Posted on by David Ashton · 3 Comments

The spectre of Spengler

Oswald Spengler. Woodcut by Bertrand Zadig
WADE SMITH revisits Decline of the West, and its critics

To paraphrase a famous Tory lexicographer, a death-sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully. People are born, flourish, weaken, and pass away, but so do nations and empires. Although the comparison is metaphorical, the phenomenon is real.

Surely the gradual crumbling of Great Britain from Lord Salisbury’s imperial zenith to Ed Miliband’s imbecile zero is undeniable. It fits into a general Euro-American deterioration, exacerbated by welfare-dependence, industrial unrest and defence-alliance disarray. Consequently, a revival of interest has occurred over questions of historical change, and in its successive commentators, from Plato and Polybius, through Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, to Paul Kennedy and Paul Cooper.

Overshadowing them all is Oswald Spengler, who died 89 years ago this May. His huge work on “Western decline” drew admirers. Nirad Chaudhuri called it “one of the greatest books of our time.” Henry Kissinger saw it as an “attempt at the resolution of the problems of existence,” while Fernand Braudel praised “its tone, the breadth of its views, its passion for understanding.” Christopher Dawson wrote that “Spengler wishes to make the present generation conscious of the crisis through which it is passing and of the true task that lies before it.”

However, the well-known historian Niall Ferguson, under the impression that Spengler had been influenced by Wagner (it was actually Goethe), once asserted that his “turgid” prose was nowadays seldom read [1]. But his giant Geist has rematerialized – to haunt the current geostrategic gloom of international trade turmoil and knife-edge security risks.

Many references to Spengler have lately appeared in print journalism, scholarly monographs, timely podcasts and specialist websites, from Professor David Engels [2] to Professor Stephen R. L. Clark [3].  His early historical studies and family photos have been publicised. The glib dismissal of his magisterial oeuvre as a ‘gargantuan horror-scope’ ceases to amuse in the world he so accurately predicted.

Recent books include the richly researched, indispensable Oswald Spengler & the Politics of Decline, by the Marxist scholar Dr Ben Lewis, on his principled “Prussian” activism and mutual incompatibility with Hitler, who (I discovered) specifically denounced him in a public address on May Day 1935. The Decline & Fall of Civilisations is a considerable survey from the prolific and idiosyncratic writer Dr Kerry Bolton, who endorses Spengler’s suggestion of the next major Culture emerging from the Russian landscape. Especially important is his place among Dr Neema Parvini’s constructively analytical Prophets of Doom, alongsideGobineau, Carlyle, Brooks Adams, Glubb Pasha, Evola, Sorokin, Toynbee, Turchin and Tainter. Ulrik Rasmussen’s relevant Fall of Western Civilization: The Cycle of Supremacy also deserves close attention.

Spengler began life near the Harz mountains and his heart finally failed in Munich when only fifty-five. His masterwork on the downslide of Occidental civilisation was conceived before and partly written during the first world war. Its so-called “cyclic” theme, preceded by the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia & Europe, and echoed, less substantially, by the Anglo-Saxons Flinders Petrie [4] and Correa Moylan Walsh [5], made a dramatic impact and engendered serious debate in his defeated Fatherland.

The sinking-sun imagery powerfully evoked by its “Teutonic Title” was attenuated as Decline of the West in an excellent translation for English-speakers, whose more subdued response, admirably documented by John Carter Wood [6], in some cases recalls a notorious lordly dismissal of Gibbon’s narrative about the fall of Rome as just another scribbled tome. A contemporary classicist, E. H. Goddard, nonetheless ably supported its fundamental cross-cultural alignments with corresponding pull-out civilisation timetables [7].

I first encountered this book in the library of my then 430-year-old former grammar-school in Walthamstow. Its thick black spine made a welcome contrast to its Left Book Club amber-cover shelf-companions; and its fascinating contents likewise. My adolescent appetite was promptly reinforced by seemingly corroborative material in Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World, Eric Bentley’s Cult of the Superman, Amaury de Riencourt’s Coming Caesars and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.

By an odd coincidence, the late Roger Scruton made a similar youthful discovery, but disappointment with Spengler’s “unscholarly inaccuracy” diminished this conservative intellectual’s approval of his “grim” prognosis. Given the arduous circumstances of its original composition, and the information then available for revision, however, occasional errors are forgivable; several disputed aspects have also since found defenders.

After initially greeting his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann afterwards recoiled as if handed a demonic grimoire. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg complained that its “morphological view” of destiny denied “race and personality.” Irving Babbitt described the singularly erudite and earnest polymath as a “charlatan of genius.”  Martin Heidegger and Wyndham Lewis attacked him much more thoughtfully, along with established historians. Aurel Kolnai ridiculed his “harsh Olympic coldness,” whereas Theodor Adorno granted the “destructive soothsayer” a nuanced appreciation.

Nevertheless, the book impressed poets like W. B. Yeats, David Jones and Robinson Jeffers, authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Whittaker Chambers, Colin Wilson and Camille Paglia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the systems-theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and surprisingly Ludwig Wittgenstein. And it left me personally with a lifelong interest in “philosophies of history.”

Spengler wrote with the eye of an artist and the pen of a poet, producing beautiful passages of keen sensibility, exemplified by his account of infant Christianity:

Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis and Osiris must have seemed [compared] to the still recent story of Jesus [whose utterances resembled] those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world…. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesaret, while all around them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined western society, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy…. The one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

This delicate passage appears within a mammoth text, whose martial attitude elsewhere was ironically condemned by communists [8] as brutal advocacy for the Junker aristocrats they sought to eradicate in the “violent overthrow” of existing society and “bloody struggle or extinction,” as Karl Marx expressed it. Even during Spengler’s short literary lifetime, millions perished in the USSR.

He depicted the West as one of eight self-contained Hochkulturen, in addition to the Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Indian, Chinese, Magian, and Classical. Each possesses a distinctive ethos characterised by its cosmology, symbolism and architecture, yet all pass through comparable stages, like the inevitable transition from spring to winter, though without recurrence. We need not discuss pertinent definitions of “civilisation”, as previously covered by Samuel Huntington, Pitirim Sorokin and Naohiko Tonomura, except that Arnold Toynbee responded to the challenge with over 20 “mortal” examples, historians Philip Bagby and Caroll Quigley choosing fewer, and Nicholas Hagger listing 25.

Setting aside Spengler’s own metaphysical “collective-soul determinism”, complex macro-societies often proceed through almost parallel patterns, such as solely waning average intelligence [9]. The empirical examination of the multiple causes of their growth, decay and collapse is a legitimate and rewarding pursuit.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “environmental features,” Claire & Bill Russell’s “population cycles,” Jim Penman’s “behaviour biodynamics,” David Hackett Fischer’s “price revolutions” and Heiner Rindermann’s “cognitive capital” are among numerous contributions towards a fresh and fruitful development in objective social science, aided by comprehensive data-led websites like Peter Turchin’s valuable Cliodynamica and Seshat.

Several terminal phases have been linked to urban sprawl and congestion, and failing competence and character among the rulers of a largely hedonistic populace. Cluttered with material and mental sewage, the “megalopolis” becomes vulnerable to farmland depletion, infections and addictions, depravity and disability, sectarian discord and organised crime, plus susceptibility to invasion. In 1927 the pacifist Aldous Huxley voiced the fear that industrialisation of numerically greater races could put us at their military mercy. By 1951 Shephard Clough’s economic analysis of the rise and descent of civilisations expected envious outsiders eventually to attack Europe.

The validity of Spengler’s century-old foresight is easily overlooked precisely because of its present familiarity. The literary critic Northrop Frye described at length, fifty years ago, how the “detail of Spengler’s vision is all around us… What [he] said would happen is happening, to a very considerable degree” [10]. Does not parliamentary democracy, for instance, operate by deception, bribery and “shameless flattery,” so that “election affairs” become “games staged as popular self-determination” to suit obscured wealthy interests? “People want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Ideological convictions are dissolving into disposable fashions, except for an emergent “second religiousness,” possibly indicated by Gen Z revival of Bible study, and potentially focused on the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Entering the epoch of less heavenly inner-cities and global skyscraper competition, we find, exactly as he said, “primitive instincts” let loose in sexual relations, the “reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds,” “incomprehension of tradition,” the “extinction of great art” and of “courtesy,” “betting and competitions” for excitement,“ alcohol and vegetarianism” as prominent issues, and crucially the “childlessness and ‘race suicide’ of the rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.”

The 1939-45 titanic “war of contending states”, which bypassed Spengler’s ignored warning to Germanic nationalists against “biological antisemitism” and a “Napoleonic adventure in Russia,” shifted the “imperium” from Berlin to Washington, thereby fatally disarranging his anticipated sequence for conclusive contests between “blood” and “money.”  Caesarism today is manifested not in fascist legions, but in the formlessness of American politics, despite ambiguity over machine-technics, financial-flux and armed-force deployment; Musk rather than Mussolini.

His phrase “the world as spoil” neatly applies to impending rare-earth search and supply-lane safety from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and beyond. The invention of “weapons yet unforeseen” has alarmingly accelerated, with continental territories “staked – India, China, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played.” We can match his futurology against reflections by present-day writers like Thomas Frey, Bruno Macaes and Ian Morris, regarding particularly the tumultuous interactions of Putin, Trump, Xi and “great cosmopolitan foci of power.”

Shortly before his death, Spengler further envisaged a devastatingly concurrent underclass and colour conflict. It would make no difference, he explained, if Bolshevism “ceased to dictate”, for “the work goes forward of itself.” Did not this danger arrive, a mere three decades later, from the US New Left “race, gender, class revolution,” subsequently exported as “critical theory” for a “long march” or (more accurately) incremental infiltration, through Western institutions, targeting “white privilege,” “white patriarchy” and “embedded whiteness,” and culminating, for example, in both DEI regulations and BLM rioting?

Perhaps Paris 1968, Brixton 1981, Madrid 2004 and Munich 2025 are pointers. The Network Contagion Research Institute reports a surge in approval of political violence, mainly among left-wing networkers. Effective protection against foreign-community intrusions remains morally paralysed as uncharitable “racism,” despite unabated mass-exodus of the multi-million ‘wretched of the earth,’ aided by profiteering traffickers, in a “nomad century.”

Number-philosopher Philip J. Davis thought his fellow-mathematician from the Kaiserreich classrooms was correct to discern the advent of “theories of everything” in science, and possibly, in the outcome of mass-media and telecommunications, the control “like that of Faust” of human minds by a self-operating computer-system “wrapping the earth with an endless web of delicate forces, currents and tensions.”

Spengler’s refutation of universally inevitable linear “progress” has anyhow been largely vindicated, in my judgement, by the evils of vacuous postmodernism, compulsory multiculturalism and suicidal wokeism [11]. Was he too imaginatively attached, however, to ancient and classical models to follow through his unique insight into the heroic exploration, energetic curiosity and infinite endeavour that typify our exceptional “Faustian” ethos? Maybe our railways will lie ultimately forgotten “as dead as the Roman wall” and monuments “ruined like Memphis,” but the last prolonged turn of the western wheel must entail extensive fulfilment as well as senescent exhaustion.

“Only the future,” observed another academic admirer, Professor John Farrenkopf,

…and not Spengler’s innumerable detractors, is in a position to authoritatively answer the question if mankind is nearing in apocalyptic fashion, whether through nuclear Armageddon, the synergistic interaction of international economic collapse and the explosive North-South conflict, or the intensification of the global ecological crisis, the much-discussed end of history. [12]

Nevertheless, could Western science, which has split the atom and spliced the gene, reached the outer planets and penetrated the brain itself, under sagacious guidance, yet modify our caducity with robotics, ecological management and biological enhancement? “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” we should at least respect the venerable advice of der Weissager to face up to facts, with fortitude and fidelity to our noblest values.

NOTES

[1] War of the World (2007), p.645; cf. Doom (2022); The Great Degeneration (2014); Civilization (2012)

[2] Oswald Spengler: Introduction au ‘Declin de l’Occident (2024); Spengler: Pensando en el Futuro (2022),&c. The author presides over The Oswald Spengler Society

[3] “New Histories of the World: Spenglerian Optimism,” Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence (2022) online

[4] The Revolutions of Civilisation (1911)

[5] The Climax of Civilisation (1917)

[6] “’German foolishness’….Spengler & the Inter-war British Press,” www.academia.edu/3315175, online

[7] Civilisation or Civilisations [with P. A. Gibbons & F. C. S. Schiller] (1926)

[8] E.g. Nikolai Bukharin (1934); cf. Melvin Rader, No Compromise (1939)

[9] Elmer Pendell, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct (1977); Cf. Edward Dutton & Michael Woodley, At Our Wits’ End (2018); Robert Klark Graham, The Future of Man (1981); Raymond Cattell, A New Morality from Science (1972), pp.146-147; Donald Kagan (ed) Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (1962)

[10] “Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited,” Daedalus (Winter, 1974), pp.1-13

[11] Cf. David Ashton, “Decline of the Best?” Council of European Canadians, February 12, 2024, online

[12] John Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s ‘Der Mensch und die Technik’,” German Studies Review (October 1991), p.548; Prophet of Decline (2001)

 ADDENDUM

I have long thought and expressed the view that the exceptional “Faustian” character of our Western civilization would enable its successful prolongation. Since completing the above, I came across an interesting National Interest article online which covered some of the same ground, including a similar thought about that future possibility. This was a welcome coincidence, not plagiarism on my part. Here is that article, by Robert W. Merry, an adapted extract from his 2005 book Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition – Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy – The National Interest

Posted on by Peter King

Home learning

PETER KING says that houses are not machines, but ‘organisms’ animated by us

I was lying in bed one morning, with no plans other than to roll over. It was too early to get out of bed, and I had nothing to get up early for. As planned, at 7.00am the heating system clicked into life with its distinctive rumble and low hum. Usually, this is a comforting noise, suggesting that things are working as they should. Except that they did not continue to work as they should on this particular morning. The low hum was replaced by a clang as if someone had dropped their tools on the landing, and then a loud bang. There was still a humming but louder and more insistent and with an ominous edge to it. There was also a smell of burning. The heating pump had burnt out after more than 20 years of consistent use. We turned the system off and arranged for an engineer to call to replace the pump, which duly happened the following morning. The repair was straightforward and took barely an hour. However, what had become clear to me was that there were things in our house that we could not control and could not maintain ourselves. There are any number of complex machines in our house that we rely on, that we expect to work reliably and constantly.

Le Corbusier, theorist of the house as machine

Naturally when one considers the idea of machines in this context one’s mind goes to Le Corbusier’s statement that ‘A house is a machine for living in’. This is a notion that I have always found abhorrent, with its emphasis on both uniformity and conformity.

Quite simply, we just do not see our house like that. When we consider the nature of the specific place where we live what stands out is its distinction. It is definitively different from those around it, even if the external appearance is very nearly indistinguishable. We never mistake our neighbour’s house for our own regardless of how similar it might look. A dwelling is always particular to those using it. Its use is always specific and not interchangeable. Our dwelling is not there simply to sustain us – although it must do that – but it acts too as a repository for our life experience and as a store of memory. While on a utilitarian level, any dwelling of a certain level of amenity would suffice, in practice we want something specific and we make it so.

Our dwelling is then a place that contains machines, but it is not a machine itself. We might see it as an assembly of machines, but again it is not merely this. We have to add to this assembly our memories, relationships (past and current), habits, eccentricities, and so on. These are the things that we use our dwelling for. They are the essence of what dwelling is and what the machines are there to serve.

A machine is something that can transmit force. It is powered in some way. But in what way is our house ‘powered’? There is no obvious power source (as opposed to what powers the machines within it). Our house does not move. It appears to be in stasis and as such it might be the very opposite of a machine.

But I want to suggest that dwelling does have a motive power. But it is not a quantifiable one. We can explore this by positing an alternative metaphor, namely that of the organism. We can define an organism in a number of ways. We can see it as a living being, as a distinct thing. But we can also see an organism as a system consisting of interdependent parts. As a living being an organism is contiguous and complete. But it is made up of a number of interdependent elements all with their prescribed function. This makes it sound like a machine, but there is an important difference. Unlike a machine, an organism is something whose motive force comes from within and not without. It is animated from the inside and does not depend on an external power source. So an organism, like a machine, can be seen as a complex or network of things. It too has a material structure with defined parts. But what animates the organism comes from within and is already part of us.

Like the machines in our house some parts of us must be in continuous use. We cannot turn them off and remain a viable being. We can appear to be largely idle, when we are at rest or asleep, but some of our core functions, such as digestion, respiration, heart function, must continue on. These are involuntary, automatic and outside of our conscious control. They operate without our direct involvement. The same applies to our unconscious mind. We cannot control our dreams. We cannot stop them from bursting into our heads, confusing and confounding us, perhaps even in frightening us. There are, so to speak, programs always running in the background, which we cannot control and which we would struggle to inhibit.

It is in this way that we can see our house as an organism, as having a number of systems that appear to work independently and outside of our direct control. It might be argued that we should only take this metaphor so far. Unlike our breathing, we can turn the systems in our house off. We can turn up the heating if we are cold or increase the shower temperature. This is certainly true, and we should be careful in not overusing our metaphors. But we also need to add that, while we can turn machines off or alter their use, we still need them. There is a cost in turning them off and it may be fatal, just as if some of our core bodily functions cease to work. A metaphor need not be exact to be helpful to us.

Where the metaphor is helpful is with relation to the issue of power. What is it that powers an organism? As I have suggested, it is this that differentiates an organism from a machine, and it is this facet that makes the organism a better metaphor for dwelling that the machine.

One way of looking at this issue, is the idea of animation. While a dead body of a loved one looks familiar, it is clear that there is something really significant missing: it is familiar, but it is not the same as the person we knew and loved. In some way the body appears to be empty. There is then something that appears to animate us. This can be seen as a life force that turns us from simple matter to a living being. We might be able to measure this life force, in indirect ways through pulse, brain wave patterns, respiration and so on, but this is not the force itself. It is not what gives us life, what gives us a mind. This is what distinguishes us most from a machine. It is also what distinguishes dwelling from the machine. A dwelling comes alive become it is inhabited by something that appears to give it volition and purpose.

An inanimate object can only do as it is bid. It can either work in the prescribed manner or not at all. It always does the best it can. It can do no other. It has no will and nor is it prone to mood swings and tantrums. It may appear temperamental, but this will be perfectly explicable in mechanical terms. A machine will work until it is turned off or breaks. The inanimate is implacable and cannot be reasoned with. There is no contingency, no variety or diversity in its operation. An object is functionally transparent.

Martin Heidegger, who believed we ‘humanised’ objects by using them

As Martin Heidegger has suggested, what animates the object – what gives it its spirit – is our use of it. In his book, Being and Time, Heidegger refers to the idea of objects as equipment. We turn it from an object to a tool, into something that is not only ours but, for as long as we use it well, part of us. In his famous example Heidegger talks about a carpenter using a hammer. This is an old and now familiar tool, and the carpenter is undertaking an action – hammering in a nail – that he had done countless times with this tool. Heidegger states that the hammer becomes transparent to the carpenter’s consciousness. It, as it were, becomes part of him, an extension of his will. It is, to use Heidegger’s jargon, ready to hand. But were the hammer to break it would become unready to hand and appear to the carpenter as present to hand. In other words, it becomes visible as an entity distinct in itself.

The jargon here may be clumsy – at least in English translation – but what Heidegger points to is that we use objects as extensions of ourselves incorporating them into our motives and aspirations, such that we literally do not notice them. And this is indeed how we act with all those things we use every day. We find we have driven home from the office without really noticing the route we’ve taken, because we do it every day. We don’t focus on the chair we are sitting on while we are eating, and we do not notice the machines working away in the background keeping us warm and providing us with hot water and light.

Indeed, our lives would not be recognisable if we had to focus specifically on every object we were using rather than on our objectives. Much of what we have around us are means – things for us to use – rather than ends. They are present to do a job for us, but in such as manner as not to be noticed. Many of the machines in our house have been devised precisely so we do not have to engage directly with them. They are made to work instead of us, and often to work in a way that is hidden from us. They are programmed to turn on and off and are placed away from us, so we do not have direct and regular contact with them.

In this sense, it might appear that these objects lack meaning in that we do not directly animate them, and certainly it is the case that we relate to them differently. They remain, as it were, strangers to us. However, these machines are in constant use and they perform crucially important tasks such as heating, light and supplying constant hot water (which is why they are preprogramed and automatic). Their meaning is necessarily implicit. They are the necessary background or framework on which our conscious lives depend. When these machines break, like the central heating pump, we are brought up short and made to think about the complexity of dwelling. The object is unready and most definitely present to us.

We can no longer ignore all those things hidden behind doors, walls and kept in inaccessible parts of the dwelling. But just as the heart and lungs are integral to us, so are these machines to our house. That we do not have to think about them is precisely the point. We are dependent on them, but this dependency does not have to made explicit. They remain tools just as much as those objects we active pick up. We use them and this use makes them opaque.

A machine can only be animated by our use of it. This is not to give it life as such, but to share our life with it, to make it part of it for as long as we need it, and it works as we wish it to. We take the machine and use it – and only this gives it meaning.