The Background of Spengler's Decline of the West ⤒🔗

Seventy years ago, Oswald Spengler published the first part of his Decline of the West, wherein he proclaimed that the process of history and all of man's strivings are ultimately meaningless, because soci­eties and civilizations are predestined to run their limited course and perish, leaving little or nothing behind of all that they accomplished. With this in­terpretation Spengler broke with the West's traditional view of history; not only with the Christian one which Au­gustine of Hippo had formulated in his City of God, but also with that of the Enlightenment, which saw meaning in history because of its faith in unlimited progress.

Politics Around 1900←⤒🔗

Why did Spengler and his contem­poraries reject the essentially optimistic Western tradition and replace it with prophecies of doom? The reason was not the First World War, wherein Eu­rope indeed came close to committing suicide; as I mentioned earlier, Speng­ler's book had been drafted before that war broke out. Did anything in the in­ternational situation of the prewar years suggest an imminent decline and fall of Europe?

There were alarming developments, which may well have influenced Speng­ler. In 1871, thanks mainly to the ef­forts of Bismarck, the unification of Germany had been completed and the Second Reich established. True to his Prussian background, Bismarck had made it clear that not idealism, but "blood and iron" were to create and maintain the new Germany, and subse­quent history showed that the Prussian military tradition would indeed be up­held. Germany, which had shown its military strength by defeating Austria and France, and which soon began to compete with England for first place as a naval power, upset the European power balance, and the two decades preceding the First World War saw fre­quent international crises.

Because of these developments, all major European nations were pre­paring for war well before 1914. There was an ever-accelerating arms race, and countries were busy arranging and rearranging alliances. It is indicative of English respect for German strength that it now looked for a reconciliation with its traditional enemy, France, and became its ally against Germany.

The Social Darwinists←⤒🔗

A war among the major European powers could turn out to be catastroph­ic and signify the decline of the West and its civilization. That possibility was considered. During the final de­cades of the nineteenth century there was a spate of publications dealing with calamitous warfare in Europe, and also with invasions from Asia and even from outer space. ¹ Apparently some of these publications served a po­litical purpose: the authors tried to con­vince their nation that more money was to be devoted to programmes of military preparedness. The popularity of these works shows, however, that the possibility of a nemesis and a re­versal of the West's fortunes was con­sidered by at least part of the prewar population. Spengler did not develop his ideas in a vacuum.

It is only fair to add, however, that expectations of impending doom by means of war and invasions were not general. The opposite opinion was at least equally strong, and there was even a tendency to welcome war. Na­tionalism had become a new religion, and the conviction was quite common that war was good for the nation.

That conviction was bolstered by the so-called Social Darwinists, a group of people who had begun to apply the­ories of evolution to society. Darwin had taught the principle of natural selection. According to that theory the life of organisms is one of constant struggle, which leads to the extinction of some life forms and the preserva­tion and improvement of others. Mer­ciless as this struggle, this war of nature, may be, it is, Darwin pointed out, also good and beneficial, for it is thus that the most favored or fittest individuals and species survive, the un­fit are eliminated, and progress takes place.

It was these theories that the So­cial Darwinists applied to human af­fairs, including economics and politics, and they concluded that struggle had the same function in society as it had in nature: it led to the survival and im­provement of the fittest and the elimi­nation of the weak. Therefore social and economic warfare, as well as war­fare between nations, were humanitar­ian pursuits in that they served the cause of progress and helped bring the fulfilment of the utopian dream closer. It is easy to see how this view reinforced the tendencies toward militarism, na­tionalism, and laissez-faire liberalism that were so strong in the late nine­teenth century.

The Mood of the "Fin de Siècle"←⤒🔗

There was, therefore, a twofold ap­preciation of political developments around the turn of the century. Many, probably the great majority, continued to hang on to the old faith in progress, believing that all was well with the West­ern world and would get better yet. The advances in science and technology, the increase in industry and trade, and the great rise in prosperity, all strength­ened that view. A minority, however, reacted against that facile optimism and also against the complex of prac­tical and philosophical materialism. Members of that minority group doubt­ed that progress was inevitable and ex­pressed feelings of weariness, anxiety and foreboding, not only with political developments, but with society and culture in general.

Judging by the art and literature of the period, that sense of malaise and apprehension was especially strong in the 1890s, and the mood is often called that of the "fin de siècle," the end of the century, or the end of the age. The latter translation is perhaps the more appropriate one, for the feeling was in­deed that an era was coming to an end, if not the world itself.

Influence of Evolutionism←⤒🔗

Of the many reasons why this "fin de siècle" mood arose I will select only a few of the most important ones. Un­derlying everything was the fact that Western Christendom had abandoned Christianity and all faith in the super­natural and — probably the first civili­zation ever to do so — had adopted atheism. The process of secularization begun well before the eighteen hun­dreds, but it was in that century that the implications were beginning to be realized. We will presently look at these implications.

Another reason, not unconnected with the first, was the theories of evo­lution. These had been finding wide­spread acceptance, especially since 1859, when Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species. The work of the evolutionists had had a dual effect. On the one hand, as we already saw, it had seemed to give a scientific basis to the theory of progress and so boosted the optimistic Enlightenment faith. But on the other hand — and this was more and more realized toward the end of the century — it had serious implica­tions for man's self-concept. From a being created in the image of God and as His viceroy, the crown of His cre­ation, man had become the chance prod­uct of a blind and essentially amoral evolutionary process. And rather than being "of God's generation," he was akin to the animal, possessed of an animal nature and animal instincts.

In addition, evolutionism taught that the age of the cosmos was to be measured in millions of years, and that the existence of man was a mere drop in that ocean of time. Man's place in the universe was far less central than had always been assumed. And his very survival was no longer believed in. Recalling the law of the disintegration of energy, turn-of-the-century thinkers saw a universe in irreversible decay, and a humanity doomed to ever-increas­ing decadence and finally to extinction. ² Instead of progress there would be re­gress; instead of life, death. Abandon­ing the faith that existence had mean­ing, the age turned to the doctrine of nihilism, the belief in the meaningless­ness of all that exists. MacBeth had be­come a prophet: life was a tale full of sound and fury, but it signified nothing.

Rise of Nihilism←⤒🔗

It was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who became the major figure in this turn-­of-the-century doom-thinking. After a rather lengthy eclipse, Nietzsche is again very much in the news in recent years, and rightly so: if we want to understand our century and the society we live in, we have to consider him.

Nietzsche's primary claim to fame lies in the fact that he was one of the first and most eloquent advocates of the new atheism. It was he who not only proclaimed that God was dead, but who also challenged his contem­poraries to face the consequences of their atheism. His main message was that in a godless universe — in a world which finally realizes that there is and never has been a God-man himself must become god by striving to the status of superman (Uebermensch). In the process he must also develop the morality appropriate to this new posi­tion. All the West's norms and morals, all its ideas and ideals, Nietzsche point­ed out, were ultimately derived from or tainted by Christianity. Christianity had now at last been shown to be a myth, and one can't continue to base one's actions on a myth that has been exposed as such. Hence it was necessary to establish a new morality, a morality that would be different from and in­deed the opposite of the Christian one. All norms would have to be reversed; there would have to be, to use Nietz­sche's term, a "transvaluation of all values" (an Urnwertung alter Werte). Those new values would include glorification of war and violence, egotism, oppression, and a ruthless pursuit of power.

Nietzsche had the desperate cour­age to draw the consequences of his atheism, and in doing this he was in­evitably drawn into the abyss of nihil­ism and despair. If anyone's life shows man's creatureliness, his inability con­sciously to deny God and yet find mean­ing, it is Nietzsche's. In the end he had to admit that in a godless universe there is only the void, nothingness. He ex­perienced that void: the consequences of his nihilism were symbolized in his own life, which ended in insanity.

Spengler and Nietzsche←⤒🔗

Spengler assimilated the ideas of the turn-of-the-century thinkers, and in the preface to his book he cited Nietz­sche as one of his major sources of in­spiration. Spengler was not merely a product of the "fin de siècle" thinking, however; he also promoted it, and he did so first of all in Germany, where his influence was greatest. It was Speng­ler, moreover, who advocated various practical applications of the new theories, especially those of Nietzsche.

Like most of the turn-of-the-century thinkers, Nietzsche had been anti-liberal. An opponent of equality and democracy, he had not proposed that all men become supermen; only a select few were to aspire to that state. The new, post-Christian society would be one of leaders and followers, of an elite master race with its own master morality, and a common herd. And like practically every nineteenth-century thinker, from Marx to Darwin to the Social Darwinists, he promoted struggle. In his opinion war was the proper pursuit of man. He also thought that war might at least delay the decadence of society and the death of its culture.

In his Decline of the West and other writings Spengler, as Nietzsche's faithful disciple, also spoke of the inevitability and acceptability of worldwide struggle and authoritarian rule. He urged his compatriots to reject liberalism and democracy, to encourage the state to adopt power politics and totalitarianism, and so to steel themselves for the inevitable world conflict. Although the nazis rejected him because he opposed biological racism, Spengler nevertheless, by his antiliberalism and faith in war and dictatorship, helped prepare Germany for the acceptance of Hitler. And the influence of his doom-thinking spread well beyond the Ger­man borders.

I have dealt at some length with Spengler's intellectual background be­cause it is worthy of our attention. This is not only so because the ideas that in­fluenced him are still alive and help shape the moral and intellectual climate wherein we live, but also because they so clearly show the bankruptcy of hu­manism. Having declared that God was dead and man had come of age, the late nineteenth-century intellectuals were unable to live with a godless uni­verse and therefore hastened to create new gods, but these gods were demons: the superman, the totalitarian state, the Fuehrer. This has been the legacy which the nineteenth century bequeath­ed to the twentieth, and in this sense the title of Spengler's book became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The darkness did not descend, however, because of unalterable and relentless natural laws, as Spengler and Darwinists taught. It was a result of Europe's wilful aban­doning of its true heritage.