Canonball
Canonball
Discussing Volume II Of "The Decline Of The West" By Oswald Spengler
In this episode of Canonball we discuss Volume I of "The Decline Of The West," which, subtitled "Form And Actuality," was written by Oswald Spengler and published in 1922.
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How do civilizations end? What is the relationship between cultures and peoples? How does a city affect culture and the individual? And what is its role in history? What is honor? What does the press do? These are some of the questions that Oswald Spengler tries to answer in volume two of The Decline of the West, which is subtitled Perspectives of World History. In the previous episode, we looked at volume one. If you're interested in Spengler and you haven't listened to that one yet, I recommend you go and check it out. I enjoyed reading that very much. And there I also included some of the highlights from Spengler's life. I do that with each of the writers that we look at, but if we are reading another book by the same author or another volume of a book by the same author, then I don't need to do it again. So you can find that there as well. Before we get into volume two, I wanna mention something important that I missed in looking at volume one. Spengler's argument in general is that history is better understood as the life and death of various historical processes rather than as some gradual linear progression. He doesn't like the ancient medieval modern scheme. He prefers to say Greece and Rome were sort of two parts of one thing. Arab civilization is another thing. Chinese civilization is another. The history of Western Europe is another. And that it makes more sense to look at each of these as something that begins, rises, decays, and falls, that you can find more patterns in looking at it that way. And I had said that I wish that he had made some kind of graphic laying these all out side by side because he points out these connections. He'll say this over here resembles that in the text. He'll say that, but I had said it would have been nice to see a timeline of each of these different things that he's talking about and how they line up in certain ways. And little did I know that in the back of the book, there is a table almost exactly like what I was describing. In the back of volume one, table one is titled Contemporary Spiritual Epochs. And he puts contemporary in quotes because some of them are very old. He means contemporary in the sense that they happened in a way that was parallel somehow. And he has four columns, Indian, classical, Arabian, Western. And then along the left side, he has spring, summer, autumn, and civilization. He stops the seasonal metaphor at winter and puts civilization in its place. And then for each season, there are sub-stages. And he shows how each of these stages can be demonstrated in each of these different processes. They can be shown by different figures and movements that emerged in roughly the same order in each of these different contexts that are separated by a lot of time and space. And this is a very dense table. Each entry on it represents something that could be at least a chapter of a book, if not a book by itself or even a shelf of books. So I'm certainly not familiar with all of it, particularly in the column for the Indian Spiritual Epoch. And I want to look at this more closely and study the topics here about which I don't know anything. So I'm still not totally convinced by this, but this table does a lot to further Spengler's argument that we should still look at it with a critical eye as we do with everything. And with that, we can get into some passages from volume two of Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, subtitled Perspectives of World History. And in this first short one, he's talking about blood and ancestry. And there's an important distinction to make here, which is that there's a way that talking about ancestry is discredited, which is by saying that if you're too interested in ancestry or your own ancestry, then it's because you're trying to take credit for things that you didn't do. And on one level, there are certainly people who do that, and that's kind of a dorky thing to do. If you happen to be the descendant of some king, which as you go further back in the generations, that becomes increasingly likely for many people, but you yourself haven't done anything interesting, that's not worth anything. If you have some ancestors who did something great, that puts more pressure on you to do good work and to live a good life than there would be otherwise, if it has any effect at all. When I think about ancestry, I'm not thinking about this or that relative who did this or that important thing. Anyway, I don't have anything like that in my family. I'm thinking about it in a more even way that in my mind creates a kind of spiritual balance and which could apply to anybody really. And that is that whoever your ancestors are, one thing that definitely happened is that they certainly had children. And they probably did some kind of work. For most of history, the kind of work that men and women did was separate, but they both worked a lot, most likely. And even if you have some patches of your family that were very,wealthy for a little while, that probably didn't last very long. If you could look at a pie chart that would characterize the economics of the lives of all your ancestors, whoever you can claim among them, still the overwhelming majority of that pie chart would be ordinary people doing ordinary work. But when I reflect on that, I still feel something special, which is that all kinds of people lived all kinds of lives and begat children and worked to raise them and made themselves tired and as a result of that, I am here. And that's not only a side effect. They certainly didn't all do it just for me specifically, but they certainly thought of their descendants in some abstract way. They didn't know who we were going to be, but they had some abstract sense of who they hoped we would be or what kind of people they hoped we would be. And that was probably at least part of their worldview. It was probably a bigger part for them than it is for us, because just how in modern life thinking about ancestry is not terribly fashionable, thinking about one's descendants one or two or three or five centuries in the future is not very fashionable either. But I get a feeling of balance when I think about this, because on the one hand, all of our ancestors all worked and now they're all dead. And there were certainly some people among them who did certain things that were at their own cost to the benefit of posterity. They planted trees under whose shade they would never sit. And they did that thinking of us in some abstract sense. And so for me, I enjoy the fruit of their labor. And I also really want to pay it forward. I want to keep that going. So there's on the one side, a receiving from the ancestry and on the other side, a giving to the progeny. And I find this to be one quite effective answer to the nihilism that is so popular and seemingly actively promoted and encouraged. So when I talk about ancestry, I'm not thinking of this or that esteemed figure that I can claim in my family tree. I'm talking about the totally ordinary people who lived ordinary lives of struggle and sacrifice, industry and invention as a result of which we're all here today. And so we have some kind of moral obligation to do something. So all of that is why a passage like this one from Spengler stood out to me. Spengler writes, quote, The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat and time. End quote. A topic that comes up a few times throughout this book is the difference between theory and action in politics, and how action is more valuable than theory, or it does more to shape the course of history. He writes, quote, In the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here, a shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the ink slinger and the bookworm, who think that world history exists for the sake of the intellect, or science, or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity, the understanding divorced from sensation is only one and not the decisive side of life. A history of western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality, Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse. Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. End quote. This next one is a bit longer, and he talks about a few different things. He talks about how humans began as hunter-gatherers, and they shifted to agriculture. They went from nomadic to being settled, and that shift was significant spiritually also. Nature went from being hostile to nurturing, and he lists these connections that were made between sowing seeds and begetting children, between the harvest season and death, between the child and grain, that this relationship between man and the soil was significant not only as a means of getting food. And then from there, he talks about the transition from the peasant to the town man, to the culture man, not necessarily as an advancing to some higher plane, but only as a transition to a different stage in these processes that he's describing. And he talks about how the cities and the towns separate people from their roots, and this rootlessness results in a ranging intellect that goes all over the place, just as people.do. And he connects it to the Germanic tribes moving south and says that man is nomadic at the beginning and at the end of the culture. And he talks a bit about how what we normally call world history, whatever country you're talking about, is really only town history. It's the history of built-up populations, whereas man history would include peasant life and nomadic life. And he uses these terms microcosm and macrocosm, and I take that to be a reference to the relatively individual life of a nomad. Not that a nomad is alone, he has his tribe, but it's not as collectivized as the town is. And he talks about how a totality, a collective soul, emerges from a town or a city. Spengler writes, quote, Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of hostile nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture, for that is something artificial, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and plows is seeking not to plunder, but to alter nature. To plant implies not to take something, but to produce something. But with this, man himself becomes plant, namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends. The soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earthboundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile nature becomes the friend, earth becomes mother earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. Skipping ahead. This is the condition precedent of every culture, which itself in turn grows up out of a mother landscape and renews and intensifies the intimacy of man and soil. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plant-like being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor religion can alter the site of its growth. Only in the civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man, as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsmen were free sensually. Ubi bene ibi patria, where there is bread, there is my country, is valid before as well as after a culture. In the not yet spring of the migrations, it was a Germanic yearning, virginal yet already maternal, that searched the south for a home in which to nest its future culture. Today, at the end of this culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something worth dying for. It is a conclusive fact, yet one hitherto never appreciated, that all great cultures are town cultures. A higher man of the second age is a town-tied animal. Here is the real criterion of world history that differentiates it with utter sharpness from man's history. World history is the history of civic man. Peoples, states, politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon one prime phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all cultures themselves live in the town, even though they may reside bodily in the country, they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is. To feel this, we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the wonder-struck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone and wood set in the landscape, with its stone-enclosed streets and its stone-paved squares, a domicile truly of strange form and strangely teeming with men. But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass soul of a wholly new kind, whose last foundations will remain hidden from us forever, suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the palace, the town figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing the form, language, and style history that accompanies the culture throughout its life course." End quote. In this next one, he's talking about cities, and he first talks about how the countryside first nourishes the country town, the first and smallest version of a city. And then eventually, a city grows up and it's sucking the countryside dry.of men, of people. It's bringing everybody into the city. And he refers to those people as its victims. And he says that people who are used to the countryside can pull up their roots and go somewhere else. But he says that the intellectual nomad, ironically, the person who has lost their connection to the soil and is now living in big cities and moving all around, they ironically are unable to leave their new place. They're unable to leave the city in that even if they move out to the countryside, they bring the city with them in their minds. They've lost the countryside inside of them, and they can't regain it by looking for it outside themselves. And he says that their cosmic beat is decreasing and they have all kinds of tension in their consciousness. This one is a little bit more spiritual, but since I lived in big cities for a long time, and I have now moved out to a small town, I found this one interesting. Spengler writes, Long, long ago the country bore the country town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men till it waries and dies in the midst of an almost uninhibited waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go back to the land. Even disgust at this pretentiousness, wariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the tedium vitae that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take the city with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the country within themselves and will never regain it outside. What makes the man of the world cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous." And this next one is a bit longer and he gets into a few different things. He talks here about cities and the loss of the collective to live. And that might sound strong, but what he's talking about is that there's still an individual will to live. As people move to cities and get separated from the soil, they still individually want to live, but they're not afraid of their family line dying out the way that peasants are. And he talks about why children stop happening in civilizations. And he says that when people start thinking about having children in terms of pros and cons, the turning has already come. That life has this unconscious drive that keeps it going. That peasants never think about it. They simply continue in this natural order of having children. But the conscious mind, the intellect disrupts that order and it makes people think about the pros and cons of having children. And something that comes along with it is differing views of marriage. Men start looking for a life partner rather than for the mother of their children. And women also view themselves differently. He talks about the Ibsen woman who he says, instead of children has soul conflicts. And all of this leads to depopulation and the crumbling of civilization. And this is another spot where you'll hear it. He mentions a bunch of other examples from history. And it would be interesting to go and look into each of those because all of this certainly sounds pretty familiar in Western European culture over the last 150 years. But he says that there are parallels to this phase in ancient Rome, in India, in Babylon, in Greece. And there is a word and a reference here that the translator uses that are not terribly common. One is a glebe, which is a word for a field. And the other is quiverful, which I had known to mean a family with a lot of children. But I found that the origin of the phrase is Psalm 127, which reads, quote, like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them, end quote. So it looks like it originally referred specifically to sons, but I've seen it used to refer to families with lots of children. Spengler writes, quote, the last man of the world city no longer wants to live. He may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no. For it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deepened, inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. Let the reader try to merge himself in this world.the soul of the peasant. He has sat on his glebe from primeval times, or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forebears and as the forebear of future descendants. His house, his property, means here, not the temporary connection of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and inward union of eternal land and eternal blood. It is from this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of the cycle—procreation, birth, and death—derive that metaphysical element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and religion that all land-bound people possess. For the last men, all this is past and gone. Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man of intelligence most significantly and characteristically labels as natural impulse or life force, he not only knows but also values causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard having children as a question of pros and cons, the great turning point has come, for nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an it, a drive, that is utterly independent of waking being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. In the classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been established in the great cities. In subsequent Roman times it became appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own companion for life, becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the higher spiritual affinity in which both parties are free, free that is, as intelligences, free from the plant-like urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a shah to say that unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul conflicts. Marriage is a craft art for the achievement of mutual understanding. It is all the same whether the case against children is the American ladies who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisians who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine who belongs to herself. They all belong to themselves, and they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a matter of course, in every other civilized society, and conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism, and in the 19th century, as in the times of Lao Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine, there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The quiverful, which was still an honorable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the great city a subject of caricature. Ibsen did not fail to note it, and presented it in his Love's Comedy. At this level, all civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up a while. And last, only the primitive blood remains, alive but robbed of its most promising elements." And in this next one, he touches on something interesting that I had been thinking about recently. I'll read the passage first, and then we can talk about it a bit. Spengler writes, "...there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive today, there were a million ancestors, even in A.D. 1300, and 10 million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood relative of every human being."European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field. So that within 20 generations or less the population of a land grows together into one single family. And this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfill the will of the race." End quote. So the part that I'm particularly interested in there is he says that everyone alive today has a million ancestors who were alive in the year 1,300 and 10 million who were alive in the year 1,000. And the important part here is that the number of your ancestors is not very intuitive. It's a lot more than you think. We usually imagine, at least in the American case, a few centuries back, you think of your great-grandparents' parents, and then a little bit further, and you say, well, it's a few hundred people. But if you keep extending that, it of course keeps doubling. And so going back not very far, you suddenly get to very big numbers. And I think that it would come out to being 2 to the X, where X is the number of generations. And so if we take a 25-year generation, that on average the next generation has children when they're about 25, then we say there are about four generations per century. And so what that means, roughly, is that you have 16 ancestors who were alive a hundred years ago. You have 256 ancestors who were alive 200 years ago. You have 4,096 ancestors who were alive 300 years ago. And then at 500 years, based on this calculation, it gets over a million. At a thousand years, it's over a trillion. And at 2,000 years, it's over a septillion. And that's much higher than what Spengler came up with, but it also doesn't make any sense because there weren't a trillion people around a thousand years ago. So what do we do with these numbers? Obviously, the families intermarried a lot, so that your ancestors at such-and-such generation, let's say in 1750, also themselves shared an ancestor maybe in 1620. And in many cases, it was more recent than that. So I think that Spengler must have gotten lower numbers because he somehow tried to account for that intermarrying and to bring the numbers down in a sensible way because if you just do it with that 2 to the X, it becomes nonsensical. But the conclusion is, as Spengler points out, it's a lot. It's more than you think it is, probably. And it might mean, he says that everyone alive today probably has relatives who fought in the Crusades without exception, and he's using that as an example. But if we go back further, it might mean that if your 23andMe comes back with significant French and German heritage, that you are related to almost every single Gaul and Alemannian who were defeated by and successfully resisted the Roman advance, respectively. But this kind of thing is unintuitive, so I'm not sure if that's true. But intuitively, it seems like it's true. But for now, we can put a pin in it and say you have more ancestors than you think, which I think is Spengler's point here. And this also feeds into what I was saying earlier about thinking of ancestry not as a hall of fame of the notable people in your family tree, but as a fabric, as a tapestry of thousands and thousands of threads that all come together to make something big and beautiful. A point that Spengler brings up a few times is this idea that it's not that peoples create cultures, but rather cultures create peoples. And in a related way, peoples do not do great deeds, great deeds create peoples. That it wasn't that the Romans made the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire made the Romans. That the reason why we think of the Romans as a unified people is because they did this thing called the Roman Empire. And I think we'll get into that more in the passages that I've marked, but we can leave it there for now. Spengler writes, quote, In this next one, he's talking about the emergence of modern science from the beginning of the Faustian period, which as we talked about in the last episode, he dates to roughly the year 900 or a thousand. And he sees it as this process that's now drawing to a close a thousand years later. And he views science not as connected to theology, but to the Faustian will to power. And he describes it as being technical, that is, experimental, mathematical, not theoretical in its foundation. And then he lists some major medieval scientists andtheir contributions and talks about how the symbol of the machine led directly to the experiment and also to the view of God as a kind of great machine. Spengler writes, quote, within Baroque philosophy Western natural science stands by itself. No other culture possesses anything like it and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings not a handmaid of theology but the servant of the technical will to power oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally from its very foundations a practical mechanics and as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000. As early as the 13th century Robert Grostest was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1189 wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert in 1600 and Roger Bacon the disciple of both developed a natural scientific theory of knowledge to serve as basis for his technical investigations but boldness in the discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1311 and a few decades later was mathematically developed by the Paris alchemists Bourdain Albert of Saxony and a resume. Let us not deceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive power of these explorations. Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment forever but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the 12th century and made perpetua mobile the Prometheus idea of the Western intellect. Skipping ahead and imperceptibly also as the scanning of nature became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy. The concepts of monkish working hypotheses developed from Galileo onwards into the critically illuminated noumena of modern science. The collisions in the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light and the electricity which in our electrodynamic world picture has absorbed into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical monotheism. End quote. Later in trying to articulate what honor is he references Thersites who is a character in the Iliad who is not particularly honorable. Quote, the basic concept of all living custom ethic is honor. Everything else, loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution is comprised in it and honor is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honor that is already dishonor. To lose honor means to be annulled so far as life and time and history are concerned. The honor of one's class, one's family, of man and woman, of one's people and one's country, the honor of peasant and soldier and even bandit. Honor means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional time as sin belongs to timeless space. To have honor in one's body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites natures. The mud-souled, the riff-raff, the kick-me-but-let-me-lives. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy. All these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. End quote. In this next passage he's talking about the state and the family and the wording that he uses at the very beginning, or rather the wording that the translator used, is a little unusual. But he also uses this phrase throughout the book, inform, and he sometimes says in condition, and these are usually in quotes. And if he ever said exactly what he meant by that, I missed it, but it seems that he means, depending on their context, either that they are in their best state, that they're at their best when, and then whatever he says next, or it sometimes seems he's using it to mean they are in form in a philosophical sense. Volume 1 of Decline of the West is called Form and Actuality. He spends a lot of time talking about how certain things are manifested in history, and sometimes when he says inform, it seems that he's saying that this is manifested by that. In this particular context it seems more like the former usage. He says that a people is in form when it is a state, and a kindred is in form when it's a family. And he talks about these two structures, the state and the family, and the parallels between them. And he draws this connection between res privita, the private life, and woman, and res publica, the public life, and man. And he says both of these are expressions of care, of the effort to sustain life. Spengler writes, quote, a people is as state, a kindred is as family in form. That is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life.res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care. The woman is world history. By conceiving and giving birth, she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is in form as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will to duration. A people in condition is originally a banned warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man. It is care for the preservation of the whole, including the spiritual self-preservation called honor and self-respect, the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar. If all life were one uniform being stream, the words people, state, war, policy, constitution would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful variety of life, which the creative power of the culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such with all that flows therefrom. Plant life is only plant life in relation to animal life. Nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defense, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat. A people shapes history inasmuch as it is in condition for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history which gets it into this condition in which alone it becomes creative, and an outward history which consists in this creation. Peoples as state, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world as history there is nothing beyond them. They are destiny. Respublica, the public life, the sword side of human being currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connection, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being." Here he gives a few interesting thoughts about what history actually is and how it progresses or how it ought best to progress. He writes, quote, in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts. No truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts. And anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics. Let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples in form. No doubt it is the form in press that living doth itself unfold, but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary. And as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood. If by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions. In other words, the way to nullity." End quote. And at one point he refers to, quote, the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation. End quote. And that line caught my attention because this brings up a problem to the skeptical approach to history. On the one hand, you want to try to have your thoughts about history track with the available evidence for it. And that usually means documentation of one kind or another. Though when you're talking about history, it could also include archaeology and geology and other things as well. And this is a very safe way to approach history. But I think what Spengler is getting at is that if you do that, you are going to have to cut out the vast majority of the totality of human history. We take that as a given. Documented history is a few thousand years old. But the story of people, maybe the more important part of the story, the part that would actually explain a huge amount about why we are the way we are, happened before there was anybody writing anything down. And so he refers to identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation as an evil practice. And that also puts the terms prehistory and prehistorical in a weird spot. Because he would say, that's not prehistory, that's history also. It's justnot surely documented. It reminds me of the story of the drunk who's crawling around on the ground under a streetlight and the policeman comes along and says, what are you doing? And the drunk says, I lost my keys. And so they looked together for a few minutes and they can't find them. And the policeman says, are you sure you lost them here? And the drunk points down the street and says, no, I lost them over there. And the policeman exasperated says, then why are we looking for them here? And the drunk says, because there's better light here. We might be doing something like that. If we only focus on the times and places of history for which there is very clear documentation in this next passage, he's talking about the press and Spengler often hits on so many important things in a short passage that it can be difficult to keep up. But here he says that the press serves its owners. It doesn't spread free opinion as it claims to do. Rather, it generates it. That's one sentence in this 1300 page pair of books published well over half a century before manufacturing consent. And he gives an interesting definition of liberalism. He calls it freedom from the restrictions of the soil bound life. And he elaborates on that a little bit. And before that, he had been talking about money in politics. And he says that these two things, the free press and money in politics are what constitute liberalism. And these two things together aim at the domination of a class which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the state. They want to be above the state. Spengler writes, quote, it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics, not the bribery of individual high personages, which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the nursing of the democratic forces themselves. In 18th century England, first the parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected commons were systematically managed by money. England too discovered the ideal of a free press and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread free opinion, it generates it. Both together constitute liberalism in the broad sense. That is freedom from the restrictions of the soil bound life. Be these privileges, forms, or feelings. Freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both too unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the state. Mind and money being both inorganic want the state not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose, end quote. And then later he talks about one of the results of this process, which is that parliamentarism, this faith in the parliament, is becoming what monarchy used to be. That is an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the orthodox. It's something for the true believers to watch and to be amazed by. Just as in the past people would have come out in the street to see the king go by or gone to see the coronation or whatever spectacles the crown put on, parliamentary government is mostly that also. It's a spectacle for the orthodox. And he says that meanwhile, actual power has moved somewhere else. And remember he was writing this over a hundred years ago. Volume two was published in 1922, so 102 years ago. Spengler writes, quote, with the beginning of the 20th century, parliamentarism, even English, is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the role that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the orthodox, while the center of gravity of big policy already de jure transferred from the crown to the people's representatives is passing de facto from the latter to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The world war almost completed this development, end quote. In a lot of volume two, Spengler talks about the city and the role of the city in a culture and in history. And we've looked at that a little bit. And in this next passage, he's talking about how the masses from the city then become destructive. That as a result of what cities do to people and culture over time, leaders can then easily drive those people in one direction or another. And here he makes a passing mention of Syracuse. And this is just one of many examples of how he connects these different parallels across history. But he's talking about a division of property in Syracuse. And this was something that happened in 356 BC, that land and houses were redistributed. Spengler writes, quote, it is the world city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ale, whether the division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for banner like Marxism, all thisis superficial. It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Caesarism the only issue. The world city, the land-devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion, and in destroying, they die." And later he gives a kind of impressionistic summary of what the end of the show looks like. And basically he says that leaders manipulating the intellectually rootless masses leads to chaos. And in that chaos, this group that he calls the Caesar men rise up and take control. And then the whole cycle starts over again. And as is characteristic of pre-culture, new destinies can be imagined. And this is Spengler forecasting based on his study of and understanding of history. We don't necessarily need to take this as dogma, but from his vantage point of 1922 and his understanding of history, this is how he viewed the future. Spengler writes, quote, Presently, however, the idealist facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its reserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of becoming, the Caesar men. Before them, the money collapses. The imperial age and every culture alike signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. Race springs forth, pure and irresistible, the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-culture time are possible afresh and visible to the consciousness without cloaks or causality, end quote. Later, he emphasizes the mobilizing and political power of ideology and how it resembles a religion. He writes, quote, Whether these doctrines are true or false is, we must reiterate and emphasize, a question without meaning for political history. The refutation of, say, Marxism, belongs to the realm of academic dissertation and public debates, in which everyone is always right and his opponent always wrong. But whether they are effective, from when and for how long, the belief that actuality can be ameliorated by a system of concepts is a real force that politics must reckon with. That does matter. We of today find ourselves in a period of boundless confidence in the omnipotence of reason. Great general ideas of freedom, justice, humanity, progress are sacrosanct. The great theories are gospels. Their power to convince does not rest upon logical premises, for the mass of a party possesses neither the critical energy nor the detachment seriously to test them, but upon the sacramental hypostasis in their key words. At the same time, the spell is limited to the populations of the great cities and the period of rationalism as the educated man's religion. On a peasantry, it has no hold, and even on the city masses its effect lasts only for a certain time. But for that time, it has all the irresistibleness of a new revelation. They are converted to it, hang fervently upon the words and the preachers thereof, go to martyrdom on barricades and battlefield and gallows. Their gaze is set upon a political and social other world, and dry, sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of death. But for this very reason, documents like the Social Contract and the Communist Manifesto are engines of highest power in the hands of forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses." In this next passage, he compares gunpowder to printing, and he says they're both distance weapons, and he talks about how they emerged around the same time. He doesn't talk about it here, but I'm vaguely remembering that somewhere in these two books, he acknowledges that the Chinese invented both woodblock printing and gunpowder first, but they were developed in Europe independently. But he mentions in passing an example that sounds like an English propaganda war in French under Napoleon, that the English government was somehow deliberately seeding articles in France that were against Napoleon. I'd be very interested to know more about that, if that's what he's saying. And he gives that as an example of the press being used for the first time deliberately and on a large scale as a weapon against an enemy. And he talks about how we today, and he's writing, of course, in 1922, live under this bombardment of the press, and it's very difficult to get out from under it. And he says that this so-called free press...is the will to power in a democratic disguise. And he says the object, the target of that will to power that is us, the reader, the ordinary person is effectively flattered by the most thoroughgoing enslavement that has ever existed, is the phrase that he uses. That even while the bourgeois reader is so proud that he's free of censorship, he's really under the whip of Northcliffe, he mentions who was a British publishing magnate who owned both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. And then he wraps up by talking about how the newspaper pushed the book out of public life as a format. Spengler writes, quote, "'Gunpowder' and printing belong together, both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought as the two grand means of Faustian distance tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of the late period witnessed the first fly sheets and the first field guns. The French Revolution in the beginning of the civilization witnessed the first tempest of pamphlets of the autumn of 1788 and the first mass fire of artillery at Valmy. But with this, the printed word, produced in vast quantity and distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands of him who knew how to use it. In France, it was still in 1788 a matter of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that and deliberately seeking to produce impressions on the reader. The war of articles, fly sheets, spurious memoirs that was waged from London on French soil against Napoleon is the first great example. The scattered sheets of the Age of Enlightenment transformed themselves into the press, a term of most significant anonymity. Now the press campaign appears as the prolongation or the preparation of war by other means. And in the course of the 19th century, the strategy of outpost fights, feints, surprises, assaults is developed to such a degree that a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired because the press has won it meantime. Today, we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will to power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thoroughgoing enslavement that has ever existed. The liberal bourgeois mind is proud of the abolition of censorship. The last restraint, while the dictator of the press, Northcliffe, keeps the slave gang of his readers under the whip of his leading articles, telegrams, and pictures. Democracy has, by its newspaper, completely expelled the book from the mental life of the people. The book world, with its profusion of standpoints that compelled thought to select and criticize, is now a real possession only for a few. The people reads the one paper, its paper, which forces itself through the front doors by millions daily, spellbinds the intellect from morning to night, drives the book into oblivion by its more engaging layout, and if one or more specimen of a book does emerge into visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects by reviewing it," end quote. In this next one, he's talking about the press as an army. And he says that the journalists are the officers and the readers are the soldiers. And he says the journalists can easily direct the readers against a particular target and they will attack it. And he says the reader doesn't know how he's being used or for what purpose. And then Spengler wraps up by talking about the ability of the press to kill an idea simply by not reporting it. That if everyone is going to a source of information to know what is supposedly important, then all that that source has to do is ignore something and it can pretty effectively erase it from the public consciousness. Spengler writes, quote, No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows, a hint to the press staff and it will become quiet and go home. The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly and war aims and operation plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is allowed to know the purposes for which he is used nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly, a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot. His will to think is only a willingness to think to order and this is what he feels as his liberty. And the other side of this belated freedom, it is permitted to everyone to say what he pleases, but the press is free to take notice of what he says or not. It can condemn any truth to death simply by not undertaking its communication to the world, a terrible censorship of silence, which is all the more potent in that the mass.Masses of newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists." Those are some of the passages that I wanted to show you from Volume 2 of Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, subtitled Perspectives of World History. I'm generally cautious of any kind of grand overarching theory of history, but what Spengler lays out here is pretty compelling. I plan to gradually look in more detail at, as I mentioned, that table that he lays out and try to see more clearly more of the connections that he makes and this progression that he outlines. Even if you don't agree with his explanation of history, you have to figure out why you don't agree with it. Where does it falter? Where is it weak? Where does it maybe not make sense? And doing that requires a closer look. And even if we were to find some big problems in this explanation, these two books are still very interesting, very enjoyable to read, full of interesting references. And I hope to read them again someday. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you will send it to a friend who you think will enjoy it as well. And go over to my website, walrathpublishing.com, the link is in the description, and pick up some books for yourself, for your family, for your friends, and do your part to support independent book publishing. Farewell until next time. Take care, and happy reading.