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.