way in which, for example, [the dissemination of] McLuhan’s ideas on the globality of world have influenced the move towards such a globality: ‘There can be little doubt that McLuhan both reflected and shaped media trends, so much so that in time we have come to witness (self-serving) media attempts to consolidate the idea of the global community,’ (Robertson 1992, 8-9). Globalisation, far from being a mere series of technological and political ‘accidents,’ is revealing itself to be a conscious attempt to forge the globality of the world.

A parallel process which lends itself to a theory of the chance origins of globalisation is the development of international finance. Even if, as some (like Eric Hobsbawm) have done,[1] one argues that nations are a development of industrialism’s uprooting of land-tied peasants, it is impossible to argue against the fact of the influence of credit banks, and the faith governments, governors and despots alike have had – and continue to hold – in them. Holton emphasises the function finance has played in developing the co-determination of geographically-disparate locales (our ‘here’ and ‘there’):

‘Banking and trading have for much longer [than the one hundred years since 1900], exhibited a transnational character, connected in part with diasporic groups such as Jews, Lombards, and the Chinese. In the past two centuries, private international bankers, for example, have periodically influenced the terms upon which nations responded to fiscal or military crisis by conditions placed on credit, whether in France in 1870-1 or Britain in 1931,’ (Holton 1998, 84).

The Great Depression of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties affected the industrialised nations of North America and Europe in tandem. National economies revealed themselves to be at the mercy of a complex, international system of labour, production, investment and regulation that was not necessarily tied to any specific locale. In addition, the growth of trade between nations and its fostering of greater global interdependence – the like of which Robertson refers to in our quote above (1992, 8) – has, particularly since colonial times, brought the causality of world affairs together into a kind of single network of international, or interregional, relations. The interdependence brought about by international trade links, and the technological ‘compression’ of the world, are further augmented by rapid population growth permitted by the complex economic structures. The Encyclopaedia Britannica claims that the ‘agricultural revolution’ of prehistoric man could support at most between five and ten million people;[2] today there are over six billion people in the world. If, after Harvey, one takes the earth’s space-time dimensions in terms of the ‘compression’ and ‘depression’ of distances, and includes the distance between urban areas and other human settlements, then the world is yet still ‘globalising’ itself into a society where, for need of space, indeed, nothing will be done anymore without the whole world’s ‘meddling in it.’ Rather than minimise the effect of an individual’s actions, which seems to be the more obvious corollary of a population explosion, the ‘international division of labour’ (Robertson 1992, 141) [foreseen by Marx and Engels as early as their penning The German Ideology], coupled with the increase of persons per square foot in the world, accentuates the demand made by individuals in one part of the world upon the conditions of other individuals in another part. The demands of specific parts of the world for goods or armaments now directly affect the industry, customs and living conditions of the other parts of the world. Perhaps most telling of this process is China’s new status as the ‘factory of the world,’ upon which formerly self-sufficient nation-states now depend for many of their manufactured wares.

This shrinking process, at once financial, political, and geographical, bespeaks a standardisation (Watson 2003) that is the essence of a ‘meddling’ in individual world affairs. ‘Organic,’ that is to say: internally-developed, systems of practice are eschewed in favour of an internationally-cognisant and artificially-contrived single body of law. We have suggested that the League of Nations was an incidental attempt to standardise political diplomacy between states – a standardisation that has national consent as its basis. In marked contrast, the post-Communist drive to standardise world economies has a specific logic and a prearranged goal of its own. To use a term of Giddens’s, this standardisation is ‘self-reflexive’ in that it knowingly transcends its origins as a merely incidental response to a particular set of world events to become an event itself. According to the German nationalist thinker Reinhold Oberlercher, political globalisation is a process that chips away at the autonomy of land-rooted communities for the purpose of promoting a society modelled upon the gesellschaft of the United States – a theory that is echoed by Robertson (1992, 12; 73), who sees globalisation as the transition from gemeinschaft (folk-community) to gesellschaft (cosmopolitan-society). Writes Oberlercher, ‘The unification of currency for all world capital funds and the universal right of suffrage for all citizens of the world are the logical end-stage of the capitalistic-democratic way of thinking,’ (Oberlercher 1992). Oberlercher sees America as the prototype of a ‘global nationality’ – a single world-nation in which peoples form regional societies for the sole purpose of guaranteeing contractual security for their private property, and who have as their cultural maxim, ‘Ubi bene ibi patri' [3] (Oberlercher 1992). But Robert Holton insists that international financial regulation, if not political regulation, is a necessary reaction to the pliability money now enjoys thanks to the possibility of instantaneous, electronic, cross-border transfers: ‘Although finally closed by the combined efforts of regulators in 1991, BCCI[4] had for twenty years capitalised on both the inability of nationally-based regulators to co-operate effectively and the existence of lax regulatory standards in a number of jurisdictions,’ (Holton 1998, 82). International regulatory boards – including, for instance, Interpol – guard individual nations from exploitation and ensure that the possibilities for travel and trade are balanced by provisions that prevent their abuse. In this sense the sovereignty of nations is upheld. However, the regulations themselves can impinge upon national or regional independence, whereupon the ‘globality’ of the world takes precedence over the local or national customs of a community. The globalisation of our private lives, here meant politically – though I shall also examine it culturally – depends at present on the extent to which ‘organic,’ national regulations are forfeited for the sake of the imposition of international laws ‘from above’. Globalisation thus conceived is the push-pull relationship between the needs of discrete communities and the needs of the globally-interdependent whole. Such a relationship is embodied by, for example, the resistance of local grocers to EU regulations on metric measurement. But the EU itself is not ‘international law’ – it is merely one among a number of economic-political blocs that comprise the world community.

The networking between constituents of the world community, whether we consider them in their local, national, or international contexts tends to the question of the globality of our lives. This networking, as with the development of international trade and geopolitics, is to a very significant degree the result of modern machine-technology. The ability to communicate instantaneously with parts of the world has homogenised, or at least synchronised, local and national agendas. Watson (2003, ‘“Davos” culture’) draws our attention to Huntington’s analysis of an international ‘jet-set’ that is aloof from ‘mere’ national and local trends and is influenced only by its own values, which, following Watson, are the pursuit of market economics, individualism, and democracy. They are in part responsible for the rise to power of media conglomerates like Viacom, and global financial authorities such as the World Bank. The ‘triumph’ of Greenwich Meantime as the standard world clock for most business districts of the world has improved the networking possibilities for financiers and ameliorated the processes of stock speculation, acquisitions, and mergers. In contrast to the networking of the global elite – which we must designate as a homogenising tendency, in its regulation and standardisation of law, labour and media –there are world-wide populist movements that are sympathetic to the ‘synchronising’ of distinct cultures and communities.[5] These movements are themselves often international, and they certainly transcend regional concerns, but, in marked opposition to Huntington’s elites, have as their common goal resistance to the consolidation of power in the hands of an apparently self-serving minority of rich and influential individuals. Such is the worldwide ‘anti-globalisation’ movement we see today. What is sought by the populists in resisting globalisation is not a share of the ‘spoils’ of globalisation, but the preservation of distinct communities that are imperilled by international cosmopolitanism. The populists, often themselves members of communities threatened by global trends, synchronise their activities with members of other communities for the purpose of mutual survival. The ‘globality’ of the world-as-whole is not denied by such actions; on the contrary, it is affirmed. Where once regional cultures existed with a minimum of outside influence that did not originate in geographically contiguous areas, now many locales, particularly those easily accessible to popular modes of transport and communication, are now threatened by homogenising, standardising trends. This resistance on the part of ‘organic’ cultures to the modernising influence of globalisation has lead to what Robertson calls the ‘museumization’ – that is to say, the artificial preservation – of folk customs and traditions; indeed, ‘The museumization of the premodern is a major feature of (post)modernity,’ (Robertson 1992, 153). Nature conservation, the encouragement of neglected or once-forbidden national culture (as for instance the revival of Gaelic in the Irish Republic), the preservation of sites of historical interest (at which the Americans excel)[6], et cetera, all involve the creation of intellectual or physical boundaries, from which the reach of global culture is excluded. The world, according to such a regimen, consists thus of a number of socio-cultural reservations, in which community (as gemeinschaft) can maintain itself against the overarching influence of global gesellschaft.

But what exactly is this ill-defined, but as a notion generally-accepted, ‘global culture’? It would not be presumptuous of us to suggest that global culture is largely a product of the original globalising nations of the West. What interests me is not that a species of cosmopolitan-Western culture has become the global culture, but that global culture is effectively the genuine culture that elicits a protectionist reaction in almost every other organic culture in the world. So-called ‘world federalism’ (Robertson 1992, 82), far from being an inauthentic culture of market economics, in fact provokes the organic culture to an artificial maintenance that looks to insulate itself from all forms of development. The development of all so-called organic cultures involved the creation of new, or the adaptation of existing, cultural traditions; the attempt by communities and states to insulate their traditional culture and customs from foreign and global influence presupposes that they are somehow ‘posthistorical’ phenomena. Indeed, a posthistorical preservation of national and regional culture is perhaps the only means of perpetuating the diversity of world cultures; the world of globalisation is a world in which the ‘here’ is rapidly beginning to resemble the ‘there,’ where commerce, regulation and technology hold sway. Holton, quoting Anthony Smith, contends that socio-political preservationism is a direct response of in-groups to encroachment from without: ‘Nationalism emerges where social groups face profound threats, be these from warfare or some other social and spiritual crisis,’ (Holton 1998, 146). What the global con-federates want, as nationalists or as conservationists, is the right to their own affairs and the ability to set their own agendas, agendas which do not necessarily coincide with the global aims of regulatory institutions like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund. As technologies become even more streamlined, transport faster and more accessible to all, media more effectively co-ordinated across continents, and the world’s spaces yet further compressed, it remains to be seen how successful the synchronicity of the global confederacy will be in preserving the world’s biodiversity from the effects of compression, regulation, and homogenisation that globalisation embodies. Whatever their reaction, their lives are surely as global as those they oppose.

---

[1]See his Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1992

[2]Op cit., ‘Population’ – trends in world population.

[3] Literally, ‘where things are good, there is my fatherland.’

[4] The Arab-owned Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

[5] Holton calls this networking phenomenon ‘simultaneity’ (1998, 110), though for the purposes of his work he does not distinguish between its use by elites and by populists.

[6] The battlefield sites of, e.g., Gettysburg and Antietam from the Civil War, and Little Bighorn from the Indian Wars are immaculately preserved; this is in contradistinction to Europe and Asia, the ‘Old Worlds.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990

Holton, Robert J. Globalization and the Nation State. London: Macmillan, 1998

Oberlercher, Reinhold. ‘The Nature and the Fall of America,’ trans. R. Belser & M. Haberkamp, www.deutsches-kolleg.org/

Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992

CD-Rom

Watson, James L. ‘Globalization,’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 4

Misusing Terms
For Spengler, cultures did not clash; they succeeded and misunderstood each other. A culture did not meet its fate accidentally, for example by going down to a rival culture, but inexorably, by aging into a war-torn and degraded civilization. The very different clash-of-cultures theory was represented in his day by the Polish philosopher Feliks Koneczny in his book On the Plurality of Civilizations.(3) Koneczny (1862-1949) dealt with civilizations as "the largest extant fractions of humanity", above states and nations (what Spengler called cultures); and he agreed that "Historically and sociologically there is no such thing as mankind." But he held that cultures inevitably conflict, struggling until one or the other is destroyed. Peaceful interpenetration could lead only to bastardization. ("There are no syntheses only poisonous mixtures. . . . We cannot be civilized in two different ways.") So he dismissed Spengler out of hand: "I do not know of a greater absurdity than the doctrine of the fall of civilizations as a result of old age; the Jewish and Chinese go on."
Samuel Huntington revived these notions in less bellicose form in his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations": "Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts." And he believes that we are in for more of it: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic [but] cultural", that is, the clash of cultures. Huntington says the West's "civil wars" - two world wars and the Cold War - were not Spenglerian, but in fact they would seem to correspond exactly to Spengler's period of the contending states; and he writes as if the coming clash of cultures were Spenglerian, when we have seen that it is not. It is nothing against Huntington, of course, that he uses terms differently from Spengler, and he could still be correct in his prognostications. But a closer consideration of Spengler's theory would have enabled Huntington to anticipate the main argument of his critics, such as James Kurth in "The Real Clash" (The National Interest, Fall 1994): namely, that the West's real cultural problems arise from internal corruption, and that a similar bastardization is well advanced, thanks to Western influence, in the cultures Huntington fears - which is why they need not be feared.
A different misuse of Spenglerian terms characterized the late Cold War. When Hans Morgenthau wrote "The Decline of the West" in Partisan Review in 1975, when David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) wrote Must the West Decline (1966), or when a score of publicists similarly echoed Spengler, they were thinking of a different "West" (usually NATO) and were concerned with matters of strategy and Great Power rivalry far removed from Spengler's concerns. And when Paul Kennedy studied The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers from an unprofitably narrow economic angle, he was the anti-Spengler in his indifference to the soul and style of cultures. To their credit, neither Spengler nor Toynbee ever mistook the Soviet Union for a culture or a civilization. (Nor, added Spengler, had Japan ever had a culture.) Toynbee called Russia a Western deviant or sport, while Spengler dubbed it a pseudomorphosis, a stunted cultural offshoot inside another, as the Magian (Arab) culture had been inside Hellenism. As early as 1922, Spengler predicted that the Soviet Union would be expansionist and aggressive, and he doubted the Slav's attachment to Western scientific culture; but he never saw that as a possible cause of a decline of the West. The application of his rhetoric to the strategic case brought the familiar fatalist temptation, as Owen Harries noted: "The decline thesis also has an operational purpose. . . . The policy prescription attached to the analysis is not that the country should strive to arrest and reverse the decline, but that it should adjust to it."(4)
inally, Spengler was invoked by those who took "the West" to mean "the white race", and its decline to consist in eclipse by some other race, be the peril yellow, black, brown, or brindle. There is not a word of this in The Decline of the West. True, Faustian man seems very Germanic, but Spengler had an unflattering opinion of other "whites", notably Russians, Italians, and Spaniards; while in the political tracts, the enemy is England. He warned of the danger to Western manufacturing industry from cheap Asian labor, in terms similar to those Sir James Goldsmith uses today. But none of this was part of his scenario for decline; and it would have contradicted his theory of the meaningless succession of cultures for him to pretend to predict where the next one would arise, for that was Incident, not Destiny. That did not prevent Arturo Labriola from claiming that he was following Spengler in his Le Crepuscule de la civilisation: l'Occident et les peuples de couleur, where he made the apocalyptic prediction that a struggle between colored races and European imperialism was about to destroy civilization. Labriola was closer to Koneczny in his view that cultures are necessarily aggressive and destructive; to be sure, his undated book seems to have been written in 1936, when the world looked that way.
More significantly, Labriola admits that his ideas "coincide with Lothrop Stoddard's book." Stoddard is a name seldom heard today, though it crops up in an unexpected place, The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins (The Letters, pp. 289-90), "I read [Spengler] the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don't think I ever quite recovered from him. He and Marx are the only modern philosophers that still make sense in this horrible mess." He went on to quote Spengler's description of the brutal, ruthless, uncultured realism of late civilized man, and it is possible that Fitzgerald was thinking of this when he depicted the "monied thugs" of his novels, especially Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. But Richard D. Lehan went much further and decided that Spengler's "influence on [Fitzgerald's] work is so great that it is amazing that it has so long been overlooked."(5) He developed a Spenglerian interpretation of the three principal novels: Dick Driver's career in Tender is the Night parallels the decline of the West; Faustian man fights it out with the new Caesar in The Last Tycoon; and Gatsby is the last Faustian, the man of infinite desire. There is even the preposterous suggestion that the narrator's reflection that Gatsby and the characters around him "were all Westerners" refers not to their status in East Coast society but to Spengler's declining West.
What we know for sure is that the villain of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, urges people to read a book called "The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard." There is no such book but Fitzgerald gives us a clue when a drunk pulls a book at random off Gatsby's shelves and it is "the Stoddard lectures." So the reference is to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, an archetypal yellow peril potboiler. The narrator later calls it "stale ideas" and thinks it revealing that Buchanan would be obsessed by such stuff. So Fitzgerald knew his Spengler well enough to conclude that the prophecy that Western culture would be swamped by the colored races was an idea fit for roughnecks.
None of the foregoing reactions to the decline thesis constitutes an answer to Spengler's prophecy, but of course such answers were not lacking. The first and most often advanced was that science and technology have put Western culture into a different case from all preceding cultures, thus postponing the doomed collapse, breaking the cycle of the civilizations, and converting Western culture into world culture. R.G. Collingwood, in his 1927 review of Spengler in Antiquity, ruled that there is no longer "a mere plurality of cultures, but a unity of that plurality, a unity which is the present culture, the heir of all the past."
Progress theorists have taken the same line ever since, especially in America. James T. Shotwell, for example, agreed in 1929 that science had made our civilization not only different from its predecessors but corrosive of their foundations, of their repetitiveness, of their economic limitations, and of their reduction of intercultural relations to domination, predation, and exploitation. (Shotwell's further deduction that, consequently, there would be no more "disasters, Caesarism and Machtpolitik" was, for 1929, ill-timed.) The same ideas were advanced in 1964 in Kenneth Boulding's The Meaning of the Twentieth Century - The Great Transition: the era of civilizations is at an end because the scientific revolution has inaugurated "a new state of man." Similarly, Frye in his 1974 re-evaluation of The Decline of the West in Daedalus foresaw a shift from Western to world culture: "If science is a universal structure of knowledge, it can help mankind to break out of culture-group barriers. . . . [T]he transition would be to something bigger than another culture."
Without necessarily disagreeing, not everyone was enthusiastic about this promised end of separate civilizations. Ludwig von Bertalanffy said that Spengler had been a true prophet but that his "enormous cycle of history is now accomplished", thanks to "globality and technology which, in a way, explode the cyclic scheme" to introduce "a global technological mass society in which old cultural values and individual creativity are replaced by . . . a Brave New World of affluent mediocrity . . . a post-historical age" (Perspectives on General System Theory, 1975).
Another response to Spengler's doom-saying was, roughly speaking, "What's wrong with a bit of doom? Cultural collapse never hurt anyone!" This idea runs back to Vico, who thought that over-refined, vicious, and "effeminate" societies could be reinvigorated by a relapse (ricorso) to primitive religion and heroic barbarism. It was taken up in our day by that lonely genius, Franz Borkenau, who thought that "Spengler is by no means 'done with'" and that his argument had not been answered.(6) In particular, he averred, the fury directed at the "prophet of doom" sprang from "a mixture of self-deification and a fear of death transposed to society." In fact, said Borkenau, the cycle of cultures had not ended and could not, for "history knows no resting point in this up-and-down pattern." A fall into barbarism was no disaster, and could be revivifying; indeed, "the more profound the barbaric downfall, the more creative the subsequent culture." Taking a cheerful view of the supposedly approaching chaos, Borkenau wrote: "For such is the paradox of human affairs that men, by walking with open eyes towards the disintegration of their own civilization, may yet serve and experience the fulness of life. . . . In times such as these there is only one upright attitude: Amor fati."
Some support for this cheerful attitude toward doom came from the civilization scientists studying the sociology of recurrent social collapse. In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Joseph A. Tainter rejected Spengler's organic explanation of collapse as "mystical" and suggested that social collapses are "responses to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity." As such, they are not catastrophes, simply relapses to a lower degree of complexity. So social collapse "is an economising process [and] may be the most appropriate response" to unfavorable historical circumstances.
In a way, both the above responses to Spengler amount to saying the same thing, though in a different tone of voice. Both those who predict a global Westernized civilization that survives the death of the great cultures, and those who predict a comfortable, habitable, post-cultural incoherence (sometimes called "chaos") are assuming that science and technology can henceforth sustain a viable society that lacks any particular cultural underpinning, a post-historical high-tech barbarism. If that is indeed the argument, Spengler would have thought he had anticipated it when he insisted on the unity of a culture, even to the point of claiming that each culture had its own science, which could not outlive its cultural context. If Faustian man dies, his science and technology will die with him.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 3

It was in April 1919 that Paul Valery said, fatuously, "Nous autres civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles." ["We civilisations now know why we are mortal".] Spengler claimed to show why, insisting that, unlike anyone before him, he was not talking about the decline of nations or states or empires but of a whole culture, including its youngest offshoots in the New World. America, he specified, was the epitome of civilization and thus "had no future."

Wyndham Lewis said ironically in Time and Western Man (1927), "This thesis is, in itself and apart from anything else, such an immensely popular one that the book was assured an immediate and overwhelming success everywhere, from Moscow to Johannesburg." Doom has gone on being popular ever since, and Francis Fukuyama pointed out that the really successful universal histories written in this century were those, like Spengler's and Toynbee's, that predicted "the decline and decay of Western values and institutions." Frye noticed that the very fact that we talk about "Western culture" is part of this doom-mongering; it is common to go on and say it is "old", that it puts one in mind of latter-day Rome, that things have gone wrong since about Napoleon's day. All such views, he added, "have a more or less muddled version of Spengler's vision as their basis. . . . If we do not acquire our knowledge of Spengler's vision from Spengler we have to get it out of the air, but get it we will; we have no choice in the matter." Ernst Cassirer was no doubt speaking for Germans when he said in The Myth of the State that between the First and Second World Wars, Spengler's very title was enough to inflame imaginations: "At this time many, if not most of us, had realized that something was rotten in the state of our highly prized Western civilization. Spengler's book expressed in a sharp and trenchant way this general uneasiness." But the mood persisted and spread. As late as 1969, Matthew Melko observed that all those systems, whether proposed by Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, or Kroeber, that involved "the conception of a number of exclusive, durable, mortal macrocultures" have met considerable interest, which "derives, no doubt, from a feeling that our own civilization might be facing the possibility of coming to an end, of 'dying' if you will, as others apparently have in the past."(1)

Whether or not such forebodings were genuine, they served wonderfully as a pretext for a facile pathos, a self-pitying world weariness. The poseur who is the hero of Andre Malraux's La Tentation de l'Occident (1926) tells his Chinese friend that "Europeans are weary of themselves, of their crumbling individualism, of their exaltation"; their art is "an abandoned palace attacked by winter winds, the wall of intellect is gradually falling into ruin. . . ." He reproduces exactly Spengler's view of contemporary art when he says it leaves "an impression of a kind of insanity, an insanity both self-conscious and self-satisfied."

Unfortunately for the case he is making, some of the most insane of that art is an endorsement of Spengler, as in William Butler Yeats' book, The Vision (1925, revised 1938). Yeats explained that in 1918, soon after his marriage, he discovered that his wife was given to automatic writing at the dictation of unseen powers whom he calls "instructors" and who were somehow related to Oswald Spengler. Even though The Decline was not yet published, Mrs. Yeats in a trance wrote out the Spenglerian philosophy, using the identical metaphors and symbols. When the book came out in English, Yeats said, "I found there a correspondence too great for coincidence between most of his essential dates and those I had received [from "the instructors"] before the publication of his first German edition." A friendly critic thinks Yeats was being whimsical but he was in earnest. The book raises the question whether Yeats was sometimes slightly mad; it is dedicated to Ezra Pound who surely was.

The Spenglerian pathos was not always so unsettling. A feeling for the fragility of imperial power and the vulnerability of high culture is no bad thing. Sound and humane policy is more likely made to the tune of Kipling's Recessional, which reminds us we will soon be "one with Nineveh and Tyre", than to the sound of Land of Hope and Glory, with its bombast about setting imperial bounds wider still. Even so, it is a mood that can lead to some fatalistic compromises. Hans Robert Jauss, the literary theorist who pioneered the study of reader-reception, tells us that when he joined the Waffen SS in October 1939, "my reading of Spengler's Decline of the West, a book banned by the Nazis, had made me skeptical about the Hitlerian empire." He could not believe in the thousand-year reich, thanks to Spengler, but he could still join the Waffen SS. Nearer to us is the case of Henry Kissinger, of whom Stanley Hoffmann has said, "Henry, in his melancholy, seems to walk with the spirit of Spengler at his side."

Kissinger himself has said that he conducted policy "with a premonition of catastrophe." He has admitted to "a perverse fascination" with Spengler's historic pessimism, but says he rejected Spengler's notion of the inevitability of decay; indeed, he had said as much in his 1950 Harvard thesis. Nevertheless, critics have claimed to detect a fatalistic defeatism in his policies, something which flowed from a belief that American civilization had passed its high point, like so many before it, and had to accommodate the rising forces represented by the USSR, "Sparta to our Athens." This became, briefly, a political issue in the 1970s, when retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt said Kissinger had told him such things; Ronald Reagan declared that the Sparta/Athens = USSR/USA analogy was a lapse of faith that was making Kissinger too keen to cut a deal with Moscow. Kissinger said his views were being distorted and misrepresented, and from what we know of his sympathy with the Kantian idea of moral freedom, we can believe him. But at least one of his biographers maintains there is a "kernel of truth" in the suggestion that the former Secretary of State was a case of Spenglerian pessimism.(2)

Elsewhere, too, discussion of Spengler's doomsaying has not been about whether it was plausible or warranted but about the bad moral and political consequences of preaching such doctrines, the encouragement it gave to despair, to anti-cultural and anti-intellectual coarseness, and to callous acceptance of the destruction of our society and its inheritance. Of many such denunciations, Thomas Mann's is most eloquent:

But when I found out that this man wanted his prophecies of death and petrifaction taken in sober earnest; that he was instructing the young not to waste their emotions and passions on culture, art, poetry and such things, but to hold fast to what must inevitably be the future, which they must will in order to will anything at all, to technique and mechanics, administration, perhaps politics; when I perceived that the hand this man held out toward the yearnings and wishes of the human being was actually just the old natural Satanic claw, then I averted my face and put the book out of my sight, lest I find myself admiring so harmful and deadly a work.

Spengler shrugged off these attacks on his fatalism with a Latin tag asserting that, "The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling", but he did proffer several qualifications. The Untergang he was prophesying did not mean a smash-up: "The idea of catastrophe is not implied in the word." It meant rather fulfillment (Vollendung); as Lewis Mumford said, "The title whispered the soothing words downfall, doom, death." It was not mechanical but organic, like growing old, and it is not fatalism to learn to live your age. There were still choices to be made, as between a plundering Anglo-Saxon capitalism and a Prussian socialism based on blood and honor. But Spengler did not live to proffer the most important qualification of all: the phrase "decline of the West", tinged with defeatism and despair, came to be associated with three outcomes that Spengler never envisaged or believed in. They are the "clash of cultures"; the great power rivalry that pitted another "West" against the USSR; and the Yellow Peril that supposedly threatened the white race.

Philosophy: 'The Worst Argument in the World'

James Franklin writes on deceased eccentric David Stove's notion of the worst argument in the world (which means basically a form of idealism). Article here.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 2

Those later political pamphlets (which are acutely analyzed by Rolf Peter Sieferle in Die Konservative Revolution, Frankfurt, 1995) are said by some critics to reveal the secret meaning of The Decline, but if so that was not what fascinated so many readers, especially outside Germany. Spengler's political career was actually rather pathetic, as so often is the case when an unsophisticated scholar gets taken up by men of power. A Dutch researcher has lately discovered that, made famous by his big book, Spengler became adviser to a conspiratorial network of Ruhr industrialists and political and paramilitary activists in Berlin and Bavaria, and thus found himself on the fringes of a national-conservative plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic. He wisely retreated to his study, but despite being still ambivalent about Nazism, let himself be wheeled in several times to see Hitler. He decided Hitler was a Dummkopf who had nothing of the coming Caesar. He found the Nazis' racism stupid, their economic policies shortsighted, and their "socialism" far removed from the old-fashioned Prussian state-capitalism Spengler intended by that name. Although Ernst Junger tried to claim him for the movement, dedicating Der Arbeiter (1932) to him, the Nazis saw that he was too reactionary for them, and his big book was banned. So Spengler was caught in a crossfire: Theodor Adorno said, "In Germany he was ostracized as a pessimist and a reactionary. . . . Abroad he was considered one of those ideologically responsible for the relapse into barbarism."

Getting back to Spengler's one important work, it was (according to the tide he first proposed to his publisher) a "morphology of world history", that is, an account of the successive, meaningless, unconnected rises and falls that constitute what is improperly (because monistically) called the history of humanity. Such cyclical theories are as old as the Greeks and Romans, but what was original to Spengler was his suggestion about what it was that rose and fell: a culture. For him that meant an ideal or a style that characterized a whole group of societies over a long period, and which was expressed in or symbolized by everything they did, from music to mathematics, from economy to architecture. According to Spengler, there had been eight or nine such cultures in history, and the two he paid most attention to were the Apollonian, which arose in the heroic age of Greece and died in the Roman Empire, and the Faustian, which arose in Western Europe a thousand years before and was now in its declining stage.

That stage told the same tragic story in each case, and Spengler called it by a familiar German pejorative, "civilization" - the age of the big city, war, democracy, and finally, Caesarism. When it culminated, that culture was dead, and for a time men lived without history, until one day, one could not know when or where, a new soul or ideal would be born and find expression in a new culture. That culture would flower and flourish in its turn and then decline and die. The cultures were external to each other, neither influencing nor inheriting; in fact, they could not understand each other and their relations consisted of deliberate misunderstanding. So, of course, their succession had no cumulative sense, no meaning. This, then, was not a philosophy of history so much as a science of civilizations; not a positive science, though, because its method was intuition, feeling, and analogy.

Northrop Frye said that every single element of this construction ("one of the world's great Romantic poems") has been utterly refuted a dozen times, and yet that its leading ideas are "as much part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians." We can test that proposition by separating out the leading ideas from the profusion of learning, poesy, mysticism, and oracle that is The Decline of the West. They are two: the conviction that the West is doomed and that its sun is already setting; and the assertion that culture comes in totalities, monads that are not connected by any bridges that could escape cultural relativism.

Prophet of Doom

The doomsaying was what most readers got out of the book. Said Charles and Mary Beard, in The American Spirit (1942),

Whatever meaning the arbitrary and fanciful divisions into epochs may have carried in the author's brain, Spengler's judgment of history certainly conveyed to American readers the notion that 'Western civilization' was doomed and that another Caesar, the conquering man of blood and iron, would bring it to an end.

The rest of the book was taken as "evidence" for that proposition; only historians and scholars with special interests could cope with the mass of learned allusions, artistic judgments, and stunning analogies in the sections on past cultures. For the rest of us, Spengler was saying that all past cultures eventually fell into the state of civilization and then collapsed. We have been in such a state since Napoleon, so our end is nigh, meaning within the next century or so.

Decline and fall had been a familiar and portentous theme ever since the history of the collapse of the Roman Empire was pieced together, but the suggestion that modern societies could go the same way was little more than a rhetorical or poetic flourish, and one not taken seriously by the confident and optimistic nineteenth century. Nietzsche sought to shake that confidence, and Georges Sorel mocked it in Les Illusions du progres (1908), but as Erich Kahler said in The Meaning of History (1965),

Those ideas, at the time . . . went almost unnoticed by the broad public. The world-shaking and value-shaking catastrophe of the First World War was needed to prepare the ground for their thriving and widespread influence. The man of the hour was Spengler.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 1

Article by Neil McInnes. The National Interest, 1997.

Books have their destinies, says the Latin tag, and they can vary as widely as those of human beings - from those that, in David Hume's heartfelt phrase, fall stillborn from the press but later stir to life as beacons of the mind, to those that are the wonder of a year before falling into oblivion.

It is often said that Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West met that second fate, but the truth is rather different. It was the wonder of the years 1918 to 1922 in Germany (and of 1926 in English-speaking countries), achieving sales so incongruously large in relation to its length and density that one is bound to question (as one does in the cases of Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses and Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time) how many of those who bought the book actually read it. Subsequently, it ran into a barrage of destructive criticism from the guild of historians, while its author, giddy with fame, dabbled so grossly in right-wing politics that in due course he was granted two interviews with Chancellor Hitler. While it became unseemly in academic circles to cite the work, it continued to exert, if only by way of its rifle, an influence that must be admitted to be universal.

Today, looking back, The Decline of the West can be seen to stand at the gate whereby entered such pervasive intellectual fashions as postmodernist relativism, multiculturalism, and hostile suspicion of dead white European males. It inspired more than fashions, however. Spengler's Decline led directly to a new would-be science, the comparative sociology of civilizations, and it animated the twentieth century's avid passion for philosophies of history, which everyone affects to disdain but which, observed Raymond Aron, "nevertheless exercise an influence on the historical conscience of our day." Above all, it inspired a mood, a feeling, a pathos: that of living uneasily through the end of an old, tired, dying culture.

Yet by mid-century it had been written off. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy W.H. Dray said it had enjoyed "instant but short-lived fame" in the 1920s, and if it was discussed again after the second war that was because of Arnold Toynbee's similar labors and not because of a belated recognition of Spengler's merits. Erich Heller maintained that Spengler "performed one of the most curious feats in the history of modern thought: in a remarkably short time he has achieved a kind of highly topical oblivion." After being "passionately debated" at the time of publication, "his work is by general consent utterly out of date." I shall show that this was, and still is, far from true.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was an obscure nobody of prodigious erudition and romantic imagination. Born in the Harz mountains to modest circumstances, he took a doctorate at Halle in 1904 and was teaching mathematics in a Munich high school in 1911 when a small inheritance enabled him to retire to his study and work on his magnum opus. He never married; a sister kept house for him. He had fully planned his book when war began in 1914 and he composed it under trying wartime conditions; one sister committed suicide in 1917, another lost her husband at the front, and Spengler was often cold and hungry, writing by candlelight. His two-volume masterpiece came out in 1918 and 1922 and was an enormous success, selling 100,000 copies in a few years. Apart from misunderstandings engendered by the title, its appeal to Germans humiliated by defeat and wracked by revolution and inflation was the message that a similar fate awaited the arrogant victors, including that so-called "young" nation, America. Western culture was dying, and the way cultures die is by deteriorating into urbanized, machine-dominated civilizations, rent by warring states, anarchic democracies, until a Caesar rose to dominate them all. Cold comfort for Germans, but no one was promising better certainly not Weimar's feeble democracy.

There were even hints in the book of a thought Spengler went on to make explicit in a series of partisan tracts and pamphlets, namely that in this twilight era of uncultured civilization there could be a special role for Germany, provided she was no longer "the people of poets and thinkers" but became the land of engineers, industrialists, technicians - and ruthless, anti-democratic, socialist dictators. Culture was finished, passe; the last centuries of Western civilization were to be the time of ruthless realists. (Incidentally, that is the background to a notorious remark, wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering but which actually belongs to the character Thiemann in Hanns Johst's 1933 play Schlageter: "When I hear the word culture . . . I undo the safety-catch of my Browning.") As early as 1921 Spengler wrote, "We Germans will never bring forth another Goethe, but a Caesar, yes." The foundation stone of his extraordinary reputation as a prophet was laid.