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[personal profile] 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.

Date: 2023-05-02 02:36 pm (UTC)
causticus: trees (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

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Jeff Russell

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