Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West

[hobosmurf]

A video roughly outlining the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his book "The Decline of the West"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaA7yzHh2as
longer video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uha7WWgoeX4




According to the ideas of Oswald Spengler in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, all the great cultures of mankind have followed the same stages of evolution. This can be seen in the arts, architecture, politics and economics of comparative cultures. Spengler showed that the ancient cultures took the same time to reach similar situations as the modern cultures.

One example of this is the length of time it took for cultures to start expanding beyond their previous known limits, such as the Romans starting to conqueror Italy from the security of a city, compared to the Europeans expansion to the continent of America from their relative countries

The author follows this idea, comparing the evolution of Rome and the rise of America and comes to some astonishing conclusions.

Firstly, if the account is started at 515BC for the Romans and at 1584 for the Anglo-Saxons (when Sir Walter Raleigh came to "Virginia"), there is a cultural difference of 2100 years which remains constant between the two states. After this time both states reached hegemony within their regions -- the Romans in 202BC after the second war against Carthage, and 2100 years later the Americans in 1898 after the war against Spain.

Secondly there are many events of similar meaning before and after that, confirming the idea that the Americans of the year 2008 are in the same political and economical situation as the Romans circa 92BC.

Thus the Americans would now seem to be living in the latter time of their republic, which would correspond with the Romans 2100 years before. On that basis it will take maybe 30 years for the modern equivalent of the triumvirate, Caesar and Crassus to appear. In about 70 years the power of Rome passed to an Emperor, and so America will become the "American Empire" in accordance with Spengler's theory of the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations.

The author's main interest lies in the following years: What will happen if this view of history is true: In 92BC the Romans elected a new reformer, Livius Drusus, who was killed a year later by those who hated any idea of structural change -- could this happen again to the new American president, Barak Obama ? And furthermore: shall we be witnesses of a modern version of other events that took place 2100 years before?

Today there are about 11 million illegal hispanics in the southern parts of the USA; we know about studies like that of Samuel Huntington and T. W. Chittum, warning of a new civil war in the United States. Are we approaching the modern version of the war of independence that took place in the years 91-88BC ?

Oswald Spengler
http://danieltutt.com/2010/10/01/decl...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVa-uQ...
Book Online PDF
http://archive.org/search.php?query=c...

I don't fully agree with his ideas, although it's interesting especially how certain stages of different civilizations correspond with each other.

[blogen]

This is not a history book, but the best book what was written about the history ever.

[Odin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYsgChUKS2Q

[sean]

Spengler was a highly intuitive and bold thinker whose main contribution is teaching people the correct form of historiography, against the lie of the "eternal progress narrative" (Whig history).

Whig history does not acknowledge the cycles of rise and fall that provide real insights into the true nature of human societies. I find his ideas of civilisation as a distinct super-organism intriguing. He has very poetic language and metaphors that is both captivating yet difficult to interpret for a modern man.

While I am uncertain of his "psuedoscience" outlook of using his own theory of history as a measurement tool for predicting the west's civilisational future. Some of his predictions over the failure decolonisation, consumerism and repetition of art have come to pass. While its philosophical relevance is debatable, I think it's worth a read in understanding the characteristics and flaws of major civilisations.

Liberals reject the science of the life cycles of civilisations because it discredits Liberalism and all its hedonism as symptoms of the late stage of a civilisation (i.e. civilisational decline).

His book The Decline of The West is actually a bit of a messy read, he opens his book by basically declaring that the perspective of popular historians, and their division of world history into a pseudo-Darwinistic "ancient-medieval-modern" evolutionary model is historically invalid, or at best only partially valid to the history of (specifically) the West.

It is a self-serving narrative that presents modern Western Liberalism as a goal to be reached, by all current human civilisations and cultures, and as an eternal end state of history. It is a narrative taken for granted by almost every western mind today.

However, the west's ability to spread liberal ideas to the rest of the world will wane with the west itself.