Do note that I fell asleep the first three times I listened to Chapter 3, which is thankfully short at only 74 minutes. On one of these occasions, I was exercising, and the old boy put me to sleep with an 8-pound dumbbell between my hands…

“Only the souls of children and great artists,” are, according to Spengler, capable of appreciating the living world, submerged in its “mythic aura” in the way that Classical Man did.[0] Spengler points out that the edifice of Western thought, is uniquely raised upon “the science of sciences” mathematics, to the point that history, the opposite art, the subject not so easily encompassed by our imposed and discovered “laws” of nature must be, by serious historians “dressed up as science,” even though science is not adequate to define it. Indeed, the strictly scientific mind may not fathom history, as its intuitive sense of flux and nuance is not properly calibrated to the task.

Spengler argues that “the accident of standpoint,” the circumstances of our birth, our race, our faith our nation, must be put aside as distortions to understanding any portion of history, and especially our own. How impossible this was in Spengler’s time and as well in ours, is demonstrated by a clear example that might have come out of Aesop. Of interest, is that Aesop, the only working class perspective surviving from Antiquity, is set aside by all scholarship on Antiquity, because his animal parables were, long ago, by the scientific mind of the West, categorized as children’s fables! This echoes the truism that only children and great artists may have any actual sense of reality, and that the adult mind of a mature civilization, is, by necessity, barred from a perception of reality.

Spengler, in the vein of Aesop, merely explains that though the moon waxes larger in the night sky than Jupiter, that it is not in fact larger, but tiny by comparison. This is a simple example of how the 19th century might have seemed to men of Spengler’s age as important as all of history combined, when, in fact, it is probably no more important in the vast scheme of world history as the 19th century B.C.

Two things loomed high in this listeners mind at this call from a hundred and ten years ago.

The liberal/progressive/democratic mind cannot, being by definition obsessed with the redistribution and concentration of goods and rights among current hierarchical strata, grasp any standpoint from outside of that of the current obsession with the common/greater good.

The conservative/traditional/autocratic mind cannot, being by definition obsessed the distribution and concentration of goods and rights descended from former hierarchical strata, entertain any standpoint other than the obsession with a return to a golden age of social perfection.

Thus, nearly all of thinking humanity [with most of humanity unthinking emotive nodes] is incapable of fathoming any viewpoint other than that imposed upon it by circumstance.

Of interest to this one, is the moon analogy Spengler presents. Although the ancients are considered as fools who knew nearly nothing, by most humans of our time, counter to primitive societies in which the ancients were seen as wise, Jupiter/Jove/Zeus, these heavenly bodies, those distant moving lights in the sky, to include Mars, Venus, Mercury and Saturn, were all described, were all regarded, as more powerful than the Moon, despite our own current contention, that although the other planets are larger, that their great distance makes them of very minor significance and that proximity makes of the moon a greater force upon earth. This is vested in our belief that the solar system has never altered and is in perpetual perfection of motion, again showing us as the toddlers dressing up as wise men.

Spengler labors upon this point to such depths that sleep is invoked. One can tell that his great fear was that this point would be denied by his readers. For this reason, he spent thrice the words on the hard sciences, demonstrating his respect for these, before going on to remind us that we are mere children of perspective, and that to regard world history as a past living actuality we must abandon our imposed or circumstantial perspective.

This past week I have viewed various interviews with genus investigative journalist Witney Web, a woman, a young mother, by men, her senior by generations. As she answers their questions concerning the very clear fact that POWERFUL PEOPLE have always and will always act in ways to gain, preserve and expand power at the necessary expense of those with less power, these men shake, quiver, sulk and whine! In a traditional living society, such elder men would be patting her on the back for her fresh and detailed insights and reminding her that knowledge is NOT power and that knowledge divorced from power is a threat to those in power, and that she should limit her hopes to how she can use this knowledge to warn her kin and take evasive action. But no, the perpetual historical child of Modern Western Man, is as blind to power as he is to divinity. The physical child can at least perceive mythically beyond his powerless condition. But the adult child of The West is as blind to the powers working within this world, as if an actual physical child were blind to the great size and power of the adults hemming him into the madhouse designed to reduce the native wisdom of three into the distorted worm of 33, who quivers upon the hook of power, snagged upon the barbs of faith, race and state. [1]

One wonders, did Spengler know that a generation after the publication of his master work, that a war of such magnitude would erupt that all history before it would by definition become extinguished, or corrupt?

…

Notes

-0. Understood by Spengler to be Hellenic Man from Homer to Christ, and not beyond into Late Antiquity, with all of its similarities to Soulless Modernity illuminated by Edward Gibbon.

-1. I rate ideologies as faiths, as replacement faiths designed to more completely divide humanity from eternity. The fact that we are taught that the invented religions of ideology are not religions, taught this by ideologues and religious fanatics alike, is a key clue to our slavery, a condition we experience, yet deny.