According to Spengler, writing during the Great War, one should not see Europe or the West in ‘Ptolemaic’ terms as being the centre of history, and other cultures as orbiting around it. As Copernicus had done in astronomy, removing the centrality of the earth, the same had to be done with Western culture.
Moreover, he claimed, every culture has a unique ‘destiny,’ and all of them display developmental phases of life and death, just like living beings. Nor did he see European culture as being anything exceptional; in fact, at the time it was already in the declining phase of ‘civilization,’ instead of the earlier, vigorously creative stage of ‘culture’ that reached its apogee during the Enlightenment, and like all other cultures, would eventually perish.
Interestingly, Spengler noted that, during the creative ‘cultural’ phase, ‘spirituality’ occupied a prominent place, while the time of decay was marked by rootlessness and world-weariness among people, and by the dominance of machine organisation – the latter feature echoed by Max Weber, who famously wrote about humanity being imprisoned in an ‘iron cage’ of mechanisation.
It is not difficult to perceive in contemporary world (and not only Western) culture similar characteristics of cultural alienation and the predominance of machine culture, increasingly manifesting itself as the valorisation of AI. But instead of the cultural forces highlighted by Spengler, just over a hundred years after the publication of his epochal work it would turn out that a comparatively small group of individuals, motivated largely by financial and economic considerations pertaining to the possibility that they might lose their grip on power, would be instrumental in precipitating a catastrophic, controlled collapse of Western society, but also the rest of the world. Should their attempt be successful, a global collapse would be unavoidable.
I think Spengler understood that the game of Cultures is unwinnable. Traditionally, those cultures focused on the future are in search of perfection/simplicity and end up being the snake that eats its own tail (there are many examples of this….nuclear bombs, health benefits leading to over population, messing around with viruses and bacteria just for the sake of doing so). While the alternative is just as fatal… “stagnation.” I can’t say I disagree with this. But, personally, I’m a realist and of the opinion that humans are not very different from any other organism. Our life span on this planet is finite. That’s the natural order of things. Now, Humans just may reside here for millions of years (from an optimistic point of view), but in the end, it would still be finite and not necessarily a Utopia for most of those years. And, let’s face it…the Sun is finite as well.
Relative to the mysterious cabal of elite globe masters…they’re but a footnote IMO. If things get bad enough Klaus and Gates and any other suspected puppet masters will be the first to get strung up regardless of how much security they possess. That’s their catch 22. They can’t transform the world into their oyster within their lifetime…and you know their egos haven’t taught them that lesson. I suspect they will learn it eventually though.
The West is committing suicide on so many levels. Ann Coulter has said that America’s decline in large measure can be traced back to giving women the right to vote. A majority of women vote for the Mommy Party every election, and so we get bigger and bigger government promising more and more unaffordable free ****. And one only needs to look back at the 2020 election to see how women – primarily the AWFLs – were the deciding factor in Trump’s loss (that, and massive voter fraud of course). And now thanks to Biden and the Dems the country’s decline is on warp speed.
I wouldn’t put it to giving them the vote, but the fact that so many college educated, white, liberal women vote like idiots is certainly contributing to the decline. My body – my choice? Don’t make me laugh.
Brownstone has come out of this as one of the best resources for well written opinion pieces on C19.
To every “official” who was an active participant in the worst atrocity committed against humankind, in a time when everyone should damn well know better, you can’t take it with you.
“Ann Coulter has said that America’s decline in large measure can be traced back to giving women the right to vote.”
She’s an idiot and so are you if you take that seriously. The right to vote was the political price that had to be made for using millions of women in the industrial production process in WW1 and 2. It was utterly inevitable.
And lying about the facts doesn’t help you. Trump’s share of women’s voters (and there were millions of them) rose in the 2020 election over 2016. His share of the vote also rose sharply among blacks and hispanics. So go take your race-baiting and gender-baiting nonsense somewhere else. You sound like an effing Demonrat.
White women voted about 50/50 Trump.
Women in general voted 57% Biden.
Black & Latino voters increased their Trump votes but the vast majority went to Biden.
When the U.S. becomes majority non-white in 2045 the country will never be what it once was.
Then pick a better candidate and stop your whining. As for this,
“When the U.S. becomes majority non-white in 2045 the country will never be what it once was.”
No country is ever what it was half a century later. That’s the case regardless of ethnic changes to which you appear incapable of dealing with.
“When the U.S. becomes majority non-white in 2045 the country will never be what it once was.”
Thank God. Faster please.
Women and political ignorance well…….
This article has Max Weber “echoing” Oswald Spengler, whose “Decline” was written 15 years after “The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism”.
But the article does link to a wiki page with this quote from Weber:
// The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.
Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.//
Weber was a precient scholar, Spengler was one of those who took up the themes of Decadence & Decline, replacing the theme of “Progress” as the Great War & following disasters replaced 19th Century “Rhodesian” expansion & expansiveness.
//This string of disasters cried out for explanation. And so a crowd of thinkers—philosophers, historians, theologians —began to offer them. First was Oswald Spengler in his hugely influential study The Decline of the West (1918–1923).
A host of competing declinists followed his example, all claiming to have discovered the decisive idea or the decisive event that sealed our doom.
Since the 1950s this has been a popular and growing literature on the European and American right. But its tropes can also be found on the fringe left, where apocalyptic deep ecologists, antiglobalists, and antigrowth activists have joined the ranks of twenty-first-century reactionaries. In a less well known story, traces of Spengler’s historical mythmaking also appear in the writings of radical political Islamists, whose story of the secular West’s decline into decadence, and the inevitable triumph of a vigorous, renewed religion, has European fingerprints all over it.//
The Shipwrecked Mind – Mark Lilla 2016
One stream of this declinist genre was racial angst, “The Passing of the Great Race” & “The Rising tide of Color”.
These days it’s The Great Replacement & Scientific Racism.
They’re both wrong. As can be seen from everything -not- turning out the way they forecast.
“This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.
Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”
Poppycock.
Also, racial angst? White fragility, perchance? More poppycock, but of much lower quality.
I agree with you. There are few things so utterly futile as trying to predict the future of human society. Human affairs are dominated by Black Swan events. These can be positive or adverse, but routinely they demolish any preconceptions about the future of human society. By their very definition, they are not predictable and change everything.
Some of them are very large events and very sudden. There was a huge Black Swan event approximately 65 million years ago. It spelt the end of the Cretaceous and every living species over about 3 kg body mass. It’s also the only reason that human beings exist at all.
So you are quite right; the predictions of Spengler and Weber are worthless. Whatever happens, it will not be that. This nonsense of predicting the future is the same stupid blunder that the global warmers have been making through their absurd climate modeling exercises for the past few decades.
With a little help from arsenists.
Cultural evolution is slower than technological evolution, by around a factor of 10.
We hadn’t adapted to industrialization before we had cars, planes, then the nuke and computers, and we still haven’t adapted to industrialization, and we’re throwing AI and ubiquitous computing, mass surveillance, giant electrical grids, the internet, etc, into the mix.
Result: A big mess, which, as Murphy’s Law dictates, all comes to a head just as western civilization collapses.
Lucky us.
“all comes to a head just as western civilization collapses.”
Another prophet who imagines that the future is predictable. So deal with it rather than whining about it.
It is not uncommon to be SNAFU (Situation Normal, All F***** Up). But we are now in FUBAR (F***** Up Beyond All Recognition).
It is not going to end well.
That is true.
It’s going to end at TARFU.
Well … that article read like an amalgamation of every EXTREME right wing “conspiracy theory” ever devised since “The One” was elected in 2008. Right? There’s the WEF, Klas Schwab, 15 min. Cities, C19 lockdowns, vaccine harms, etc. every verboten topic fact checked into absurdity by the Deep State and the False front media. Every “conspiracy theory” having been proven without a doubt. When will all the tech platforms disappear Brownstone’s internet access?
Are the people of the West waking up? Or will the majority of voters simply prefer “owning nothing … but being happy” with the ‘Free’ pittance handed out by their benevolent government? We have become overwhelmed with a underclass of dependents whose only hope in life is government dependency (and/or crime). That voting bloc … now harvested by the communist Democrat Party … may have overwhelmed the remaining sane citizens of our formerly free and fair nation. It may just be mathematically, and statistically … OVER. We may have lost our nations forever. Mission accomplished by the multi-culti open borders one worlders… we’re screwed.
The moment the rest of the world caught up with the west is the moment the west overturned the table.. Take my ball and go home.. Change the rules.. But they aren’t speaking to the rest of the world.. They are speaking to us..
The looming consequences of a failed empire can not be placed at their feet.. They need excuses and lots of them while they do business out the side door.. Why would the rats cause the ship to sink?.. They found a better ship..
Civilization, it was great while it lasted.
One of the worst pieces of sci-fi is Asimov’s Foundation series which sucks for a variety of reasons the most prominent of which is this notion that civilizations are governed by math and certainty like gas diffusion or similar processes. It’s nonsense that fits in perfectly with the Foundation series and how serious it takes its own unseriousness. Here we have the same thing but for ‘culture’.
The best thing to ever happen to the world was English law and the gun.. Sadly our? leftists are working overtime to reverse this..
I don’t think there is any evidence to support Spengler’s thesis that societies are essentially deterministic organic entities, ie, functioning within a linear growth pattern of organic-like birth, maturity, decline. Such a thesis ignores not merely that a society’s ideology and laws are developed by the population – and that populations and their social ideologies are highly adaptive to their ecological realities [ ie, you can’t grow wheat in a rainforest] – and – that our species adapts by technology and laws rather than by physiology. So-when women became an important part of the economic workforce, of course, they had to be given the vote, since the political system must be a reflection of the wealth producing system of a population. So, there’s no such thing, in my view, of the birth and fall of a ‘civilization’.
And – another point, the West, or Europe, did produce a unique society of high technological adaptation for one key reason; its biome, is the richest on the planet, in terms of mild climate, regular rainfall, rich soil, abundant plants and animals that could be domesticated – and the result – was a constant rise in population, which required an adaptive mindset with the laws to support it – to develop new technologies to sustain this growth population…hence, the focus on individual freedoms and thinking.
As for the second part of this essay – which is a concern about the growth of a global mercantile elite – [which Harper has referred to as the Anywhere’s], ie, a global class of networked extremely wealthy business elite with no bonds to any location but focused only on their wealth production and, who, unelected and unaccountable, function as a force affecting the elected governments of nations – I think this is a real and genuine concern.
Good post. Organicism is a category mistake.
I would add that Europe’s technological superiority developed over centuries of fighting each other,
such that this superiority allowed them to exploit Africa and the New World.