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.