[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West Bit 1: Morphology

[jprussell]

I've started a (hopeful) series on some of the big ideas in Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, which is first and foremost a way for me to settle what I've learned from the book, but will hopefully also be helpful to some other folks.

You can find the post here.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks, very interesting! I wonder how far the West will follow Spengler's model. Foreign students fit in so seamlessly in Dutch society, I wonder if we still have a culture! Perhaps every culture is merging into a world culture. If the world culture claims all the world's energy and resources, where would a young competitor be born?

[jprussell]

Thank you! Well, as we'll cover in a later post, Spengler would claim that folks raised outside of a Culture's heartland and direct influence, who seem to be a part of that culture are really undergoing a "pseudomorphosis," which is Greek for "false shaping." It's a term from geology. Imagine you have a rock formation of, say, limestone that is eroded away, leaving a hollow shell like a sculptor's mold. Now, lava flows into the hollow. Later, when examined, the lava will have the outer shape and details of a limestone formation, but will be made of igneous rock.

That's what Spengler thinks is happening when you have folks from, say, India or China wearing Western clothes, using Western models of government, making Western kinds of art. For historical examples, Spengler believed that the late Roman Empire and early Medieval period were actually the early Faustian culture undergoing a pseudomorphosis of Middle Eastern culture (the Church, mostly). Spengler assumed Americans were just far-flung Faustians, but he had some notion that the land was shaping us differently, and JMG believes that we are better understood as a proto-Culture of our own undergoing a Faustian pseudomorphosis.

Now, as for what happens when one Culture has a seemingly global reach and command of resources? In Spengler's theory, a Culture would only get to that level of material dominance after hardening into a Civilization. Once a Culture becomes a Civilization, there is less (or no) innovation, less connection with the something special that motivated this Culture to do great things (what Spengler calls the "World Symbol", more on that coming soon as well!), and so over time will grow senile, decrepit, corrupt, and so forth - but it can have a good few centuries of running the show in the meantime!

Personally, I think that current global events are showing that the Faustian/American Civilization is already showing some of the cracks in the foundation that will eventually let other cultures displace an ailing Civilization. Recent attempts to sanction Russia and the resulting shifts in trade arrangements have shown that the West doesn't have quite the monopolistic command on important resources it once did. So, basically, I think short term we'll see China resurgent, and longer-term maybe powers like Russia, India, or Brazil.

Spengler viewed the whole lifecycle as a "one and done" thing - Cultures rise, mature into Civilizations, grow old, and disperse into "felaheen peoples." I agree with JMG that he didn't give enough credit to Cultures that seem to have undergone multiple cycles from young, vibrant Cultures to mature, static Civilizations, down to a dark age, and back again. China and ancient Egypt come to mind especially.

All of which is a very long way to say that I don't really see a single, unified "World Culture" happening, at least not in the sense Spengler meant - and interestingly, the idea that all Cultures might merge into one and then proceed forever from there is a pretty Faustian conception.

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for the detailed answer! The conflicts with Russia and China do not look like all-out fights. US-China trade is increasing, and China's car exports have significantly increased. The Ukraine conflict doesn't look like an all out conflict either. For all the deaths, it has a strangely managed feel. We sent old weapons bought from the public purse. Usually risk averse Dutch companies are investing in Western Ukraine. The EU is closing chicken farms everywhere because of "bird flu", and Europe's eggs are now sourced from Ukraine, which doesn't do bird flu checks, and has a lot less regulation regarding pesticides and worker safety. Does this look like an emerging split, or is it just a stage managed distraction by the public-private-partnership world culture?

Looking forward to the next post!

[jprussell]

Well, I have not been particularly closely following US/Europe's relationships with Russia or China, but both making trading arrangements not settled in US dollars makes me think the days of the dollar as the world's reserve currency are numbered, which would have very dramatically negative effects on at least the US economy, don't know about the EU. Even if I am wrong on specifics, the main point I was making is that the West's/"World Culture's" control of energy and resources is far from absolute, and there are several places making noises about how maybe there's a different way. But, I suppose we'll see how things go.

And thanks much, I will try not to disappoint!

[causticus]

Good little summary of the basic premise behind Spengler's approach and methodology.

I would certainly agree that today's academia does everything it can to take the polar opposite approach. There seems to be a great focus on deboonking any kind of inquiry or analysis that involves pattern-recognition or making holistic generalizations from a thorough sample size of observations.

In certain fields, the easiest way to make a living today as a hackademic is to write papers tearing down academic works from previous generations and ending the paper with the same brilliant conclusion, "well aaackshually, there's no evidence that [insert pattern generalization] is really a thing!" That's right, the search for meaning is now "problematic" in the eyes of every reductionistic egghead and higher-ed bureaucrat drawing a comfortable paycheck. 9/10 in a wikipedia article when you encounter the weasel-phrase "modern scholars" it's referring to the above.

No wonder "modern scholars" are doing everything they can to pretend Spengler and his work doesn't exist. In psychology they do the same with Carl Jung.

[jprussell]

Thank you! I worried that I didn't actually say much and mostly just vaguely gestured at the word "morphology." If anything could be clearer, I'd love to hear how.

I entirely agree with your assessment about where the state of modern academia has gotten, but I would likely put most of the causation on a set of perverse incentives, rather than (as much) on ideology and a lack of intellectual curiosity/rigor on the part of individual academics. You have to publish a bunch to get and keep a job, the market is vastly oversupplied since every lab only needs one professor but lots of PhD student researchers (and those professors sure as hell ain't retiring), it's easy to justify how rigorous and scientific you're being if you use computers to do calculations on large sets of data, and finding old material and subjecting it to a form of analysis that didn't exist/wasn't possible in the past is an easy source of topics to mine to keep cranking out all of those publications you need to publish.

Now, of course, many of those perverse incentives were at least aided and abetted by the growing emphasis on reductionist materialism and preference for intellectual abstractions over observational empiricism, but my model is that most academics find themselves trapped in a horrible system they wish worked differently but no single person feels like he can change, and going along with it is safer and easier (for now) than finding some other way.