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.