Adelphiasophism
Cyclical History: Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 21, 2000
The Cyclical View of History
On the web, John J Reilly, a Catholic deeply absorbed by eschatolgy, reviews several modernist history books under the title “Spengler’s Future.” Oswald Spengler was a German historian of the last century who preceded Toynbee with the idea of analysing major civilizations to extract a general theory of history. The clues were to be found not just in parallel events but in parallels in culture, and culture includes lifestyle and religion.
Since the momentum of these huge historic cycles is so great, the implication is that nothing can be done to stop them. Once you recognize you are in a particular phase of a cycle, there is no point in behaving as if you were somewhere else. You are out of synchronization, or out of form and can only fail in what you are attempting to do. Plainly this has a bearing on those who believe in things that are new or have been profoundly disrespected for a long time. Adelphiasophism as a religion or world view might be like that. Is it?
In Spengler’s view, history has manifested itself in just eight “High Cultures”. He found similar patterns in seven other cultures, besides the Greco-Roman World—Egypt, ancient China, India and other societies. From a unique initial religious base, each produced its own philosophy, arts, political style, natural sciences and even mathematics. Each had also experienced “modern” eras of two or three centuries, and had its own peculiar “age of faith”, and its cultural climax in a “Baroque”. None expressed universal truths. Meaning was only the culture’s own, and the skepticism of each late culture realized it.
The story of the High Cultures is that of societies that ultimately fail. Cultures eventually die, but produce fossils, canons of art and science and political forms. The period of fossilization, after the end of the culture proper, is what Spengler calls “Civilization”, which he said began for the West at the end of the 18th century. The work of modernity is the completion of the final forms. Spengler was the first philosopher of world history to write about the other great civilizations not as a mere prologue to Western history.
Spengler’s idealization of the history of High Cultures had obvious implications for the future of the West. If the analogies held, then, within a few hundred years the West should collapse into a universal empire, with a culture that would ultimately become as stiff and curatorial as Egypt’s during the New Kingdom. Meanwhile, money and democracy would increasingly hollow out the traditional forms of society, until both collapsed in the face of power politics. Wars would reach a climax of technical sophistication and speed, even as nations disintegrated internally.
Oswald Spengler
Spengler’s doctorate was in Classical Greek philosophy, with a doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Heraclitus. His own philosophy, strongly influenced by Nietzsche, resembled the ideas of Martin Heidegger who also became a supporter of the Nazis.
A few years before the First World War, Spengler inherited a small sum from his mother which allowed him to stop school teaching and to pursue a historical study he had in mind, an examination of the parallels between the Western Europe of the early twentieth century and the Classical Mediterranean world at the time of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, roughly, from the mid-third century BC to the mid-second century BC. Similarities had been noted, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, between the modern era of the West and the Classical age—from the death of Alexander the Great (330 BC) to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BC).
Spengler tried to work out the analogy systematically, noting that besides the great power rivalries, parallels also happened in the exhaustion of artistic styles, the domination of both periods by a few great cities, and that science and mathematics approached final formulations in similar ways in antiquity and modernity. The outbreak of the First World War confirmed him in his opinion that Western civilization had entered a period of great wars of annihilation.
After the Agadir Crisis of 1911, Spengler realized that a general European war was inevitable, and that the West was entering a period of two centuries of wars for world power, like that between the Battles of Cannae (216 BC) and Actium (31 BC). Spengler saw Germany as the equal of Rome, but now it is more plainly the USA that is. It will establish hegemony over Europe, and create a world empire.
Spengler had the first volume of his masterpiece, “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”, ready for publication just as Germany surrendered to the allies in 1918, and it became extraordinarily sought after throughout the German-speaking world. Called “The Decline of the West” in English, in various translations, it became controversial throughout the whole world. It is not true, as is often implied when “The Decline of the West” is mentioned, that Spengler thought the West was collapsing or would soon be overcome by outsiders, but he saw that we were nearing the climax of our western civilization and would decline or stagnate. Spengler seems not to have been quite accurate in his timescale but he predicted with reasonable accuracy the events of the twentieth century and expected society to collapse or stagnate by 2200 AD.
With the loss of the world war, Spengler became involved in plots among right-wing aristocratic circles to overthrow the Weimar government and establish an authoritarian regime. What Germany needed to do, according to Spengler, was to rescue socialism from class warfare and Marxism. The socialism of the future, would not be an economic theory, but a system of morality for the conduct of public affairs. It would be ethical socialism.
“The Decline of the West”
Interested in the origin of civilized life, Spengler decided humanity is only about 100,000 years old. In the past humanity has had four ages, three before the historical High Cultures began. Most of human history was in the paleolithic, the remainder in the neolithic, precivilization—after the last ice age ended about 10,000 BC—and lastly the time of the High Cultures, which began in the Near East about 3,000 BC.
Spengler thought Nietzsche’s phrase “transvaluation of all values” captured the fundamental character of the final dying phase of every Culture, what he called “Civilization”. The beginning of a Civilization re-uses the forms of the culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in a different way. It ceases to create, but only reinterprets, whence the negativeness common to all such periods. The genuine act of creation has already occurred, and it merely inherits it.
The temporal quantum in the life of Spengler’s High Cultures is the generation, a measure that changes little over time, so Spengler believed that cultures go through life cycles of about the same duration, and that each goes through similar phases.
- A precultural period, when people are essentially barbarians, as in the Dark Ages of Europe;
- Spring, an age of construction and faith like the High Middle Ages;
- Summer, like the Renaissance and early Baroque, when the culture develops its distinctive arts and sciences;
- Autumn, when the fundamental insights of the culture reach full maturity if not necessarily final form, as in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe;
- Winter, when the creations of the past in art and science and spiritual life are perfected and elaborated, but not fundamentally extended. Technology flourishes rather than new science. For Spengler the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not new, but continued the characteristically Western style of science established by people like Newton and Leibnitz. This final age is the time of increase in quantity, not quality.
Spengler called spring, summer and autumn “Culture”, and winter “Civilization”. That mankind is an active, fighting, progressing whole is a Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season. Cultures with Civilizations, the late phase of a High Culture, have existed for only a small fraction of the time that man has existed zoologically. Spengler does not explain how High Cultures arose or what they have to do with each other. Each High Culture is equivalent to all the rest.
Spengler’s method was to find examples of the art or political life of the spring, for instance, from a variety of peoples and cultures. Which are we talking about? The ones from which data lines have been entered are ancient Egypt (from the Hyskos to the twenty second Dynasty), China (from the Hegemony of Chin to the end of the later Han Dynasty), the Classical world (from Alexander to the end of the Roman Empire) and Islam. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom period in Egypt and the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages in Europe are both characteristic products of the spring.
In the late-Classical age, Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism experienced the long death-struggle of the Apollonian ideal—the victory of natural order. In the interval from Socrates—who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible—to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every ideal of the old Classical age underwent transvaluation.
In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete by the time of King Asoka (250 BC) as the parts of the Vedanta written before and after Buddha show. These illustrations are all of equal significance in their own stories. They do not lead “up” to the modern West, but in the end Spengler thought it possible that all the High Cultures might be part of a larger story.
There are streams of being which are “in form” in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. When an athlete or team is “in form”, the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is “in form” when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach.
Spengler held that by the beginning of the Christian Era, the Middle East was the home of an awakening new culture which he called Magian, after the Magi of ancient Persia. Spengler’s idea was that the culture was composed of religious communities the way that the later West would be composed of nation states. Thus, the Jews, the Christians of Syria and Anatolia, and the Zoroastrians of Persia were all Magian communities. The birth of this new culture was masked, however, by the accident that the Romans had political control over much of its territory. Spengler calls this kind of distortion “pseudomorphosis”.
The new culture had to express itself in alien forms. It pretended to be Greek and Roman and as such put Magian ideas into the West. The Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire of the East, was a Magian polity. It was no different in spirit from its long-time foe, Sassanid Persia, or from the Islamic Reformation which ultimately destroyed it. This culture reached its final form in the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed as recently as the end of the First World War. Spengler included the Ottoman Empire as one of four sample civilizations. Like Han China, the Roman Empire, and the Empire phase of Egyptian history, it lasted roughly 500 years and went through many of the same crises which these other empires also experienced. It was effectively a universal state when it conquered the Middle East. The question is whether it can really be said to represent the final form of a single, mature culture, or whether Islam will carry it further.
Spengler’s presentation of economic history as a branch of culture, subject to styles and “periods”, is a novel view of the subject. The peculiar ways of looking at the world that each culture develops is true for itself, but fundamentally incomprehensible for the people of the other cultures. Spengler spent his public career emphasizing the cultural unity of the West and the inevitability of the end of national sovereignty, but seemed not to like international institutions.
While the High Cultures may borrow techniques from each other, they borrow nothing essential, and even what they borrow they put to uses peculiarly their own. Spengler’s best argument for this is mathematics, where he shows how the West put Classical geometry and Arabian algebra to uses that were different in kind from those of the societies that invented them. Historical meaning, in fact, occurs only within each High Culture. There is no truth for mankind as a whole.
When a person occupies the same place in the life cycle of one civilization as someone else does in another civilization’s cycle, these people are said to be “contemporary”. For instance, Spengler says that Alexander the Great in Classical times and Napoleon in the modern West are “contemporary”. Even now the ethical socialism of the Western (Faustian) psyche, its fundamental ethic, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that idealism is walled up in the stone of the great cities.
Rousseau is the ancestor of this Socialism. He stands, like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great civilization.
Rousseau’s rejection of culture forms and conventions, his famous “Return to the state of Nature”, his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the late culture, and whoe pure reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their severity, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated by dialectic. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha.
So long as the man of a culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to follow straight onwards naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms, but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory to present life to himself, morality turns into a problem.
Civilized ethics that are no longer the reflexion of life but the reflexion of knowlege upon life. One need has made itself felt—the need of a practical morality for the observance of a life that can no longer govern itself. Philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal ethics occupied a modest place, but now it was moral philosophy. Epistemology has to give way to hard practical needs or merge with them. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type. Adelphiasophism the modern version.
Fundamanetally style is not just whimsy. The artist or designer does not just make the style out of the air, personality, or brain—the style defines the artist. The style is a prime phenomenon of the Culture, within it the style of life itself, be it the style of art or religion or thought. It is the reflexion of Nature in the experience of people in that culture, their image in their world. In the historical picture of a Culture there is but one style, “the style of the Culture”. Mere style-phases—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire—are treated as if they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the Egyptian, or the Chinese style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same form, the style of the West as ripening and ripened. Hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque, or late Romanesque with the late Baroque.
Each culture has made its own set of images of physical processes, which are true only for itself and only alive when it is itself alive. The Nature of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near, and Euclidian geometry. The Magian Culture can by symbolized by the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious substances like the “philosophical mercury”, neither a material nor a property but by magic can transmute one metal into another. The outcome of the Western idea of Nature was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Magian the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes, and to the Western the idea of force and mass.
Just at the time of the emancipation of Western mathematics by Newton and Leibniz, Western chemistry was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematics alike became pure analysis when Robert Boyle (1626-91) devised the analytical method and with it the Western conception of the element. That was the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the mechanical outlook which the Baroque Age had established through Galileo and Newton.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as used in modern science, merely traditional distinctions without deeper meaning—are really the respective physical systems of the Apollonian, Magian and Western psyche, each of which grew up in its own culture and was limited in validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue.
The symptom of decline in creative power often is a taste for the gigantic, but size is not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of inward greatness, but is meant to hide its absence. This swaggering in specious dimensions is common to all nascent Civilizations—we find it in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of Chares called the “Colossus of Rhodes”, the architecture of the Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, and the American skyscraper.
For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour, just what Wagner musically achieved in three bars—whole world could crowd into these three bars. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against contemplation—painting and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step.
An artificial art has no further organic future. The mark of the end is technical and prosaic art—in piles of bricks, unmade beds and lights merely switching on and off. Art is pursuit of illusions of novelty called progress, of personal peculiarity, of the new style, of unsuspected possibilities, of theoretical babble, of pretentious fashion, of prosaic pretenders in the poet’s place, of industrial art, the unabashed farce which the art-trade has organized as latter day art-history—weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells! The bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of the West. Our art dies of senility, having fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.
Today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest.
The Alexandria of 200, as here in our world-cities, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists, whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions—all pattern-work. No one can date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by its ornamentation. So it has been in the last act of all Cultures.
Religion
Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even these last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically. The belief is belief in force and matter.
Unique and self-contained is Western materialism. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world is a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it—this is what distinguishes our particular “return to Nature” from all others. Confucius also believed that “Knowledge is Virtue”, and Buddha, and Socrates, but “Knowledge is Power” is a phrase that possess meaning only within the Judaeo-Christian Western Civilization. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system. All these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism and what not are elevated into the fitness morality which is the beacon of businessmen and politicians—Philistines alike—and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith.
Christianity did not transform Western man, but Western man transformed Christianity, making it a new religion and giving it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I”, the passion-charged foundation of the sacrament of personal contrition, the passionate striving to set up a proper morality as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity—will-to-power in ethics, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted. Nothing is more characteristic of our own culture than Christianity—a morality of imperative command.
The degree of piety of which an age is capable is revealed in its attitude towards toleration. One tolerates something either because it seems to have some relation to the divine, or because of indifference. Toleration in the classical world is the opposite of atheism. Plurality of numina and cults is inherent in the conception of Classical religion. To the Western psyche, dogma not visible ritual is the core of religion. Opposition to doctrine is regarded as godless. A Western religion, by nature of our culture’s space-dominant dynamic, cannot allow any freedom of conscience. Even free-thinking itself is no exception to the rule. All opinion leans to an inquisition of some sort.
Megalopolitans are irreligious. It is part of their being, a mark of their historical position. Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. What Spengler shrewdly realized was that it is entirely compatible with a living desire for real religiousness, when that on offer is no longer, or never was, valid. Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of Civilization.
The natural beat in the being of the world-state city dwellers is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous. This makes them incapable of living any way but artificially. This is the conclusion of the city’s history. Growing from primitive barter-centre to culture-city and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the energy and imagination of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of civilization—and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.
“Second Religiousness” appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which change ceases. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness— only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the springtime become visible and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.
In all Cultures, “Reformation” has the same meaning—the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Western worlds, to the budding off of new religions at this point.
Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because, for him, it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a S Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and gables.
Luther liberated the Western personality. The person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and divinity, however it was conceived, was removed. The common people welcomed, enthusiastically the tearing up of visible duties, but did not realize that stricter intellectual duties replaced them. The urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people were concerned, has given little.
The holy causality of the contrition-sacrament, Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone”. Both he and Bernard of Clairvaux understood absolution as a divine miracle: man does not change himself, God changes him.
Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee.
For Bernard, belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther belief sank to doubt. From 1215, the Western priest was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination. By his hand even the poorest wretch could grasp God. Protestantism destroyed this illusion of a link with the divine. While the strong do not need to hold the hand of divinity, many do, and even Catholic priests could see the importance for the simple of the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near and ever helpful, which could suffice for the simple, with a priestly guide. Luther wanted the simple to be heroes. Christian life is a desperate battle everyone must fight against the devil, and everyone who fought it fought it alone.
Arnold Toynbee
Spengler’s chief competitor as a comparative historian was Arnold Toynbee whose work, “A Study of History”, began to appear in 1934 and was finished in twelve volumes in 1961. Toynbee was also convinced that the modern West was repeatin the behavior of the ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Toynbee believed that the First World War in the West was “contemporary” with the Peloponesian War between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece, which occurred more than 200 years before the Punic Wars seen by Spengler as between contending states.
Toynbee did not believe in Spengler’s rigid cycles. Toynbee’s “Study” was intended as a correction of the German’s ideas. Spengler never attempted but the “Study” tried to cover the whole world. Toynbee would note the parallels and common patterns in the lives of different civilizations when they could be documented, but he refused to believe that history had ever been predestined. Events could always be traced to some individual or collective act of will.
Toynbee recognized that the different civilization cycles were related to each other and fell into certain classes. Both historians recognize Greco-Roman or Classical civilization as distinct from the more properly so-called Western civilization which arose in Western and Central Europe during the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Spengler said that the two societies had nothing in common but a partial coincidence of territory and some inessential technology. Toynbee insisted that Western Culture was obviously a successor to the Classical world. He also pointed out that, while the Classical world was the creature of a certain limited geographical region, the West was at least in principle a universal civilization, a characteristic it shared with China, which also had a classical forerunner followed by a Dark Age, and with Islam. In comparison to both these latter generations of civilization, the earliest civilizations, which in Eurasia arose in river valleys, were really local developments. Egypt was never more than a small country. Still, even these early societies seemed to manifest many of the crises and phases which their later regional and universal descendants also experienced.
Finally, it must be noted that one of Toynbee’s chief preoccupations was what he called universal states. This is the final political form into which civilizations tend to fall. While Spengler was also keenly conscious of this final stage of his Winter phase of the historical cycle, he did not discuss the universal states in great detail, though, in his earlier work, the US is a contender for the possible founder of the “imperium mundi”. Perhaps the United States did create the Western imperium mundi in 1945, 150 years ahead of schedule. The situation of Rome after the end of the Second Punic War was not so different from that of the United States after the Second World War.
The Empire is a theocracy. Macrohistorians like Arnold Toynbee have welcomed the prospect of religious revival. Toynbee decided that history was really about the development of universal religions, and only incidentally about civilizations. His “Study of History” became utterly evangelical in its later volumes. Some suggestion of where it may lead is offered by Spengler’s famous prophecy of the “the Second Religiousness:”
Neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself—it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness—only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.
“Springtime” is the first of the four metaphoric seasons that cultures evolved through. It emphasized architectural novelty and ornamentation, with architecture initially dominant. Winter brings us to civilization and the decline and fall of the Empire. When Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished: taste or fashion replaces architectural style, methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, with capricious choice.
A Western Apocalypse?
And ourselves? Spengler saw the High Cultures as a series of ever-greater failures, later High Cultures are more powerful and profound than the earlier ones, with the West reaching a maximum. For Western existence the distinction between Culture and Civilization lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that, frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other, the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts”. That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
Thus the present, roughly the early Winter of Western civilization, is not unique. Other civilizations have also experienced comparable periods of secularism and aggressively individual art and revolutionary politics, though each in its own form. The final phase of the West opens a fifth and final age of the whole human story. The coming end of the West will be the greatest catastrophe so far. By its end, the physical environment of the earth could be seriously disrupted. Human populations could fall back to the sparse numbers of precivilization. The species could even become extinct.
The end of the West as a High Culture is not purely pessimistic. As the era of its Civilization advances, the West can be expected to produce a final version of science, of mathematics, of politics, of ethics, even a measure of universal peace in the world empire. Spengler said he was talking about the “fulfillment” of the West. The goal would not be achieved by nations and individuals cooperating to establish theoretically correct solutions, but through the unprincipled pursuit of national and individual self-interest.
The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of late Civilization. The destiny question is not that of states’ ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief, of friend and foe, in their effectiveness. In every healthy state the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution. The decisive problems lie, not in the working out of constitutions, but in effecting a sound working government. It is always a definite minority, a single social stratum, which provides the political lead, constitutionally or otherwise. At the point when a Culture is beginning to turn itself into a Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively—and for the first time—as an independent force.
The state, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist— that is, sickly or formless. The idea of the whole nation being “in form” for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hallmark the incomprehension of the old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the wish of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized.
For the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom—from all form—by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up. With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures.
The transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism is a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the period of the Contending States. When, in 104 BC the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of assumption of the mythic Emperor title by the ruler of Ch’in in 288 BC.
The place of the permanent armies as we know them will be taken by voluntary forces of eager professional soldiers, and revert from millions to hundreds of thousands. These armies are not substitutes for war—they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations, they will prevail. These wars are for the heritage of the whole world, and continents will be staked. India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam will be called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played.
Popular education prepares the world for the coming Caesars. The nineteenth century began the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism.
Caesarism is that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar.
Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies.
Democracy is simply forgotten. Low voter turnouts and the emergence of post-democratic supranational entities like the European Union mean the end of democracy as anything but a venerable anachronism.
The Empire, in the form of a universal state, can and does facilitate economic activity through the rule of law, and through maintaining public order. It also taxes and regulates universally, in the interests of income redistribution and toprevent disruption through economic change. So, the expansive, technologically innovative economy that appeared in China during the politically chaotic Sung and Yuan periods was brought to heel when order was restored in the Ming period. By the eighteenth century, China’s manufacturing sector was still huge and sophisticated, but wholly subordinate to the imperial autocracy and gentry.
The arts under the Empire are well funded, technically proficient, and highly eclectic, but they are not new. The art of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt can usually be dated to within a generation, just as the periods of Western art can be easily distinguished from the Middle Ages on down. When you get to the New Kingdom—the age of the Empire—repetition predominates, except for freakish episodes like the Amarna period. The work that survives from the end of Egyptian civilization is almost impossible to distinguish from that of the Old Kingdom 1500 years before.
Not all macrohistorians say that the Empire is inherently mortal. Spengler thought that the Empire did not have to end. Fossils can last indefinitely. Classical civilization was destroyed by historical accident. Toynbee thought that either the winner of another world war would create a Western Universal State, or that an ecumenical society would arise peacefully—with western characteristics and a world government, it would not be a Universal State in the traditional sense. For Toynbee, the Universal State’s internal proletariat deserts it in favor of a higher religion, while at the same time the outer barbarians become stronger and stronger.
Science Fiction?
William Atheling Jr, who dies in 1975, wrote science fiction under the pseudonym, James Blish. Using the theory propounded by Oswald Spengler, Blish considered that science fiction was the lieterature of the winter phase of western civilization, and so would never produce any towering masterpieces. He explained his reasoning in the April 1979 edition of “Futures” magazine, a copy of an item published posthumously in “Foundation” magazine the previous year.
Science fiction, on the face of it could never have existed without science, but some students of it as a literary genre see similar fantastic fiction of previous ages as equivalent. Blish sees a justification for this in Spengler’s cyclic theory of history. Science fiction can be “contemporary” in Spenglerian terms with early forms of fiction. As we have seen, “contemporary” to Spengler meant in equivalent phases of the evolution of a culture. People who play a similar part in different cultures are contemporary even if they lived centuries or millennia apart. Blish saw Richard Nixon as contemporary with Caligula! Napolean and Hitler might be thought to have common features but they are not contemporary, whereas Caesar and Trajan could be thought of as contemporary with them. For Spengler, this age was the age of Caesarism in the western culture.
Cycles of history limit people’s choices, if they want to succeed. the western culture has already produced its great bards, poets, musicians, architects and painters in their appropriate times, so those with the ambition to be a Milton or Beethoven are too late to do it. Until we get to the Fimbulwinter of the western culture, there is still scope for some lesser degrees of success, but Milton and Beethoven have been, and the cycle has moved on, so that they cannot be bettered in this culture we live in.
Once the autumn begins, civilization commences and real creativity begins to grind to a halt. Napoleon began it, in the west. Great cities attract people from the countryside where they gather in increasingly grest slums and tenements. Law is codified and history written. Arts adopt standard models so that individuality wanes. Civilizations can last for many centuries as did imperial Rome. Technology flourishes as it did in the Roman empire. Great works can still be dones especially at the outset but they begin to dry up as the period lengthens and winter sets in. This is the phase of “contending states” as the Chinese termed it, and the collapse of Caesarism.
Politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and complete moral plasticity.James Blish
Familiar? Democracy becomes its own destroyer, when money destroys intellect. And:
Science disintegrates into a welter of competing grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each other almost weekly and veer more and more towards the occult.James Blish
A second religiousness arises among the masses that no one actually believes in, and this is upheld by syncretism in which snippets of other religions are taken out of context and welded into the latest one. Popular feeling turns towards occult matters, allowing science and religion to merge. The poor classes grow to unprecedented levels, and have to be humoured grossly to prevent discontent. In the arts, the lately respected traditions become old hat, and even schools fall into disrespect. Instead confused individual experimentation and fads replace them. The aim is meant to be originality, but the time for genuine invention has passed by, and tongu-in-cheek novelty and bad taste substitute for it. Culture is dead. Winter has set in.
So, Blish is able to explain science fiction as a literary syncretism in which decaying scientific forms meld with fantasy and the occult to feed a growing second religiosity. Science fiction draws in besides the technology and terminology of science, pseudo-sciences like ESP, parallel universes and psycho kinesis. Spiritualism and reincarnation are brought in. The spirits find tehnology useful for communicating with the living—tape recorders have ghostly voices, computer screens glow with ghostly writing, and TVs project ghostly figures. Cynicism leads science fiction into Dianetics and Scientology.
Though the restraints of fate are severe, the chances of exercising free will remain. They are merely bounded. Spengler says:
For us whom Fate has placed in this culture and at this moment of its development, the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches, our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth living. We have not the freedom to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. A task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.
We can be led willingly or be dragged along against our will. Those who do not sense and understand the forces of the time in which they are born, who trust to the surface—public opinion, popular phrases and the ideals of the day, are not of the stature for its events. A yearning wakes for whatever worthy tradition still lingers alive. The in-form powers, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken. The tradition and nobleness of the money-disdaining high ethic that has saved itself up for the future can revive at the center. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the mere politician—the seeker after wealth and rank—by the fact that he dares to demand sacrifices and obtains them. His feeling he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands, transforming them to the core and rendering them capable of unlikely deeds.
When science and religion overlap, we can follow with complete cynicism as Scientologists or with pride and justification as Adelphiasophists. Adelphiasophism lets Nature lead, and, if Spengler has his law of history correct, then we shall obey it quite naturally.
With the formed state having finished its course, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Humanity is a plant again, attached to the soil, quiet and enduring. The timeless village and the eternal peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth. People live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and continue to live into a new springtime. Should we return unprepared as in the past ot should we be prepared—as Adelphiasophists?
