JMW Turner, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817. Tate Gallery, London.
You’ve probably seen the videos of people answering simple historical questions, like When was the Second World War? (Most young British people can’t answer that). Or in the States, Who did Americans fight against in the War of Independence? (Many can’t answer at all, or give an absurd answer like ‘Russia?’) A lot of Americans don’t know who fought in their Civil War. Most young British people struggle to name a Prime Minister before the present one, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher, the personification of evil. (In a current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she’s actually exhibited in puppet form alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden as exemplars of villains of history.) In short, we live in an ahistorical age—many people, including the so-called ‘educated’ know almost no history, and thus are condemned to live in a sort of amnesiac present, with no idea what forces have shaped their lives.
To make matters worse, if people have ‘studied’ a little history—which usually means if they’ve been indoctrinated in anti-western ideology, if they’re under forty—then they either have no coherent philosophy of history, or have a very bad one, which is the Marxist and socialist one of constant ‘progress’. (I mean it’s very bad not because the idea of progress is itself bad, but because any objective study of history shows clearly that it’s simply a fantasy: it’s not how the world works at all.) I managed to take a degree in history at Cambridge University, which was then a genuine institution of higher learning, without studying any philosophy of history at all, not even Toynbee. But in recent years I read The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, which was published just after the First World War (1914-1918!) and although the book had some obvious faults, it transformed the way I looked at history.
I’m going to give a very brief summary of Spengler’s thesis; bear in mind that it’s a long book, and a very complex one, and I can’t possibly do it justice in a paragraph. His main argument is that civilizations are organic, and experience birth, growth, flourishing and maturity, and then, inevitably, decline and death. He claims that civilizations last about 1,000 years, and that our Western one, which he calls the Faustian, because it has always reached for infinity, indeed into Space itself, began about 1000 AD, was already clearly in decline a hundred years ago, when he was alive, and would be finished about 2000 AD. (No apologies for Anno Domini, either!) Civilizations go through ‘seasons’, so our spring would be the early medieval period, summer the Renaissance, autumn the Baroque and Enlightenment age, and winter our own post-industrial age. It works pretty well for the Europe of the last thousand years or so, and also for the Classical World, which would date from roughly the Archaic Age in Greece, 6th century BC, to the Fall of Rome. It also fits what he calls the Magian Civilization, which was the Byzantine and Islamic one that followed the collapse of Roman power. On the other hand it seems to me not to work so well with Egypt, India, China, and the Mayans. It’s possible that some of these either managed to reinvent themselves, or at the very least avoided total collapse through a kind of stagnation and repetition, which preserved the civilization without advancing it.
In our case, it’s obvious that our civilization is under attack, and that this is a moment of profound crisis. Many western elites feel profound shame for their history and culture—indeed, shame and guilt have become so dominant, that all the achievements of the past are either forgotten or distorted. An example of this is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which seeks to portray the first settlers in the New World as genocidal, the Founding Fathers as evil slave owners, and so on. Another example might be John Berger’s contention that the history of western art is essentially a history of the power and conspicuos display of the propertied classes, first the feudal lords and then the bourgeoisie. Yet another example might be the study of literature through neo-Marxist and feminist lenses: the novels and plays and poetry of the past are studied principally for what they can teach us about the exploitation of women and ethnic minorities by ‘the patriarchy’. In all these claims there’s a grain of truth, of course: no one is claiming that westerners have always been saints, though I would claim that we have been no worse than other civilizations, and often a lot better. Recently the accusations have become even more extreme though: classical music is now regarded as racist and discriminatory in some circles, as is mathematics. The British countryside is supposed to be racist because it’s mainly inhabited by white people! In any case, all this is evidence not only of the malice and ignorance of ‘scholars’ of Critical Race Theory, who hold that countries like the US and Britain are systematically racist, but also of the self-hatred, self-disgust, and cowardice of the mostly middle-class, educated white elites who uphold them. Such attitudes are now mainstream in educational institutions—even primary schools—museums, the media, especially the legacy media, and the civil services of the English-speaking countries. Children are being taught to hate their own country, to be ashamed of their ancestors and history—and primed to pay ‘reparations’ for their ancestors’ sins, a bizarre revival of the Old Testament view that people shall be punished for their sins ‘unto the seventh generation’. (Which was more generous than what modern ‘liberals’ want.)
So is there any hope? Spengler thought not. ‘Optimism is cowardice’, he said—though it has to be remembered that he was German and lived through the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s early years (and although he was initially sympathetic to the Nazis, he got into trouble with them for criticising their doctrine of racial purity, and considered Hitler, whom he met, to be a complete nullity.) Nietzsche, who was a major influence on Spengler, had a different view. Although he thought that western civilization as we know it was in inevitable decline, and Christianity was already dead, he believed that in future Overmen (ubermenschen) would usher in a more vital, heroic age. So far, it has to be said, we have seen precious little evidence of that. Here’s Spengler on the what we might call the New Elite, the ‘educated’ liberal city dweller:
‘In place of true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.’
(I couldn’t agree more!) He sounds as if he’s describing the digital nomads of our own times, the ‘nowheres’ who don’t merely cohere in fluid masses, but are even ‘gender-fluid’ themselves very often, confused about whether they’re men or women or even what those terms mean. Spengler also mentions that instead of trying to give true culture to everyone, the opposite happens: everything is levelled down. ‘General equality is to reign; everything is to be equally vulgar.’ For Spengler, ‘Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found found in front of a door in Pompeii, who…died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness…The honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.’ A grim vision, but one that does not lack nobility. Elsewhere he says, ‘Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies not wisdom, but banality.’ I’m with him there, and as one who has long since realised that he is not saint material, I think that we must indeed decide to be heroes. That doesn’t mean the hubris of believing we are perfect: far from it. All the heroes of the Greek myths are flawed. The protagonist of my new novel says ‘A man is a hero or he is nothing.’ I will come back to that in later essays. We can’t know whether or not we will prevail in this culture war, which is not just a war of words, but a struggle for the very existence of our civilization. The Philistines want to eliminate it and start all over again, as Mao did, or Pol Pot. If enough of us fight them, we may yet win, or at least create an outpost of civilization, like Byzantium, that will flourish for centuries. And if we lose, may we die honourably at our posts like that Roman soldier, or Leonidas and his men at Thermopylae. We shall die with our boots on. These are dangerous times, and getting more dangerous. Yet let us not be nostalgic for the past: that has gone. This is the era we have. Let us welcome the danger, like true free spirits.
This is a great and much needed essay. My protagonists are heroes (and good looking!) something mainstream publishing didn’t seem to be looking for, but I wanted to write about true bravery which is sorely lacking in so many places in our society. I also think people want this. They’re tired of being told what is wrong with everything by losers who create nothing.
I wonder if it goes deeper than that. The culture wars are like all other wars in that people and or nations take sides, all believing they are right and are prepared to destroy anything and everything that gets in their way. If we are hoping to be uberbeings then we must be prepared to evolve above that..the human as a being becoming Uberhumans. Aside from that, our Europ. Muslimhood is veiwed as anean and United States societies are beginning to be at war within. Muslims are being viewed as part of an ethnoreligeon to fight within their adopted state against Jews who represent similar ethnorligious groups