“Towards the inorganic, towards the end,” does each great culture develop into a civilization. This surge of practical taking down of dead cultural strands, has, in Spengler’s view, developed “a new type of nomad,” a “globe trotter” a “parasitic,” materialistic, “clever” only metaphysical in a plastic way, a creature whose soul is ensnared “scientifically a religion in place of the old religion of the heart.”

The follow the science movement in media medical management is a symptom of that age which began in 2019, and is possibly a post civilized state of decadent barbarism, suggested by Spengler’s Time Line of 1800 to 2000 for his age of Western Civilization. Note that the Conservative objection is not whether Science should take the place of God, but that it should be lead and used rather than followed. [0]

Spengler seas the homeless barbarian, became a culture man at that point when he recognizes home, a great place in the heart, and that culture dies when cosmopolitanism becomes the ruling ethos. The world city has not a “folk” but a “mass.”

Indeed, in 2024, mass media herd management is currently our ruling condition.

Spengler excellently exposes the very modern aspects of Rome and Constantinople, which were “World Cities,” in which the scions of former clans, tribes and great rural lords, rented miserable apartments [1] in six-story shacks that sometimes collapsed and squash all of the occupants. World cities are places where culture is attracted, brought as loot, consumed, entombed melted together to make a more massive but inferior social alloy.

The money spirit that dominates modernity, Spengler points out, dominated antiquity, once it became post cultural and developed world cities. He does make the observation that the despair caused by urban blight compelled the ancients “to submit to Christianity,” keenly recognizing that faith as a soul-conquering one. Yet even the Sons and Daughters of Christ do not escape the World City and the post-cultural doctrines of civilization as Science, as ideology and politics usurp the place of the Cross in actual Christian life.

That thinking members of “Civilized Man,” split into two warring factions: the materialistic money man, and the whining, dreaming philosopher living in the past, is discussed as a reoccurring process. He shrugs off the pining of modern poets and thinkers for the traditional faiths of antiquity by pointing out that if the literature had not been lost, a student of the economic transactions of the treasurers of the Delphic Oracle would not look much different than the activities of modern bankers, investors and industrialists.

“The money spirit,” is “the power of civilization.” the “reputed centers of decision” politicians are expressed as the mere puppets of the “money men,” of “the brain of the megalapolitan.”

[Sounds like a three letter Creep State agency.]

The withering character, the empty and worthless dithering, the romance and the bickering that continues to turn these eyes away from the literature of Late Antiquity in disgust, is here brought to light by Spengler. He has identified the hand of very few, possibly a single “pedagogue” [2] of the Augustan Age [3] who erased or failed to have copied, nearly all Greek literature before Plato. That there was a vast literature antedating Plato, is plain by reading Herodotus, who declines to investigate certain subjects because they had so oft been treated upon. Why would the fire of Alexandrian Library discriminate against books written before 400 B.C.

Gerta, a man I know nothing about, is, in the final epigram of the introduction, quoted as the inspiration and guiding light of Spengler. Nietsche is observed as a kind of fool genius stuck “staring into a philological mirror” who he decries as a romantic, but does credit as his secondary inspiration for the project in the attitude of his questioning. Spengler dismisses skeptics as a negation prone sort of conservative that naturally rise in the ruins of culture called civilization alike to weeds.

The Homeric age and that of Arуan Yogism, with a reversion from tomb and grave burial to funeral pyres is discussed by Spengler as an unfortunate cultural back sliding. Knowing, as he did not, that the Bronze Age Civilizations were brought down by a global catastrophe which featured fire storms, well attested in many sources [4], may well have instigated an imitation on earth of heavenly immolation, and at the least diminished confidence in tombs and graves so recently violated by flood and fire.

The reader is warned against the folly of charting a Euro-Centric chronology as distorting, particularly in the life of cultures and their destiny and death as civilizations, assuring us that “life is only consummated in death.” He is not engaged, by his own account in “pessimism,” but in an act of discovery, in an attempt to track culture and its tomb of civilization according to a “periodic” method. [5]

This is expressed in the story of Classical Greek architecture of the old times, low and modest by comparison to the colossal, soaring, arrogance of Roman building at the same sights. We have seen this in our own life times with box like, opaque, skyscrapers taking away the skylines from baroque government buildings which in turn overshadowed church and cathedral. He names the historian as he whose business it is not to judge this process, but to study its morphology. Spengler names the people of Germany in the 1800s and early 1900s as a group who had more great moments of heroism than others and who also seemed unconscious of their nature let alone their destiny.

After 9 listens of these three hours and forty minutes, I will take leave of this section as a tool, to complete the final 14 chapters of Shrouds of Arуas. I will then go on to listen to the balance of Spengler’s work as a mirror upon the completion of this one in Norns of Arуas.

I would like to leave the reader with some quotes I jotted down while stretching in the pump room of a Pacific Northwest mountain home a week ago, wondering which would best serve as a title for this section. They all, I think, give us an appreciation for Oswald Spengler’s undertaking.

“To understand living forms”

“The metaphysically exhausted soil of the West”

“Not as things become, but of things becoming”

“Pathfinder of the future”

“Organic from mechanical”

“Symbol rather than formula”

“Imperialism is civilization unadulterated”

“In what language history is written”

“The philosophy of destiny”

“A doom, something demonic” which grips the people trapped in a civilization at its end.

…

Notes

-0. Who affronts God the more? As I write in a San Jose motel, I wear a nice gray polo shirt that has printed over the heart “Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.” On the sleeve is a combination symbology: with three email symbols surrounding the serpent entwined staff of ancient Hypocratic medicine. This is interesting in light of my being de listed by the Microsoft search engine.

-1. Does not the word apartment sing a sinister note as it takes the dominant housing station away from the home. Apart ment: what reptile thought of that?

-2. Might be Athenasius who wrote Banquet with the philosophers.

-3. This is the age of the Greek dominance of transplanted Roman politics to Constantinople roughly 450 to 650 when the remains of the literature of Antiquity were curated and the muddled history of Late Antiquity was compiled. At about 380, the last historian who rose above faction, passed off the literary stage, being Amianus Marcelanus.

-4. See my summation of Worlds in Collision in the conclusion of Shrouds of Arуas.

-5. The fact that the people of Rome in the 300s were outnumbered by statues in that city is the best illustration of culture to civilization continuity.