A man named Stan Gooch once wrote a book titled Cities of Dreams, in which he postulated that the dreaming half of our consciousness is infused with a legacy of our partial Neanderthal ancestry. It sounds kooky, but the first evidence of human spirituality in the form of burial blessings, comes from a 40,000 year old Neanderthal find. The balance of early spiritual evidence is found in cave paintings by the modern people who displaced and absorbed the Neanderthal, and among Aborigine rock art. The killers that conquered the world seem to have borrowed their spirituality from those they murdered and raped. The Australasian Aboriginal population inherited Disnovian DNA, a primitive heavy browed human type that provided a host population for the modern invaders out of Africa, as did the Neanderthals of North Asia and Europe. Incidentally, Neanderthals did have greater cranial capacity than we do.

I am just throwing these scraps out there because of the first line in part 2. By Spengler, “Added to this [the Germanic failure to grasp real politics] is the universal dread of reality. We “pale-faces” have it, all of us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it.”

Where Gooch supposed the tendency of people of European origin to engage in ideology at the most impractical times was a legacy of Neanderthal psychology, Spengler lays it at the door of modernity, the cutting off of the human from the natural experiencing of destiny, time and death. Could Gooch and Spengler have been pointing to the same phenomena, of a strand of humanity dislocated from its natural habitat to the point where it is assailed by a creeping sense of dread—perhaps becoming obsessed with zombie fiction, with post apocalyptic action movies, with dystopian science-fiction, with utopian ideologies, with savior tyrants like Hitler or Obama?

Spengler points up the symptoms:

“He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place…Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and cowardly optimism…We sing in the woods at night because we are afraid. Similarly, the cowardice of cities shouts its apparent optimism to the world at large for [e]very fear. Reality is no longer to be borne. The wish-picture of the future is set in place of facts…”