[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West Bit 2: Culture as Organism

[jprussell]

Here we are with part two in my series of posts on understanding what to take from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. This post is on maybe the key thought from the books - that Cultures/Civilizations are best thought of as organisms with their own lifecycle.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for this! Many descriptions from the table are instantly recognizable, like modern art and the cult of science.

The time spans involved seem very long. Our lifetime will be spent in a single row of the table.

[jprussell]

Thank you! And yes, I think the shortest timespan for any one line of the table is a couple hundred years, and some are rather longer. Some folks might argue that our Civilization is going through its stages a bit faster than most historical times, whether due to industrial or mass communication technology, or for some other reason - for example, if you see the 20th century dictators as evidence of the "Caesarism" phase, we were ~50-100 years ahead of schedule.