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.