European Values like bombing a nation into submission because it refused to be torn apart and then taking an integral part of that nation and illegally declaring it independent in order to have a NATO military colony.
I am talking about Yugoslavia/Serbia and Kosovo.
Danish tears about Trump taking their sacred Greenland brought the hypocrisy of its final conclusion.
The Danes were the first to recognize Kosovo’s independence and the first to cry about how taking Greenland was illegal against international law.
The EU is so corrupt and full of shit that it has no concrete connection to anything legal or wholesome.
Yes. Serbia was not carrying out the social and economic reforms expected of it, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not submitted to the US-run neoliberal agenda.
Defending genocidal Serbs ?!(looks at name)….ahhhhhh. carry on then. You are a lost cause. Western Europe at least feels sorry for the genocides it caused. You sing songs about them, celebrating them. Go fuck yourself.
We look forward to some guidance and white-pilling ... ... because the above black-pill is well-nigh incontestable:
"But that does not mean nothing can be done. The actual battleground lies elsewhere. This is a theme I will return to in future essays, where I will lay out what actually can and should be fought for."
The fact that many think Spengler was pessimistic says more about us than him. I never detect any pessimism is in his works at all, unless one thinks death itself is somehow pessimistic, as all he was doing was showing a life cycle.
Things grow old and die, get over it.
But of course, that doesn’t mean new things won’t be born, and in fact without death, there is no life.
The funniest part about Spengler is he applied the lens to himself, and showed that it is only our crazily historically obsessed culture who would even consider such things as he did. For many others they would just shrug and say who cares.
Good comment and I think largely you’re right. But early in Decline Spengler wrote this, which sounds a bit elegiac to me:
“We men of the Western culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s….when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished there will never again be a culture and a human type in which world-history is so potent a form of the waking consciousness.”
Yep, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about with the meta lens applied to himself. Rather than a eulogy, I always took it in the style of Nietzsche (which he admitted) as a mocking of the assumptions we hold as so real and dear; namely that our historical obsession is anomalous and once we are gone no one will care. We can hope to pass something on, but whatever future culture exists will interpret it in their terms which may be very different than ours.
This is simply the reality of mortality, and those who find that pessimistic probably need to spend some time coming to terms with death. It also doesn’t have to mean the bloodline itself either, as it’s the great culture and following civilisation that will die. The people can carry on in all sorts of different frozen forms, like China and India or the Islamic world, or even the Jews (but after seeing what these fellaheen peoples become, perhaps a glorious flame out is better).
You cannot stop the decline of a civilization (because such things are inherently spiritual in nature), but you can build a new civilization an enclave within the collapsing civilization, to grow over the rubble.
Unfortunately such a nuanced and philosophical view, as you referenced to Spengler, is lost upon most of us today. I mean, both what passes as the right/conservative and left/socialism/liberals are fruits of the liberalism which has transformed political thought from the 18th century. And lest there be any doubts, those revivalists for monarchy or aristocracy are plagued by the same self delusions of communist and fascist youths, imagining themselves to be patricians and not the more likely plebians.
In terms of the European Union's project, we are downstream of the intentional negation of power to the central institutions, which in turn have usurped the same through rules and regulations, creating an intricate web of bureaucracy best suited to a professional and managerial class, itself a downstream creation of fordism, and if we care to glance into the past, the Prussian juggernaut.
The good news is the bad news. The immobilism borne by those needing to follow cannot face the flexibility of reality, which places the vacuous European culture, as you correctly pointed out in my opinion, in the grips of an ideological groupthink. Unfortunately this ideology has been shouting slogans of war with Russia in ever more imbecilic ways with shrieking tones, to the point that in the past few weeks the Russian governmental amalgam is beginning to respond to by acknowledging peace might not be possible. So then decline because of reality, just as decline because of servitude to Washington places Europe in an energy quandary, all the while as we live through the collapse of narrative gatekeepers.
Not to be an accelerationist, but an exogenous shock which hastens the collapse might be the best medicine for the common person who has no ideological alternative and certainly no self consciousness to imagine an alternative mode of existence that does not revolve around material and monetary fetishism. History books like to make believe that hordes of barbarians plundered a Rome grown corrupt and inept, but the reality was it was a slow roll through the centuries, and the barbarians had been invited in as mercenaries to participate in petty aristocratic squabbles. Sacking Rome was a natural consequence after the new capital shifted east to Constantinople, and later re-established itself in the West behind the veil of Venice.
So it will be again today, when all shades of liberalism suffer the same fate from any number of threats invited into the kingdom.
On a lighter note, I just got a vegetable garden and couldn't imagine a life without one.
Good comment. Absolutely spot on about how both left and right have internalized what are actually post-Enlightenment categories.
I agree that some kind of exogenous event might be the best medicine. There is very little scope for anything to change in the current configuration. I am going to write about that at some point.
Also bear in mind that the so-called “barbarians” of Roman times were Germanic tribes—the very same people who would become the heart of Europe.
Yes, good point! I still remember the first time I learned the Romans (and Greeks) used the term barbarian indiscriminately for everyone outside the empire, because history written by the victors... It's also quite ironic how seamlessly the barbarian (Germanic, Norman, Viking etc) aristocracy entered into lockstep with the local aristocracy.
Yesterday in the context of the "AI jobs apocalypse" I was thinking ("bring it on!" lol) about an adjacent theme contrasting the contradictions between the reheated Thiel thought complaining about underwhelming technological progress in the present day, matched by a broader lack of imagination of a future where technological wonder creates conditions for an evolution in our socio-political organization, perhaps reheating and finding a realistically workable version of the idea (from the 1930s) of work in exchange of value tokens (money) capped at 4 hours a week with the rest of our time for R&D, social service, individual goals, family, etc. Ever since 1971 we've reheated the historical infinite money experiment, which historically always ends in failure (like communism); at present we're stuck in an endless entropic loop waiting for the inevitable.
I think a lot of people at the top of all our hierarchies underestimate how many people lower down the money hierarchy would be apathetic, and perhaps relieved or even gleeful, if the entire village burned down and everyone had to start over.
AI as in Language Models, isn't what it says on the box or what we fantasize about when we dream about AI. That being said, it could potentially burn down the village.
I’ll never understand why the MAGA crowd chose a billionaire to make it great again seeing as how it was Trump’s ilk who made it shit in the first place
Good point. And yet I suspect that only a billionaire—and probably an irreverent one—could have made it to the top of the heap to begin with. The range of possibilities had already narrowed.
I wrote a piece that a few months back where I explore how the political and corporate systems in the West actually require one to be a psychopath. It’s called Power Without Conscience if you wanna check it out
I would read Spengler carefully, since it is true that civilisations can resemble living organisms, however nothing says that there cannot be a revival and a new lease of life given to the civilisation as a whole - it will not be the same, but it will carry the seeds and sentiments of the previous incarnation and that is what counts. Livign organisms have offspring after all. Rome faded, but Constantinople was born from it, when it faded the greatness of Antiquity was refounded back in Rome. America emerged from the English civilisational expression, and contiues to,carry some of the elements of the older time that have since faded in the UK.
Perhaps we are due for another rediscovering, be it again in Europe, or perhaps America can find it in itself, although Eurasia appears to be the civlizational crucible that is most likely to induce change.
I agree Spengler should be read carefully. Civilizational continuity requires certain prerequisites. America resembled England because it was the same people. Living organisms do indeed have offspring and I would like our offspring—I mean that rather literally—to carry the seeds and sentiments.
Great article. For those interested in “the big three” writers on civilizational decline (Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin), there’s an excellent book that summarizes all three. It was published ~20 years ago or so. It’s “Staring into Chaos” by B.G. Brander. I wrote a review of his book here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/5970377-review-of-staring-into-chaos-by-b-g-brander
Anyone reading this will better understand where we’re at now and why this state of things in the West is happening.
Big ideas like ‘civilization’ need to be interrogated to see if, in fact, it’s truly a meaningful concept or just another intellectual Indiana hayride (like ‘god’ or ‘truth’).
To me, ‘civilization’ is the materialization of culture, not the folk-culture itself. The culture excretes it’s material anchor the same way a crustacean excretes its shell.
I guy like Spengler is clever. He’s working with big ideas and piles them on until he has constructed a awe-inspiring edifice that attracts those who want to be impressed and to feel like they ‘understand how things work’.
But, what if Spengler is (mostly) wrong?
What the guy is doing is, more or less, comparative art history. Is that really a basis for a theory of human development? If so, why?
What I see is that Spengler was a ‘civilized’ man so he concentrated on ‘civilization’.
But what if, by doing so, Spengler simply didn’t pay attention to everything around what he things of as ‘civilization’. What if ‘civilization’ is a pure effect of folk-culture and folk-culture if a Deep Time phenomenon, much closer to ecology than history.
Spengler disabuses us of the notion that many of the things that we fight over can be saved. What ultimately matters is the people. We have to preserve ourselves as a people.
“In the late phases of a civilization, the ability to even perceive decline weakens, because the very cultural categories required to feel the loss are gone. Benchmarks of what even constitutes civilization progressively contract, and each contraction becomes normalized.”
Very true. But the confusion in various quarters across the West arises because there is no clear understanding of what a “civilization” is or what it constitutes. In my opinion, it is not empire, not republic, not democracy (or any other form of governance), and not culture. The last of these is important because this came up again and again in this post - culture is, at best, an element, a part, of a larger theme called civilization but not civilization itself.
In my view - of course, likely to be vigorously contested - the West never really had a Civilization per se. Consider this: the West, in the context of its perceived civilizational status, harks back to Greece and Rome.
Greece, in ancient history, was a collection of island states - Athens, Crete, Macedonia, Rhodes, Sparta, Thasos, etc - that were later absorbed into a greater Athenian Empire. With the exception of Athens much later, most of the city states were tyrannical monarchies and oligarchies that sought to expand in imperialist ways. Important figures gave philosophical weight to concepts of democracy that Athens slowly began to practice. So: was the West’s conception of Greek-derived civilization the idea of democracy?
Rome, whose influence on the West came later, in ancient history was a martial state that also expanded - hugely for their time - geographically. It was imperialism on display. So: was the West’s conception of Rome-derived civilization the idea of imperialism? Perhaps the fuel for colonialism from the 18th to the 20th centuries?
In the medieval period, we run into more contradictions. This was the rise of the Catholic realm, whose edicts ran from Rome/Vatican. This was an era of theocracy, severe fundamentalism, and punishment by death for heretic (though scientific) views. You argued for the earth going around the sun, you died at the stake. So: was the West’s conception of theocratic Catholic Vatican-derived civilization the idea of fundamentalist and theocratic religion?
Then came Martin Luther, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of Protestantism. The Vatican was cut down to size, heretic views were embraced, science fostered, and the early notions of a monarchy informed by the wealthy and the intellectuals gave rise to a secular state. So: was the West’s conception of the Renaissance Age-derived civilization the idea of “church and state” and nascent secularism - but no democracy as yet?
Then we arrive at what could be considered an inflection point - from around the late 18th century and lasting all through the 20th century - of the decline of monarchies, internecine wars (across Europe), perceived primacy of a “republic” (esp in France), industrial age, fiery colonialism, and global commerce. So: was the West’s conception of the Industrial Revolution-derived civilization the idea of “colonialism plus capitalism”?
Finally, we are now in the 21st century, where 20th century notions of democracy, capitalism, socialism, and the paternalistic state have all shown signs of decay. So: is the West’s conception of the modern state-derived angst - against religion, against capitalism, against socialism, against race and class, etc etc - yet another civilizational construct?
I recap all of the above just to show that there is no continuing thread of what Western civilization really means. The contrast with some other ancient civilizations gives a clue as to what could construe the word “civilization”.
The Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations all had the following: thought & values, religion, tradition, practices, aesthetics and culture, and symbols. Most of these - with the exception of the Hindu and Chinese - fell prey to brutal colonialist-evangelical onslaught (Aztec, Mayan, Inca) and the others (Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian) to brutal Islamic-conversion onslaught and perished. They no longer exist.
The Chinese communist state absorbed some elements of its civilization and has attempted to rebuild its identity in nuanced ways. They still have some elements - uniquely Chinese thought and values, culture, and some symbols while mostly discarding the rest. The Hindu civilization still exists in all its original form within a modern state despite repeated invasions and conversions over 1,000 years. You can see all of the elements I count as representing a civilization to this day.
To conclude: the word civilization has no meaning unless it is defined. It has a pre-historic context and the validity of those to the present day is what characterizes a civilization. To repeat what this writer says, to understand why “the benchmarks of what even constitutes civilization progressively contract” is to question if they really were the benchmarks through the centuries. As he says: “Benchmarks already fatally compromised are easily mistaken for civilizational vitality.” That is for the West to ponder.
This is an excellent comment and it’s hard for me to disagree. Part of the problem is my own. For the sake of concise narrative and to distill the message, I was loose and maybe even irresponsible in my use of terminology. I applied Spengler’s morphology to the question of “civilization” itself, whereas Spengler applied it to the progression from culture (creative, organic) to civilization (mechanized, artificial). As Spengler would have it, we shouldn’t be discussing “Western Civilization” at all but the Faustian Weltgefühl.
What interests me, though, is this notion that decline is irreversible because we lose access to the previous categories. And I think that analysis holds. It’s an argument against those who believe in the feasibility of reversing decline. What inspired this whole endeavor was a realization that early modernism (art and literature of the early 20th century) was the most sensitive to the loss of the old symbolic world. And that was over 100 years ago. Today that loss is much more complete but we are much less aware of it.
Thank you. I am no sociologist, no philosopher, no political scientist. Only a citizen (Indian, in India) living on the sidelines and watching how geopolitics plays out across the world, including in India.
I do believe, very strongly, that a civilization’s core ideas rest on values. These values are consistent, deeply held, and forms the basis of identity. That is the second idea: of identity rooted in some kind of shared values, ideals, custom, religion, tradition, practices, aesthetics, and symbols. When I said the West did not much have a civilization (and gave a historical run-down of how it has skittered down some long slope and borrowed ideas when convenient and discarded them when inconvenient) I was referring to exactly these. The West could have had a civilization but its history has been one of convenience and opportunistic occupation of the next best idea that came along.
That is directly responsible for the hypocrisy we see today: constantly preaching to the world about rules-based-international-order and other silly stuff that it never practices. They stem from, IMHO, the absence of inherent, embedded, and deeply held views on anything. The West wishes to whitewash its past…something it finds easy to do as it has done this over and over again.
The West has also inflicted self-goals in its desire to spread its version of liberalism across the world. Yesterday it was communism, today it’s nationalism. But nationalism is core to the concept of civilization as the latter is built on shared identity. If one negates nationalism it negates identity and - ergo - it has no civilization to speak of.
The West’s decline in this regard has to be seen in this context: it has forsaken to acknowledge what could identify it as a people on the altar of global expedience, dominance, and supremacy. In this, it also seeks to quash nationalism elsewhere which, ironically, only serves to give it more power, more self-pride, and to put the nail on the coffin, more assertive civilizational identity. So when you speak of the decline of the West, I think of Europe (the US is on a similar trajectory that will spin out longer). What does Europe stand for today? My humble view: absolutely nothing.
...According to all ... traditional doctrines we have entered the last, final stage of Kali-yuga, the darkest period of this "dark age", the epoch of dissolution, from which it is possible to come out only through a terrible cataclysm.
“As a civilizational benchmark, this set of norms rose to prominence about five minutes ago on the grand clock of history.”
I like this line; it acknowledges how short-sited we are when looking at history. On the scale of deep time, i.e., the one comprising the way anatomically modern humans have been living for most of the last 200 000 years, civilisation itself is the radically new aberration. On that scale you have to rethink seriously what you mean by “conservatism.”
European Values like bombing a nation into submission because it refused to be torn apart and then taking an integral part of that nation and illegally declaring it independent in order to have a NATO military colony.
I am talking about Yugoslavia/Serbia and Kosovo.
Danish tears about Trump taking their sacred Greenland brought the hypocrisy of its final conclusion.
The Danes were the first to recognize Kosovo’s independence and the first to cry about how taking Greenland was illegal against international law.
The EU is so corrupt and full of shit that it has no concrete connection to anything legal or wholesome.
Yes. Serbia was not carrying out the social and economic reforms expected of it, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not submitted to the US-run neoliberal agenda.
Yugoslavia refused to open up its banking sector to the Rothchilds..
and that is when they said “ Smithers… Release the hounds !!!!"
And the NATO dogs were all too eager to devour.
Defending genocidal Serbs ?!(looks at name)….ahhhhhh. carry on then. You are a lost cause. Western Europe at least feels sorry for the genocides it caused. You sing songs about them, celebrating them. Go fuck yourself.
Yeah. Fuck off cunt
We look forward to some guidance and white-pilling ... ... because the above black-pill is well-nigh incontestable:
"But that does not mean nothing can be done. The actual battleground lies elsewhere. This is a theme I will return to in future essays, where I will lay out what actually can and should be fought for."
Outstanding post.
The fact that many think Spengler was pessimistic says more about us than him. I never detect any pessimism is in his works at all, unless one thinks death itself is somehow pessimistic, as all he was doing was showing a life cycle.
Things grow old and die, get over it.
But of course, that doesn’t mean new things won’t be born, and in fact without death, there is no life.
The funniest part about Spengler is he applied the lens to himself, and showed that it is only our crazily historically obsessed culture who would even consider such things as he did. For many others they would just shrug and say who cares.
Good comment and I think largely you’re right. But early in Decline Spengler wrote this, which sounds a bit elegiac to me:
“We men of the Western culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture and not all mankind’s….when in due course the civilization of the West is extinguished there will never again be a culture and a human type in which world-history is so potent a form of the waking consciousness.”
Yep, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about with the meta lens applied to himself. Rather than a eulogy, I always took it in the style of Nietzsche (which he admitted) as a mocking of the assumptions we hold as so real and dear; namely that our historical obsession is anomalous and once we are gone no one will care. We can hope to pass something on, but whatever future culture exists will interpret it in their terms which may be very different than ours.
This is simply the reality of mortality, and those who find that pessimistic probably need to spend some time coming to terms with death. It also doesn’t have to mean the bloodline itself either, as it’s the great culture and following civilisation that will die. The people can carry on in all sorts of different frozen forms, like China and India or the Islamic world, or even the Jews (but after seeing what these fellaheen peoples become, perhaps a glorious flame out is better).
Really enjoyed this essay 🙏
You cannot stop the decline of a civilization (because such things are inherently spiritual in nature), but you can build a new civilization an enclave within the collapsing civilization, to grow over the rubble.
Unfortunately such a nuanced and philosophical view, as you referenced to Spengler, is lost upon most of us today. I mean, both what passes as the right/conservative and left/socialism/liberals are fruits of the liberalism which has transformed political thought from the 18th century. And lest there be any doubts, those revivalists for monarchy or aristocracy are plagued by the same self delusions of communist and fascist youths, imagining themselves to be patricians and not the more likely plebians.
In terms of the European Union's project, we are downstream of the intentional negation of power to the central institutions, which in turn have usurped the same through rules and regulations, creating an intricate web of bureaucracy best suited to a professional and managerial class, itself a downstream creation of fordism, and if we care to glance into the past, the Prussian juggernaut.
The good news is the bad news. The immobilism borne by those needing to follow cannot face the flexibility of reality, which places the vacuous European culture, as you correctly pointed out in my opinion, in the grips of an ideological groupthink. Unfortunately this ideology has been shouting slogans of war with Russia in ever more imbecilic ways with shrieking tones, to the point that in the past few weeks the Russian governmental amalgam is beginning to respond to by acknowledging peace might not be possible. So then decline because of reality, just as decline because of servitude to Washington places Europe in an energy quandary, all the while as we live through the collapse of narrative gatekeepers.
Not to be an accelerationist, but an exogenous shock which hastens the collapse might be the best medicine for the common person who has no ideological alternative and certainly no self consciousness to imagine an alternative mode of existence that does not revolve around material and monetary fetishism. History books like to make believe that hordes of barbarians plundered a Rome grown corrupt and inept, but the reality was it was a slow roll through the centuries, and the barbarians had been invited in as mercenaries to participate in petty aristocratic squabbles. Sacking Rome was a natural consequence after the new capital shifted east to Constantinople, and later re-established itself in the West behind the veil of Venice.
So it will be again today, when all shades of liberalism suffer the same fate from any number of threats invited into the kingdom.
On a lighter note, I just got a vegetable garden and couldn't imagine a life without one.
Good comment. Absolutely spot on about how both left and right have internalized what are actually post-Enlightenment categories.
I agree that some kind of exogenous event might be the best medicine. There is very little scope for anything to change in the current configuration. I am going to write about that at some point.
Also bear in mind that the so-called “barbarians” of Roman times were Germanic tribes—the very same people who would become the heart of Europe.
Yes, good point! I still remember the first time I learned the Romans (and Greeks) used the term barbarian indiscriminately for everyone outside the empire, because history written by the victors... It's also quite ironic how seamlessly the barbarian (Germanic, Norman, Viking etc) aristocracy entered into lockstep with the local aristocracy.
Yesterday in the context of the "AI jobs apocalypse" I was thinking ("bring it on!" lol) about an adjacent theme contrasting the contradictions between the reheated Thiel thought complaining about underwhelming technological progress in the present day, matched by a broader lack of imagination of a future where technological wonder creates conditions for an evolution in our socio-political organization, perhaps reheating and finding a realistically workable version of the idea (from the 1930s) of work in exchange of value tokens (money) capped at 4 hours a week with the rest of our time for R&D, social service, individual goals, family, etc. Ever since 1971 we've reheated the historical infinite money experiment, which historically always ends in failure (like communism); at present we're stuck in an endless entropic loop waiting for the inevitable.
that exogenouse change is here - its called AI. Now what?
I think a lot of people at the top of all our hierarchies underestimate how many people lower down the money hierarchy would be apathetic, and perhaps relieved or even gleeful, if the entire village burned down and everyone had to start over.
AI as in Language Models, isn't what it says on the box or what we fantasize about when we dream about AI. That being said, it could potentially burn down the village.
I’ll never understand why the MAGA crowd chose a billionaire to make it great again seeing as how it was Trump’s ilk who made it shit in the first place
Good point. And yet I suspect that only a billionaire—and probably an irreverent one—could have made it to the top of the heap to begin with. The range of possibilities had already narrowed.
I wrote a piece that a few months back where I explore how the political and corporate systems in the West actually require one to be a psychopath. It’s called Power Without Conscience if you wanna check it out
It's simple. Just look what the alternative was. But that's ignoring the fact it is not shit. And has not been.
The USA isn’t shit?
I would read Spengler carefully, since it is true that civilisations can resemble living organisms, however nothing says that there cannot be a revival and a new lease of life given to the civilisation as a whole - it will not be the same, but it will carry the seeds and sentiments of the previous incarnation and that is what counts. Livign organisms have offspring after all. Rome faded, but Constantinople was born from it, when it faded the greatness of Antiquity was refounded back in Rome. America emerged from the English civilisational expression, and contiues to,carry some of the elements of the older time that have since faded in the UK.
Perhaps we are due for another rediscovering, be it again in Europe, or perhaps America can find it in itself, although Eurasia appears to be the civlizational crucible that is most likely to induce change.
I agree Spengler should be read carefully. Civilizational continuity requires certain prerequisites. America resembled England because it was the same people. Living organisms do indeed have offspring and I would like our offspring—I mean that rather literally—to carry the seeds and sentiments.
Very good read. Demographic decline is extremely difficult to reverse.
https://conwaydgray.substack.com/p/kash-patels-remark-reveals-a-deeper?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=42y26a
Great article. For those interested in “the big three” writers on civilizational decline (Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin), there’s an excellent book that summarizes all three. It was published ~20 years ago or so. It’s “Staring into Chaos” by B.G. Brander. I wrote a review of his book here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/5970377-review-of-staring-into-chaos-by-b-g-brander
Anyone reading this will better understand where we’re at now and why this state of things in the West is happening.
Thanks for this. I was not aware of this book. I am very tempted to purchase it.
Big ideas like ‘civilization’ need to be interrogated to see if, in fact, it’s truly a meaningful concept or just another intellectual Indiana hayride (like ‘god’ or ‘truth’).
To me, ‘civilization’ is the materialization of culture, not the folk-culture itself. The culture excretes it’s material anchor the same way a crustacean excretes its shell.
I guy like Spengler is clever. He’s working with big ideas and piles them on until he has constructed a awe-inspiring edifice that attracts those who want to be impressed and to feel like they ‘understand how things work’.
But, what if Spengler is (mostly) wrong?
What the guy is doing is, more or less, comparative art history. Is that really a basis for a theory of human development? If so, why?
What I see is that Spengler was a ‘civilized’ man so he concentrated on ‘civilization’.
But what if, by doing so, Spengler simply didn’t pay attention to everything around what he things of as ‘civilization’. What if ‘civilization’ is a pure effect of folk-culture and folk-culture if a Deep Time phenomenon, much closer to ecology than history.
‘Civilizations’ come and go, the Folk endure.
Spengler disabuses us of the notion that many of the things that we fight over can be saved. What ultimately matters is the people. We have to preserve ourselves as a people.
“In the late phases of a civilization, the ability to even perceive decline weakens, because the very cultural categories required to feel the loss are gone. Benchmarks of what even constitutes civilization progressively contract, and each contraction becomes normalized.”
Very true. But the confusion in various quarters across the West arises because there is no clear understanding of what a “civilization” is or what it constitutes. In my opinion, it is not empire, not republic, not democracy (or any other form of governance), and not culture. The last of these is important because this came up again and again in this post - culture is, at best, an element, a part, of a larger theme called civilization but not civilization itself.
In my view - of course, likely to be vigorously contested - the West never really had a Civilization per se. Consider this: the West, in the context of its perceived civilizational status, harks back to Greece and Rome.
Greece, in ancient history, was a collection of island states - Athens, Crete, Macedonia, Rhodes, Sparta, Thasos, etc - that were later absorbed into a greater Athenian Empire. With the exception of Athens much later, most of the city states were tyrannical monarchies and oligarchies that sought to expand in imperialist ways. Important figures gave philosophical weight to concepts of democracy that Athens slowly began to practice. So: was the West’s conception of Greek-derived civilization the idea of democracy?
Rome, whose influence on the West came later, in ancient history was a martial state that also expanded - hugely for their time - geographically. It was imperialism on display. So: was the West’s conception of Rome-derived civilization the idea of imperialism? Perhaps the fuel for colonialism from the 18th to the 20th centuries?
In the medieval period, we run into more contradictions. This was the rise of the Catholic realm, whose edicts ran from Rome/Vatican. This was an era of theocracy, severe fundamentalism, and punishment by death for heretic (though scientific) views. You argued for the earth going around the sun, you died at the stake. So: was the West’s conception of theocratic Catholic Vatican-derived civilization the idea of fundamentalist and theocratic religion?
Then came Martin Luther, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of Protestantism. The Vatican was cut down to size, heretic views were embraced, science fostered, and the early notions of a monarchy informed by the wealthy and the intellectuals gave rise to a secular state. So: was the West’s conception of the Renaissance Age-derived civilization the idea of “church and state” and nascent secularism - but no democracy as yet?
Then we arrive at what could be considered an inflection point - from around the late 18th century and lasting all through the 20th century - of the decline of monarchies, internecine wars (across Europe), perceived primacy of a “republic” (esp in France), industrial age, fiery colonialism, and global commerce. So: was the West’s conception of the Industrial Revolution-derived civilization the idea of “colonialism plus capitalism”?
Finally, we are now in the 21st century, where 20th century notions of democracy, capitalism, socialism, and the paternalistic state have all shown signs of decay. So: is the West’s conception of the modern state-derived angst - against religion, against capitalism, against socialism, against race and class, etc etc - yet another civilizational construct?
I recap all of the above just to show that there is no continuing thread of what Western civilization really means. The contrast with some other ancient civilizations gives a clue as to what could construe the word “civilization”.
The Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations all had the following: thought & values, religion, tradition, practices, aesthetics and culture, and symbols. Most of these - with the exception of the Hindu and Chinese - fell prey to brutal colonialist-evangelical onslaught (Aztec, Mayan, Inca) and the others (Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian) to brutal Islamic-conversion onslaught and perished. They no longer exist.
The Chinese communist state absorbed some elements of its civilization and has attempted to rebuild its identity in nuanced ways. They still have some elements - uniquely Chinese thought and values, culture, and some symbols while mostly discarding the rest. The Hindu civilization still exists in all its original form within a modern state despite repeated invasions and conversions over 1,000 years. You can see all of the elements I count as representing a civilization to this day.
To conclude: the word civilization has no meaning unless it is defined. It has a pre-historic context and the validity of those to the present day is what characterizes a civilization. To repeat what this writer says, to understand why “the benchmarks of what even constitutes civilization progressively contract” is to question if they really were the benchmarks through the centuries. As he says: “Benchmarks already fatally compromised are easily mistaken for civilizational vitality.” That is for the West to ponder.
This is an excellent comment and it’s hard for me to disagree. Part of the problem is my own. For the sake of concise narrative and to distill the message, I was loose and maybe even irresponsible in my use of terminology. I applied Spengler’s morphology to the question of “civilization” itself, whereas Spengler applied it to the progression from culture (creative, organic) to civilization (mechanized, artificial). As Spengler would have it, we shouldn’t be discussing “Western Civilization” at all but the Faustian Weltgefühl.
What interests me, though, is this notion that decline is irreversible because we lose access to the previous categories. And I think that analysis holds. It’s an argument against those who believe in the feasibility of reversing decline. What inspired this whole endeavor was a realization that early modernism (art and literature of the early 20th century) was the most sensitive to the loss of the old symbolic world. And that was over 100 years ago. Today that loss is much more complete but we are much less aware of it.
Cloven,
Thank you. I am no sociologist, no philosopher, no political scientist. Only a citizen (Indian, in India) living on the sidelines and watching how geopolitics plays out across the world, including in India.
I do believe, very strongly, that a civilization’s core ideas rest on values. These values are consistent, deeply held, and forms the basis of identity. That is the second idea: of identity rooted in some kind of shared values, ideals, custom, religion, tradition, practices, aesthetics, and symbols. When I said the West did not much have a civilization (and gave a historical run-down of how it has skittered down some long slope and borrowed ideas when convenient and discarded them when inconvenient) I was referring to exactly these. The West could have had a civilization but its history has been one of convenience and opportunistic occupation of the next best idea that came along.
That is directly responsible for the hypocrisy we see today: constantly preaching to the world about rules-based-international-order and other silly stuff that it never practices. They stem from, IMHO, the absence of inherent, embedded, and deeply held views on anything. The West wishes to whitewash its past…something it finds easy to do as it has done this over and over again.
The West has also inflicted self-goals in its desire to spread its version of liberalism across the world. Yesterday it was communism, today it’s nationalism. But nationalism is core to the concept of civilization as the latter is built on shared identity. If one negates nationalism it negates identity and - ergo - it has no civilization to speak of.
The West’s decline in this regard has to be seen in this context: it has forsaken to acknowledge what could identify it as a people on the altar of global expedience, dominance, and supremacy. In this, it also seeks to quash nationalism elsewhere which, ironically, only serves to give it more power, more self-pride, and to put the nail on the coffin, more assertive civilizational identity. So when you speak of the decline of the West, I think of Europe (the US is on a similar trajectory that will spin out longer). What does Europe stand for today? My humble view: absolutely nothing.
I read this article this morning in Firstpost relating to Iran. Aligns with whatever I’ve said earlier:
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/iran-resilience-civilisational-identity-war-strategy-history-14004050.html
...According to all ... traditional doctrines we have entered the last, final stage of Kali-yuga, the darkest period of this "dark age", the epoch of dissolution, from which it is possible to come out only through a terrible cataclysm.
— René Guénon
Men and women will have to lower their expectations and take reponsibilities seriously.
“As a civilizational benchmark, this set of norms rose to prominence about five minutes ago on the grand clock of history.”
I like this line; it acknowledges how short-sited we are when looking at history. On the scale of deep time, i.e., the one comprising the way anatomically modern humans have been living for most of the last 200 000 years, civilisation itself is the radically new aberration. On that scale you have to rethink seriously what you mean by “conservatism.”
I am not a big fan of the term conservatism at all.