The Hour of Decision, pages 8-15
In this segment Spengler explored the fall from grace of the dreaming mind of Man. Where the dreamer once predicted “the form of future facts and their march through the ages,” for his fellows, through what allegorical tools were available to him, Spengler, points out that civilized western Man, divorced from the substance of life and death and sorrow, has lost his “Strong, healthy instincts, Race, the will to possession and power;” while the fantasies of “justice, happiness and peace—those dreams which always remain dreams—hover ineffectively over them.”
“…It is the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past…”
“…for there is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence.”
“…Human history is war history…”
Spengler's diagnosis of the utopian sickness of the modernist mind seems an indictment of a cultural head stuck in the sand. He denounces most critically “Romanticism,” “Idealism and Materialism” as interlinked symptoms of the civilized mind’s detachment from reality.
“In every outstanding Materialist a Romantic lies hidden…Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect.”
Here Spengler predicts the Jingoistic movie making of John Wayne in the 1950s and the concurrent willful fall from social grace marked by the 1960s counter-culture revolution, as two ends of the same trajectory. Nothing is more reprehensible to Spengler than the supremely arrogant and “morbid” idea of “reforming society,” encapsulating as it does the will of a single generation to overturn the accumulated wisdom of their countless ancestors.
This is elitist at its core. Since the gift of the ruling elite from ancient times is preserved in history, erasing culture constitutes an attack on the legacy of the common person, which is preserved only in tradition, morals, allegory, and custom. The modern ideologue’s attack on tradition is in fact an attempt to erase every trace of the billions of souls who have worked, striven, suffered and died to bequeath their life lessons to us; social reform is spiritual genocide, the retroactive mass killing of billions of souls over thousands of years.
Spengler deftly defines communism as “an economic Romanticism which trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics. They can feel only in the mass, where they can deaden the dull sense of their weakness by multiplying themselves. And this they call the Overcoming of Individualism.”
Spengler takes us beyond our stock notions of individuality and tradition, which seem perversely apposed in our time, to the root lie of modern collective ideals, all for a self-deifying fantasy.
“The life they hope for, spent in peace and happiness, free from danger and replete with comfort, is boring and senile, apart from the fact that it is only imaginable, not possible. On this rock, the reality of history, every ideology must founder.”
This reader finds Oswald Spengler to be a genius of concise exposition of the underpinning of modern human angst, who wrote beautifully, and was done great justice by his English translator.
