[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West, Bit 6 - Odds and Ends

[jprussell]

Well, I am late in posting this, as things got a bit hectic this weekend and I failed to ready myself for that by getting this done sooner. This brings me to 2 late posts for the year, I think, out of the five I'll allow myself and still say I've met my boast. At any rate, here's what I think will be the last in my series of posts on Spengler, which pulls together a grab bag of sayings, thoughts, and links to other things I've read. You can read it here.

Comments

[scotlyn]

"I wonder what might come of rigorously applying his "Culture as organism" metaphor here - are the societies of "Primitive Men" a "different species" or merely an early phase of the same organism as "Great Cultures"? What might we learn by assuming each?"

It strikes me that if an organism is a whole made up of parts, we have to observe what "parts" actually make them up. Perhaps some humans are part of bigger-than-human ecosystem organisms, in which the humans participate in that ecosystem organism as only one part of it, through their special strengths (such as, for eg, storytelling, tool-making). And perhaps, what Spengler is studying are the times when some humans breakaway with a specific story and/or a specific toolset, to form a separate organism with only human parts, or with only human stories, human tools and human beings as its component parts.

Perhaps "primitive" is a word Spengler and others use for a human who is still a component of an ecosystem organism, but not of a culturesystem organism. (Obviously I'm using language idiosyncratically here, just to get this speculation across).

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for the link to Star Wars as a Norse myth. I always wondered how Star Wars could feel so superficial and so deep at the same time. It looks like the superficial technological fantasy is masked by the deep family drama.

"I think he's a bit too sweeping in claiming there's no value in applying abstract thinking to politics." From 1990 to 2010 I followed politics. Talk shows, party events, newspaper analysis, mainstream and alternative. There is nothing useful there. I think Spengler is on to something.

The quote about the "Blues" and the "Greens" of Byzantium is great. I read about that before, and it seems many functioning societies split in two political groups. The center of the groups is the will of the people. This works for current US politics as well. Democrats and Republicans both go for the voter that will get them a majority, and so they end up exactly in the middle. This also explains why a change in governing party does not result in a change in policy. It does periodically replace the rulers without violence, which is a great thing about democracy.