[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

[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.