Spenglerian Methodology

From Northrop Frye's review of The Decline of the West (Daedalus 103, no. 1, Winter 1974, pp. 1-13).

1. Analogical Reasoning:

The philosophical framework of Spengler's argument is a Romantic one, derived ultimately from Fichte's adaptation of Kant. The objective world, the world that we know and perceive, the phenomenal world, is essentially a spatial world: it is the domain of Nature explored by science and mathematics, and so far as it is so explored, it is a mechanical world, for when living things are seen objectively they are seen as mechanisms. Over against this is the world of time, organism, life and history. The essential reality of this world eludes the reasoner and experimenter: it is to be attained rather by feeling, intuition, imaginative insight, and, above all, by symbolism. The time in which this reality exists is a quite different time from the mechanical or clock time of science, which is really a dimension of space. It follows that methods adequate for the study of nature are not adequate for the study of history. The true method of studying living forms, Spengler says, is by analogy, and his whole procedure is explicitly and avowedly analogical. The problem is to determine what analogies in history are purely accidental, and which ones point to the real shape of history itself. Thanks to such works as Bernard Lonergan's Insight (1957), we know rather more about the positve role of analogy in constructive thought than was generally known in 1918, and it is no longer possible to dismiss Spengler contemptuously as "mystical" or "irrational" merely because his method is analogical.

2. Morphology:

Everything that is alive shows an organic rhythm, moving through stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline and eventual death. If this happens to all individual men without exception, there is surely no inherent improbability in supposing that the same organic rhythm extends to larger human units of life.

This morphological view of history, which sees history as a plurality of cultural developments, is, Spengler claims, an immense improvement on the ordinary "linear" one which divides history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Here Spengler seems to me to be on very solid ground, at least to the extent that linear history is really, at bottom, a vulgar and complacent assumption that we represent the inner purpose of all human history...Hegel has been often and most unfairly ridiculed for advocating a view of history which made the Prussian state of his day its supreme achievement. But whenever we adopt this linear view, especially in its progressive form, which asserts that the later we come in time the better we are, we do far worse than Hegel. The linear view of history is intellectually dead, and Spengler has had a by no means ignoble role in assisting at its demise.

3. The Decline of the West and the practice of history:

Spengler's book is not a work of history; it is a work of historical popularization. It outlines one of the mythical shapes in which history reaches everybody except professional historians...What Spengler has produced is a vision of history which is very close to being a work of literature--close enough, at least, for me to feel some appropriateness in examining it as a literary critic. If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems.

4. Spengler and his critics:

I have elsewhere tried to show that it is intellectually dishonest to call a man's work reactionary, whatever his personal attitudes may have been, because it is the use made of it by others that will determine whether it will be reactionary or not. The pseudocritic is constantly looking for some feature of a writer's attitude, inside or outside his books, that will enable him to plaster some ready-made label on his author. Genuine criticism is a much more difficult and delicate operation, especially in literature, where a man may be a great poet and still be little better than an idiot in many of his personal attitudes...

In a large number, at least, of important writers we find an imagination which makes them important, and something else, call it an ego, which represents the personality trying to say something, to assert and argue and impress. A great deal of criticism revolves around the problem of trying to separate these two elements.We have Eliot the poet and Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and Yeats the poseur; Lawrence the poet and Lawrence the hysteric. Further back, Milton, Pope, Blake, Shelley, Whitman, all present aspects of personality so distasteful to some critics that they cannot really deal critically with their poetry at all. For somebody on the periphery of literature, like Spengler, the task of separation is still more difficult, and requires even more patience...In my opinion Spengler has a permanent place in twentieth-century thought, but so far as his reputation is concerned, he was often his own worst enemy, and a stupid and confused Spengler is continually getting in the way of the genuine prophet and visionary.

5. The enduring value of Spengler:

After all this has been said, and a great deal more that could be said taken for granted, it is still true that very few books, in my experience, have anything like Spengler's power to expand and exhilarate the mind. The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that facts make when he throws them together, the sense of the whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of one, the feeling that the blinkers of time and space have been removed from one's inward eyes when Greek sculptors are treated as the "contemporaries" of Western composers, all make up an experience not easily duplicated...

The Spenglerian Moment

From John Lardas's The Bop Apocalypse (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. 48-49):

The cold war began quietly with George Kennan's 1946 "long telegram" from Moscow about the ominous and inevitable expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe. Policy recommendations of containment turned quickly into warnings of American vulnerability, warnings often bordering on paranoia. In 1947, two years before he became secretary of state, U.S. State Department official Dean Acheson warned Americans that they "must be on permanent alert" against the Russians. That same year, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established, in part to protect America against the machinations of communists.

The tendency to demonize the Soviet Union and its state ideology quickly gained rhetorical momentum. As confidence games in the geopolitical sphere intensified, ordinary Americans participated in this peculiar national pastime of self-posturing and self-invention. Many Americans gained self-assurance through a form of identity inflation at the expense of the "other." From the most zealous of anticommunists to apolitical, suburban newlyweds, they were constructing identities for both self and country--often over and against an imagined foe, whether communists, homosexuals, juvenile delinquents, or even invaders from outer space. The American social body, it seemed, was under attack by contaminating forces. In order to alleviate the threat of corruption, Americans used the religious language of myth and symbol to forge personal religious worlds at a time when the stability and safety that such worlds promised were in high demand. As cold war anxieties became palpable and the stakes were raised, both foreign policies and domestic theodicies were on the table.

In our new Spenglerian moment, we must come to grips with the fact that 21st century Americans--bred and raised in a hyper-capitalistic (Spengler would say "Faustian") social experiment called "consumerism"--suffer from a peculiar form of collective amnesia: there is little or no cultural memory resident in the population at large. The consequences of this lack are enormous. With yesterday forgotten, the challenges of the present appear to be unprecedented. In the face of these "unprecedented" challenges, the American public looks away from its own inner resources and develops a dependence upon "experts" to show it the way to safety if not success.

But who are these experts and what exactly are they "expert" in?

The airwaves and the internet are filled with experts who are not-so-astonishingly like George Kennan in 1946: lacking historical depth, they are confused by difference, frightened by what confuses, and afraid that they may fail to sound the alarm should something alarming actually be afoot.

Kennan would later recognize that his "long telegram" over-stated the potential threat that the Soviets posed the U.S. and Eastern Europe.

But later was too late. He had given the Mandarins of Fear-Mongering precisely what they needed to construct a post-war industry fueled with wartime adrenalin. The Cold War--the War To End All End To Wars--had begun.

Notice that the victims of Cold War paranoia (political dissidents, homosexuals, the poor and uneducated) are the usual suspects of witch hunts throughout European and American history.

Notice, too, that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gay rights movement have helped to narrow the target populations of the Paranoiac Class.

As the new millennium dawned, there must have been panic among those whose livelihoods depend upon cultivating fear in the American population.

The criminals of 9/11 either played beautifully into the hands of the fear-mongers or they were recruited for the purpose.

With no real investigation of the crime ever conducted and the crime-scene evidence immediately destroyed or buried in classified files in the interests of "national security," it is not likely that the American public will ever know which of those two alternatives is the more credible.

But whatever the truth of the fateful events of that day, we know for certain that the Reichstag Fire effect has propelled this country forward through a decade of unchecked corporatism, militarism, and diminished democracy.

Indeed, and most ironically, the United States appears to be following the Turkish model whereby democratic processes are permitted within limits that do not transgress the sensitivities of the military and its domination of the Treasury.

The Spenglerian moment in cultural criticism has returned.

The Decline of the West

"If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems." --Northrop Frye

Throughout much of the 1980's and into the early 1990's, I read the Beats (especially the Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg triumvirate) and, with the Beats, I read Spengler. It did not take long for me to recognize that little could be made of the latter's grand metahistorical claims, but, as a resource for a vivid vocabulary of cultural criticism, The Decline was, and remains, a gold-mine.

Be that as it may, Spengler is so often smeared with the brush of fascism that, for the last couple of decades, I have felt it best to let that sleeping dog lie. Not that I neglected to read him--I did not. And for many years his portrait glared down upon me at my writing desk--reminding me, always, of the seriousness of my intellectual tasks. Indeed, his oracular pronouncement that "All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry" (DOTW, v. 1, p. 41), served me well as my methodological motto during the years I worked on my doctoral dissertation.

Like so many Germans of his generation, Spengler, as Heidegger, had a Nazi problem. But Spengler's Nazi problem is, to be fair, less than Heidegger's--even less than Ezra Pound's--for Spengler seems to have found Hitler something of an embarrassment from the beginning, if not a figure worthy of contempt. Even so, the Nazi problem persists in Spengler's case: for the obvious reason that his magnum opus makes readers who have been raised on the triumphalist narratives of the "rise of the West" uncomfortable.

But the time for Western discomfort is now; Spenglerian cultural criticism is needed now more than ever.

The Myths of American Exceptionalism and Western Triumphalism must be subjected to a withering "de-construction" that is both historical and satirical.

The Beats understood this as early as the 1950's. Sixty years on we must learn to raise their standard again with pride.

Events have left us no choice.

It is our Spenglerian destiny.

Toward a Counter-Imperial Faith

Toward a Counter-Imperial Faith

I am sorry to say that, for most people on the planet, religion is not about love, or justice, or leading a righteous or balanced life. No, for most people on the planet, religion is really about winning. Being on the winning side: being among the chosen, the saved, or having the last word. In this way, religion inculcates infantilism and only exacerbates the problems of the world. But occasionally, some religious people achieve maturity in their faith. When that happens, religion can become part of the solution to the problems of the world.

What I like about the linked article from Tikkun is that it is an expression of what I would consider to be "grown-up" religiosity; what Dietrich Bonhoeffer might have called an instance of "man come of age."

Christianity, in my view, as a salvation religion, has an unfortunate tendency to promote infantilism in its adherents. Moreso than other faith traditions? That is difficult to say--and probably impossible to determine empirically. But insofar as Christianity promotes a sort of "life-boat" mentality among its adherents, it is problematic in my view. And though I do not subscribe to the notion that origins are necessarily determinative of outcomes, I don't think that it is irrelevant to observe that Christianity began its history as an apocalyptic movement. Lifeboats are an intrinsic aspect of apocalyptic faiths and the monkey of apocalypticism is forever on Christianity's back. How Christians choose to deal with this monkey is what can make all the difference for the future of humankind. I heartily approve of the way in which the author of the above-linked article has chosen to deal with the monkey of his Christian faith.

Back in the last century, the Catholic social activist Dorothy Day likewise exhibited a healthy way of managing the monkey. According to her biographer Paul Elie, Day felt that it was during wartime that "the claim of Christianity to be a religion of love" was most severely tested. And she felt that it was during wartime that one witnessed most professing Christians betray their faith. She wrote: "Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one's life for one's friend" (quoted in Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, NY: FSG (2003), p. 140.

More recently, New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan published God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then And Now, NY: HarperOne (2007) with an epilogue in which he asks several pointed questions of his co-religionists (Crossan, p. 237):

1. How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in the American Empire?

Then, "beneath" that question, Crossan unearths a second one:

2. How is it possible to be a nonviolent Christian within a violent Christianity based on a violent Christian Bible?

That's right, my dear reader: a violent Christianity based on a violent Christian Bible.

These two questions merge for Crossan into a third, more direct question:

3. How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in an American Empire facilitated by a violent Christian Bible?


Since we are living in an epoch of Christian triumphalism--predominantly Protestant Christian triumphalism--the time has come (indeed it is long overdue) for Christian soul-searching on these matters.

Conveniently, according to the Christian calendar, we are deep in the Lenten season.

From how many pulpits across this broad land do you suppose such Lenten reflection is being advocated?

I would be surprised if one needed the fingers of both hands on which to count them.

Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Another front in the war against the militarized corporatocracy.

The Mazeppist Salutes Great American Heroes

Daniel Ellsberg and Joe Hill.

Rising anti-Muslim rhetoric? - Riz Khan - Al Jazeera English

Rising anti-Muslim rhetoric? - Riz Khan - Al Jazeera English

The New Medievalism

It is my firm belief that the Empire of the Eveninglands--these Orwellian States of Amnesia--is collapsing under its own weight and our modernity, which never really took hold of the imaginations of the masses, has lost its bid to do so.

So-called “post-modernity” is but a transitional phase. We are on the cusp of the new Dark Ages.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan: “Power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.”

It is no wonder that books on Stoicism and Gnosticism are selling like hot-cakes: for such are the tools of survival as the lights go out.

In times like these, we must form subterranean networks among individuals of good will. Hold prayer vigils. Designate safe houses for heretics.

The neo-fascists in the Republican and Tea parties are attempting to roll back the clock on worker's rights and women's rights.

It is open season on the middle class, on Muslims, on people of color.

Old age pensions, health care: these "perks" are destined only for the wealthiest 5% of the American population.

We are headed into the black hole of feudalism, where corporate CEOs are the land-lords and the rest of us are serfs.

It is a sad, indeed, a pathetic end to the American experiment.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

The New Humanism

I tend to find David Brooks both smarmy and shallow. But this Op-Ed piece isn't so bad. Maybe there's hope for us all.

Islam and Anarchism

No god but God.

Democracy Incorporated

Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated is, perhaps, the definitive analysis of the present state of the nation.

Read it and rise up!

Practicing the Three "R's"

Practicing the three "R's" (to resist, refuse, renounce the prevailing wisdom of one's culture) in addition to doing one's daily activities (working, eating, exercising, sleeping, being the member of a family, of a local community, etc.) is, like taking the red pill in The Matrix, asking for trouble.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was ready to take the red pill. My elders, people I respected, divined my intentions and took me aside. Sagely, confidentially, they advised me with the wisdom of age. I was repeatedly subjected to the following sermon: "Life is tough enough as it is; don't think you can save the world. Look out for 'number one.' If you don't do it, nobody will."

Initially, I resented this advice. For one thing, I had no illusions that I could save the world. That was a misstatement of my desires. Secondly, the notion of "looking out for number one" ran counter to what I had decided were worthy ideals. Mutuality, reciprocity, a sense that human beings share the world and must learn to look out for one another and for the earth herself, just seemed to me to be common sense.

But these ideals were uncommon sense and the weight of my culture, it seems, is dead-set against them.

When Ted Kennedy failed to replace Jimmy Carter as the Democratic Party's nominee in 1980 and Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected, ushering in the "greed is good" decade, I confess I gave in to despair.

Who was I, after all, to piss against the wind?

I began to look out for number one and to rationalize my change in perspective with a clever reading of the Golden Rule: doing unto others as you would have others do unto you is not a call to put others before self; rather, it is only to see that others are treated as well as you would have them treat you. This presupposes that one treats oneself well; and, by all means, when the opportunity arises, do unto others as you would have others do unto you...

By means of this interpretation, I was able to invert an other-centered admonition into a self-centered credo. I now had it on the authority of Christ himself that my ego was to be given free reign. It was not long before "others" were largely pushed out of the equation. By my mid-twenties I was living for myself alone.

And having a ball, I must admit.

No, I'm no St. Augustine and this is no Augustinian confession of remorse. I found it a great relief to be sucked into the cultural vortex and simply go with the flow. The 1980's were, for me, a decade of self-indulgence. My elders were right: you have to look out for number one. If you don't, no one else will.

By the early 1990's, however, I discovered the price that living for self alone entails: one achieves precisely what one is living for--self alone.

Personally, I found that result to be empty. I had dug myself a pit and was living in the bottom of it. I should have been happy, but I was not.

To climb out of the pit of my self, I began to reach out to others. Slowly.

Old habits die hard. But I was determined.

I discovered an early poem of Allen Ginsberg's (entitled "Song") that contradicted the wisdom of my elders: "The weight of the world," Ginsberg wrote, "is love." In other words, the burden of life in this world is to overcome the temptation to live for self alone and to learn to put others, the needs of others, ahead of one's own needs.

I don't pretend to have mastered the discipline that loving others requires--not by a long shot. Nor do I always know what I am doing when I set out to put the principle of loving others before self into action. I cannot guarantee that my motives are purely altruistic--indeed, I would be surprised to learn that altruism is even in my personal repertoire. What I can say for certain is that I have repudiated the advice that informed my actions in the 1980's.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce. "Number one" is not the self but the neighbor. This is the principle. The discipline is love.