"The Decline of the West"

Oswald Spengler may have been only just short of a century premature. Der Untergang des Abendlandes was published in 1918.

...it is a vision of humanity’s moral career that remains of deep interest today.

Civilizations have their seasons, Oswald Spengler taught—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—and it is the winter of Faustian Man that is upon us: the conclusion of a supremely individualistic epoch in which space and time have been annihilated, machines have become ever more ingenious, no limits or taboos on thought or conduct are allowed to exist, moral nihilism flourishes, primitivism thrives, and a millenarian religiosity is preparing to take wing:

'With the nineteenth century begins the winter of the West. Its thousand years of cultural vitality are over; there is no true artistic creativity left. The preceding centuries were marked by an instinctive sense of form and style—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque—but the new age is inchoate and confused.

It is the rise of the middle classes that explains this cultural incoherence. They resent the aristocracy with its refined manners and sure taste; they pursue untrammelled freedom as an end in itself; their ignorant artistic forays produce meaningless fluctuations of style—the warfare of Classicism and Romanticism leads to endless barren “experiments.”

Political life is equally meaningless. Parliamentarism provides a talking shop that obscures the basic political reality—the triumph of money. Before the power of financial speculation everything gives way: constitutionalism, democracy, even socialism. Politicians are the agents of financial interests...'

Some of that has a ring of today's Canada about it.

H/t to Arts & Letters Daily.

Decline also seems to me related to the Western intelligentsia's increasing loathing of their own societies--an appreciation that has worked to undermine broadly our confidence in Western values and institutions.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 5, 2006 11:03 AM