In examining Oswald Spengler’s The Hour of Decision the reviewer is struck with the author’s poetic compression of thought. Concepts that would require 400 pages of a postmodern novelist or 200 pages from an op-ed journalist are expressed by Spengler in a sentence. For this reason the review, which became five reviews, is now evolving into a small book. Realistically this reader’s impressions of Spengler’s 230 page thesis should require about 50 pages—a pamphlet-sized document. A portion of my impressions of Spengler will appear as an appendix in Of Lions and Men. The entire work will appear as the core of the book A Thousand Years In His Soul.

Spengler is excerpted at length below from the passages that convinced this reader that his idea of psychological racial continuity was as much on the order of the seers of the Iliad as the eugenics theories prominent in his time. Words in bold face represent my emphasis.

“Is there today a man among the White races who has eyes to see what is going on around him on the face of the globe?...

“…Does anyone, I ask, see over and beyond his time, his own continent, his country, or even the narrow circle of his own activities?

“We live in momentous times. The stupendous dynamism of the historical epoch that has now dawned makes it the grandest, not only in the Faustian civilization of Western Europe, but—for that very reason—in all world-history, greater and by far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon. Yet how blind are the human beings over whom this mighty destiny is surging, whirling them in confusion, exalting them, destroying them! Who among them sees and comprehends what is being done to them and around them? Some wise old Chinaman or Indian, perhaps, who gazes around him in silence with the stored-up thought of a thousand years in his soul. But how superficial, how narrow, how small-minded are the judgments and measures of Western Europe and America! What do the inhabitants of the Middle West of the United States know of what goes on beyond New York and San Francisco? What conception has a middle-class Englishman, not to speak of a French provincial, of the trend of affairs on the continent? What, indeed, does any one of them know of the direction in which his very own destiny is facing? All we have is a number of absurd catchwords, such as “overcoming economic crisis,” “understanding of peoples,” “national security and self-sufficiency,” with which to “overcome catastrophes” within the space of a generation or two by means of “prosperity” and disarmament.”

Spengler goes on to focus the discussion on Germany. For now, I would suggest the reader reread the text above and compare the ignorance and cloaking catchwords of his time with our own. And most of all, try to remember that Spengler has approached the rise of modern civilization and its attendant woes with an analytical mind, focused in a manner appreciative of the shamanic perspective of removing the artifice and material of life to get at the truth.

There is an old saying about ‘the truth’ not being worth the change necessary to purchase a cup of coffee. For a man of Spengler’s perspective there is much truth in such a statement, for only the truth has value; the money being a pittance detached from a leveraged lie and the coffee destined for the urinal in less than an hour.