The Collapse of Civilizations? (German Edition)

Individual French soldiers and civilians exhibited great heroism in resisting Nazi aggression, but France as such did not. He led what was virtually a military putsch to end the Fourth Republic in Caesarism reined rampant throughout Latin America for most of the twentieth century. If it might be said that English liberal ideals reached their full expression in the United States, might it not also be said that Western European ideals reached their full expression in Latin America? For what was Latin America in the twentieth century but a more advanced version of Spain or Portugal?

At the time of the foundation of the United States and for nearly a century afterward , most European countries had official censors, state churches, and strict laws against public assembly. Democracy was feared as mob rule.

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And the rule of law was meaningless in a country like France, which experienced bloody revolutions and counter-revolutions in , , , and But just as many if not more advocated repression and absolutism. Only in England, on the very edge of Europe, did liberal ideals consistently hold sway throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and only in America were those ideals fully realized in a stable constitutional system of government.

If America had an original sin, it was racism, not fascism. Like many German intellectuals of his time, Spengler thought that the rejuvenation of Europe would come from the East, from Russia.

But what passes for European civilization today is really Anglo- American civilization, imposed on an exhausted Western Europe after World War Two, and then enthusiastically embraced in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. American civilization emerged three hundred years ago as something wholly new, rooted in Western Europe in the same way that Western civilization was rooted in ancient Rome, but nourished on very different ideas and ideals.

Few traces remain of the civilization of the temporal Papacy, absolute monarchy, official religion, militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. It is the fact of facts Before the irresistible rhythm on the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking—consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last.

The "Decline" is largely concerned with comparisons of the Classical and Western Cultures, but some examples are taken from the Arabian, Chinese, and Egyptian Cultures. Each Culture arises within a specific geographical area and is defined by its internal coherence of style in terms of art, religious behavior and psychological perspective. Central to each Culture is its conception of space which is expressed by an "Ursymbol".

Although not amenable to a strictly logical examination, Spengler's idea of Culture is, he claims, justifiable through the existence of recurrent patterns of development and decline across the thousand years of each Culture's active lifetime. Spengler does not classify the Southeast Asian and Peruvian Incan , etc. Spengler distinguishes between ahistorical peoples and peoples caught up in world history. While recognizing that all people are a part of history, he argues that only certain Cultures imbue a wider sense of historical involvement.

Thus some people see themselves as part of a grand historical design or tradition , while others view themselves in a self-contained manner. For the latter, there is no world-historical consciousness. For Spengler, a world-historical view points to the meaning of history itself, by breaking the historian or observer out of his crude culturally parochial classifications of history. By learning about different courses taken by other civilizations, one can better understand his own culture and identity. Those who still maintain a historical view of the world are the very same who continue to "make" history.

Spengler asserts that life and humankind as a whole have an ultimate aim. However, he maintains a distinction between world-historical peoples, and ahistorical peoples—the former will have a historical destiny as part of a High Culture, while the latter will have a merely zoological fate. World-historical man's destiny is self-fulfillment as a part of his Culture. Further, Spengler asserts that not only is pre-cultural man without history, he loses his historical weight as his Culture becomes exhausted and becomes a more and more defined Civilization.

For example, Spengler classifies Classical and Indian civilizations as ahistorical, whereas the Egyptian and Western civilizations developed conceptions of historical time. He sees all Cultures as necessarily placed on equal footing in the study of world-historical development. From this idea flows a kind of historical relativism or dispensationalism.

Historical data, in Spengler's mind, are an expression of their historical time, contingent upon and relative to that context. Thus, the insights of one era are not unshakable or valid in another time or Culture—"there are no eternal truths. What is significant is not whether the past thinkers' insights are relevant today, but whether they were exceptionally relevant to the great facts of their own time. Spengler adopts an organic conception of Culture. Primitive Culture is simply a collection, or sum, of its constituent and incoherent parts individuals , tribes , clans , etc.

Higher Culture, in its maturity and coherence, becomes an organism in its own right, according to Spengler. The Culture is capable of sublimating the various customs , myths , techniques, arts , peoples, and classes into a single strong undiffused historical tendency. Spengler divides the concepts of Culture and Civilization, the former focused inward and growing, the latter outward and merely expanding.

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However, he sees Civilization as the destiny of every Culture. The transition is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, classes, or peoples that decides. Whereas Cultures are "things-becoming", Civilizations are the "thing-become". As the conclusion of a Culture's arc of growth, Civilizations are outwardly focused, and in that sense artificial or insincere. Civilizations are what Cultures become when they are no longer creative and growing.

For example, Spengler points to the Greeks and Romans, saying that the imaginative Greek Culture declined into wholly practical Roman Civilization. Spengler also compares the "world- city " and - province as concepts analogous to Civilization and Culture respectively. This argument has elements of Marxist conceptions of a core and periphery. He contrasts the "true-type" rural born, with the nomadic , traditionless , irreligious , matter-of-fact, clever, unfruitful, and contemptuous-of-the-countryman city dweller.

In the cities he sees only the " mob ", not a people, hostile to the traditions that represent Culture in Spengler's view these traditions are: City dwellers possess cold intelligence that confounds peasant wisdom , a new-fashioned naturalism in attitudes towards sex which are a return to primitive instincts , and a dying inner religiousness. Further, Spengler sees in urban wage disputes and a focus on lavish sport expenditures for entertainment the final aspects that signal the closing of Culture and the rise of the Civilization.

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Spengler has a low opinion of Civilizations, even those that engaged in significant expansion, because that expansion was not actual growth. One of his principal examples is that of Roman "world domination". It was not an achievement because the Romans faced no significant resistance to their expansion. Thus they did not so much conquer their empire, but rather simply took possession of that which lay open to everyone. Spengler asserts that the Roman Empire did not come into existence because of the kind of Cultural energy that they had displayed in the Punic Wars.

Keeping the collapse of civilisation at bay

After the Battle of Zama , Spengler believes that the Romans never waged, or even were capable of waging, a war against a competing great military power. A race, writes Spengler, has "roots", like a plant. It is connected to a landscape. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the extinction of the old and the appearance of the new one.

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Science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the micro-cosmic side of life a fresh group of characteristics appear and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to 'races' when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race "Man.

Nor are scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters… [13]. Spengler writes that, "Comradeship breeds races Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of a culture He also does not believe language is itself sufficient to breed races, and that "the mother tongue" signifies "deep ethical forces" in Late Civilizations rather than Early Cultures, when a race is still developing the language that fits its "race-ideal". Closely connected to race, Spengler defines a "people" as a unit of the soul. Every act alters the soul of the doer.

For example, the American people did not migrate from Europe, but were formed by events such as the American Revolution and the U. Spengler disliked the contemporary trend of fusing a definition of race similar to his with the biological definition. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people were ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science—never for folk-consciousness—and that no people was ever stirred to enthusiasm by this ideal of blood purity.

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In race Rasse haben there is nothing material but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is the incoordination of this wholly metaphysical beat which produces race hatred To Spengler, peoples are formed from early prototypes during the Early phase of a Culture.

These shapes in which humanity is seized and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art or mode of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, and Faustian cast World history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfill their Destinies.

These ideas, which figure prominently in the second volume of the book, were common throughout German culture at the time, and would be the most significant elements for the National Socialists. In his later works, such as Man and Technics and The Hour of Decision , Spengler expanded upon his "spiritual" theory of race and tied it to his metaphysical notion of eternal war and his belief that "Man is a beast of prey". The authorities however banned the book. Spengler is neither wholly pro-religion nor anti-religion , but he does differentiate between manifestations of religion that appear within a Civilization's developmental cycle.

He sees each Culture as having an initial religious identity, which eventually results in a reformation -like period, followed by a period of rationalism , and finally entering a period of second religiousness that correlates with decline. Intellectual creativeness of a Culture's Late period begins after the reformation, usually ushering in new freedoms in science.

The scientific stage associated with post-reformation Puritanism contains the fundamentals of Rationalism. Eventually rationalism spreads throughout the Culture and becomes the dominant school of thought. To Spengler, Culture is synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a religious trend that arises in the countryside, is carried through to the cultural cities, and ends in materialism in the world-cities.

Spengler described the process by which Enlightenment rationalism undermines and destroys itself, passing from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism. The Cartesian self-centered rationalism leads to schools of thought that do not cognize outside of their own constructed worlds, ignoring actual every-day life experience. It applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. In reaction to the educated elites, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness, which manifests as deeply suspicious of academia and science.

The Second Religiousness appears as a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state. The Second Religiousness occurs concurrently with Caesarism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization. Caesarism is the rise of an authoritarian ruler, a new 'emperor' akin to Caesar or Augustus, taking the reins in reaction to a decline in creativity, ideology and energy after a culture has reached its high point and become a civilization. The Second Religiousness is simply a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture. Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money , and the media are the means through which money operates a democratic political system.

Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality , natural rights , universal suffrage , and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war the bourgeois against the aristocracy. Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end.

Suffrage involves electioneering , in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism , are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away.

Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever.

Spengler notes that the greater the concentration of wealth in individuals, the more the fight for political power revolves around questions of money. One cannot even call this corruption or degeneracy, because this is in fact the necessary end of mature democratic systems. On the subject of the press, Spengler is equally contemptuous. Instead of conversations between men, the press and the "electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords , standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year.

For the press to function, universal education is necessary. Along with schooling comes a demand for the shepherding of the masses, as an object of party politics. Those that originally believed education to be solely for the enlightenment of each individual prepared the way for the power of the press, and eventually for the rise of the Caesar. There is no longer a need for leaders to impose military service , because the press will stir the public into a frenzy, clamor for weapons, and force their leaders into a conflict.

The only force which can counter money, in Spengler's estimation, is blood. As for Marx , his critique of capitalism is put forth in the same language and on the same assumptions as those of Adam Smith. His protest is more a recognition of capitalism's veracity, than a refutation. The only aim is to "confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects. Mathematics is the object of the first chapter of Spengler's book, which suggest its importance there.