Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 5 (final part)

Cultural Totalities

Since Spengler's doomsaying, and indeed his whole system, depend on this cultural monism, the most effective response is not to compete in prophecy by predicting either an everlasting one-world civilization or a comfortable chaos, but to demonstrate the pluralism of any culture past or present. The more autonomous (though connected) activities one can identify in a culture, the less likely it becomes that all of them were foreordained to climax and decline in unison.

That was the approach taken by Alfred Weber (Max's brother) right from 1921. Weber accepted the Spenglerian morphology of cultures, each with its own soul or set of symbols and all affected by a cycle of productivity and stagnation. But this, said Weber, was only one strand of history, alongside two others, which he called the social process and the civilization process. That tripartite division reappeared in Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), as the three autonomous "axial principles" of contemporary society: the culture, the political order, and the technical/economic system. Their disjunctions and contradictions, their different "rhythms" and rates of change (plus the fact that the last-named, unlike the first, is cumulative) make Spengler's inexorable doom scenario highly improbable in the absence of external forces. By now, of course, we have gone beyond doomsaying to the second leading idea of The Decline of the West, the notion of cultural totalities.

Arnold Toynbee thought that Spengler's vision of a culture (he called it a civilization) as a closely knit unit with a characteristic soul was "an insight of genius", but no one else has had much use for this Hegelian self-developing essence immune to external influence. (Toynbee, incidentally, piled another mountain of erudition on to Spengler's system but at each crucial point in the argument he introduced inconsistency, triviality, or religiosity, so that his twelve volumes are negligible for the further treatment of Spengler's main ideas.) Twentieth-century scholarship was intolerant of monist abstractions and its whole drift was toward a pluralist and realistically untidy notion of a culture, a civilization, or a society. Clifford Geertz exemplified this in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) when he said that the network of interdependencies within a culture - some direct, others indirect, some practically negligible - did not constitute a rigid system. Therefore there could be no "heroic 'holistic' assault upon the 'basic configurations of this culture', an overarching 'order of orders' from which more limited configurations can be seen as mere deductions." Put "symbols" in place of "deductions" and there goes Spengler's soulful, essentialist culture.

Nevertheless, and respecting as far as possible this tentative approach, there gradually arose after Spengler a sustained interest in what was variously called the science of civilizations, culturology, or comparative macrosociology. For this purpose, it was accepted that large supra-national cultural units can display enough unity or common style to allow of generalization and comparison. What was not taken over from Spengler was the metaphysical prejudice that such units were self-unfolding essences, of which the life-course was foreordained by a unique character or destiny. And there was no patience with the idea that each life-course was rigidly periodized into comparable stages that permitted of analogy and prediction.

Spengler gave the "civilizationists" their subject but not their method. That method is usually positivist, in the manner of "social science", though anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber (Configurations of Culture Growth, 1944) and sociologists like Pitrim Sorokin (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937) were not systematically opposed to Spengler's intuitive insights into the styles of various cultures. All these approaches are seen in the proceedings of the International Society for Comparative Study of Civilizations, whether of its first conference in 1961 (The Problems of Civilization, edited by O. Anderle, 1964) or of its meetings from 1978 and 1986 (The Boundaries of Civilizations in Space and Time, edited by M. Melko and L. Scott, 1989). Melko recalls that Spengler's culture morphology was at first overwhelmingly rejected, as dealing in "fictitious entities." He then adds:

But time has given a different answer. Many historians write today with a sharpened awareness of cultural integration and characterization. They seek relationships between politics, economics, and aesthetics, and they dismiss cause-and-effect political history as out of date, something that belongs to the nineteenth century. What they have rejected in the system-builders is their dogmatic periodization. The basic concepts have stood. Civilizations do have meaningful inner relationships, they can be characterized, they can be distinguished from one another.

While the comparative study of civilizations is not yet exempt from acerbic criticism by traditional historians averse to abstraction and generalization, it is striking that their occasional jousts with the civilizationists (and with Toynbee) do little more than repeat the arguments of the controversy unleashed in Germany in the 1920s by The Decline of the West. Then, and later, the element in Spengler's theory that aroused most intense opposition, even scorn, was the assertion that cultures are incommensurable, they have no common standards, they cannot understand or influence each other, and their very science and mathematics are culture-bound. They are monads without windows. It was easy to show that this argument was self-destructive, for how could the Faustian Oswald Spengler know so much about past cultures, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Faustians who read his book? But instead of self-destructing, cultural relativism prospered as one of the most successful ideas of the twentieth century.

Spengler was not the sole inventor of this field of study. It was formed by the confluence of several tributaries, of which Spengler's book was one. It was powerfully encouraged by Marxism's totalizing approach, by functionalism and then structuralism in anthropology, and by systems analysis in social science - as well as by the concern of UNESCO (which financed the above-mentioned conferences) to put peripheral "cultures" on a footing with dominant Western civilization. The relativist tendency of historicism was available to be taken to outright skepticism once Wilhelm Dilthey's vague dream of a philosophical synthesis of social perspectives was abandoned. The Marxist reduction of much culture to class-bound ideology (bourgeois justice, bourgeois science, proletarian art) was a pervasive relativist influence. But Spengler pushed the relativist paradox to the furthest limit, not just to a solipsism of cultures but, since each culture had successive stages that similarly could not understand each other, truth was forced back to ever more restricted social redoubts. When the quite uncontrolled appellation "culture" was transferred from Spengler's vast Hochkultur to petty tribal cultures and thereafter to such vacuous notions as youth culture, counterculture, gay culture, and feminist culture, the number of groups ready to claim cultural isolation became legion.

Academic philosophers were at hand to turn this declension into dogma. Take the case of Michel Foucault. Right from Les Mots et les choses, Foucault said that in place of history he would put an archeology; in place of continuities, traditions, influences, causes, comparisons, and typologies, he would put ruptures, discontinuities, and disjunctions. He would privilege the differences rather than the similarities between the various epochs of the history of consciousness. So regarded, the history of culture loses its narrative and falls apart into "epistemes" or knowledge systems that do not evolve or cumulate; they simply appear alongside one another without rhyme or reason, like Spengler's cultures. Science and culture lose all continuity because, Foucault asserts, there have been several great epochs of epistemic coherence in modern times and the ruptures between them are so profound that they are isolated from one another, untranslatable one into the other, in a word, incommensurable. Each "epistemic field" lives a plant-like cycle until it collapses and is replaced by another in blind succession. The demise of our own particular episteme is nigh and its successor is unpredictable (which incidentally rules out political activity aimed at influencing it, because we could not understand it from within the prison of our episteme).

Critics saw that this was a Spenglerian construction; "melange instable de Spengler et Heidegger", said Michel Amiot, while Hayden White saw in it the same isolating intention as in Spengler, the effort to "effectively isolate men within different, not to say mutually exclusive, universes of discourse, thought and action."(7) Once "we are isolated within our peculiar modalities of experience", then thought is led "into the interior of a given mode of consciousness, where all of its essential mystery, opaqueness and particularity are celebrated as evidence of the irreducible variety of human nature."

The social implications of this bizarre epistemology come readily into view. It is a further step in what Lucien Febvre called the breaking up of "the immense empire of civilization into autonomous provinces." Civilization, truth, and human nature itself are to be fragmented in space and in time. The dethronement of a dominant and supposedly dying Western culture led first to tolerance of other cultures and then, thanks to the absence of any standards (dismissed as "meta-narratives"), to the elevation of any style or pathos that cared to clamor for equal time. From Spengler's eight or nine high cultures via Toynbee's twenty-odd civilizations we arrived at the melee of pathetic particularisms, each complaining "You don't understand me."

If the west were to decline, this could be one way it would go down; but it is hard to believe that a vast civilization that has at its simultaneous disposal (pace Spengler) all the resources of both the classical and the modern scientific cultures could be brought low by disruptive policies that cannot even state their intellectual basis without self-contradiction. Sir Isaiah Berlin rails against them:

Relativists, Spenglerians, positivists, deconstructionists are wrong: communication is possible between individuals, groups, cultures because the values of men are not infinitely many; they belong to a common horizon - the objective, often incompatible, values of mankind, between which it is necessary, often painfully, to choose.(8)

So the conflicts that cultural relativism pretends to explain are not really about communication and understanding but about conflicting choices, contradictory policies, incompatible intentions. To allow that they are all equally objective and, given patience, understandable is not to surrender to any one set of policies as canonical, compulsory, or alone properly human. Quite the contrary, discarding Spenglerian relativism and monism, and their contemporary "post-modern" variations, is a prerequisite to effective criticism of solidarism and other cultural frauds.

1 Matthew Melko, The Nature of Civilizations (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).

2 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Isaacson says in a note (p. 776), "Spengler also fascinated Paul Nitze, who in the late 1930s quit his Wall Street job to go to Harvard and study The Decline of the West."

3 Published with a preface by Arnold Toynbee in London in 1962 from the 1935 Polish original.

4 "The Rise of American Decline", Commentary (May 1988).

5 Richard D. Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966).

6 Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

7 Michel Amiot, "Le Relativisme culturaliste de Michel Foucault" in Les Temps Modernes (January 1967); and Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground", History and Theory, vol. 12, 1973.

8 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban, 1992).