On Spengler and the inevitable

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, 21 February 2024 17:33.

Although it’s not really my area of interest, I’m going to venture a few remarks on Oswald Spengler’s famously pessimistic and a-biological model of civilisational decline. Al Ross raised the question of historicity and political agency. It’s a good question. Is there a metaphysical force acting on human sociocultural processes in Time, the effect of which, very basically, is to mirror in them the form of the individual human organism from birth to death?

pair-wise duel
The ineffable and energetic male spirit of the early 18th century high-point of Western culture, as imagined by Ridley Scott in his wonderful directorial debut from 1977, “The Duellists”.

Oswald Spengler’s grand historical conception is attractive to many students of western decline, especially from the critical right. It supplies a seemingly conclusive, “dust to dust” certainty that may satisfy the pessimistic tendency. But is it really the case that all grand historical forms of the lived life of men must inescapably trace one absolute arc?

Methodologically, Spengler appears never to have remorselessly interrogated history for the raw causalities. He was a creative interpreter of the historical. His base assumption for the aforementioned mirror automatically resulted in civilisational facts fitting around his morphological thesis. These days one could easily imagine that he would be dismissed with the technical truth that even if all the facts did accord with the thesis, correlation does not prove causation. Indeed, the Hungarian-Jewish Marxist György Lukács is reported to have done exactly that in 1954, charging Spengler with “substituting causality for analogy”, that latter being Spengler’s own standard for inclusion in the model. Of course correlation does not rule out causality either. But then the fact that civilisations can follow a certain path does not mean that they must do so. There are variables vis-a-viz the internal and external moral, political, economic, and military dynamics of said civilisations; and then there is the non-variable of the blood and Mind, (to which we will come).

Ontologically, Spengler’s morphology relies on a somewhat assumed universal law of the disorganisation of systems, the assumption being that it can be freely shifted from the organic temporal form to history. There are questions:

i) How, precisely, are we to adequately identify and define the natural law at work here, for such it must be? Is it, for example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics? But that would suggest a material (ie, biological) underpinning, which goes against Spengler’s culturist ideological grain.

ii) And then, what is the precise mechanism by which this law scales itself up from the organic temporal form to world-historical proportions while, at the same time, effortlessly accomplishing the leap from a material relevance to a non-material one? Intoning the word “analogy” over this transformation is not sufficient to demonstrate proof.

iii) On the question of what is a natural law, how is the necessary hardness and imperviousness of “the leap’s” correlative bounds ordered? Where, to borrow from cosmology, is its event horizon which stops “the leap” itself, once in the realm of culture, from becoming another system of natural decline? “Analogy” is totally exteriorised and, one would think, far too weakly associated to supply the essential consistency and robustness of a law. At least one more step back towards Final Cause would be necessary to find such. But that step would route the rest of the structure not in culture but biology.

iv) If, as Spengler claims, human groups are culturally purposive, and their goal is self-fulfilment, how, exactly, does he avoid the implication that this is all just teleology, and an ordained failed teleology at that, ie, a religion of hopelessness?

As it is, none of these questions were forensically explicated by Spengler. One would think that this would be required at a minimum, really, to lift the thesis beyond the observational to a state of philosophical Truth. The probability is, therefore, that the entire scheme is not actually true, indeed is anthropomorphic; and the resultant pessimism - certainly beyond the point where Spengler’s early phase of “cultural becoming” settles into “civilisational being”- is just not realism.

For the awakening nationalist, for whom a burgeoning realism is surely key, a thesis of cultural effusion followed by certain and mechanical decline supplies little to nothing agentive or salvatory, nothing political beyond surface effect and, eventually, a dolefully managed decline. But then Spengler very deliberately offered an impoverished conception of biology and sociobiology (evolved in-group behaviours) as sign and source of group character, relationality, futurity, and capacity, ie, the specific, unchanging European Man in history. Spengler’s morphology did not ask a question of these ineradicable things (ie, “Is this not a source of at least potential High-Cultural permanence?”). Instead, he resorted to airy talk of metaphysics, soul and spirit, against which it must always be said that the real function (not purpose) of human existence is the transmission of genes for fitness unto the morrow, in the teeth of Time and Entropy. Survival and continuity of kin, and thus belonging, identity and difference, is the highest human cause. Spengler’s cultural ordering is simply wrong. Why it would, among those unfortunate enough to be armed with a copy of Decline, commend anything more than Arabic fatalism and Asiatic indifference I do not know.

Perhaps, with his wilful incomprehension of human race and his necessarily finalising reference to “self-fulfillment” as both the purpose and the destiny of whole peoples, he simply could not sense the rude, reflexive fact of Nature in his own blood and in the blood of the man beside him. Perhaps, as an intellectual, his personal cognitive modus operandum was too given to the bloodless and tendentious structures of pure thought. Perhaps the (rather distant) infusion of non-German genes in his own bloodline reached down and influenced him. Perhaps culturism always leads its advocates to deny what Man is, and to assign to very different races a single set of potentials. Or perhaps, in the end, culturism just belongs with liberal universalism and the Judaic gentile at the End Time, its face set irrevocably against Nature and kin.

Whichever it is, we are not Arab or Asiatic, and Arabs and Asiatics are not us. Neither is knowing the otherness of Arabs and Asiatics a path to “hatred” of them, as Spengler half-intimated. Of our European kin, Spengler’s whole, magisterially wrong conception prompts one question: Even accepting that creative energies can decline … are declining ... then how do we Europeans, the creator race after all, create our own way forward from here? How do we throw over this supposed fate, and promulgate renewal?

Tags: Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Thorn on Wed, 21 Feb 2024 23:36 | #

Making the simple complex is the product of the deceitful or confused mind.

The most sought-after value - or aim - in the West was (repeat: WAS) to get a good education; get the best job you are qualified for; then get married and raise a family. Those values have been obliterated by modern liberalism. That event happened during the 1960s revolution and thereafter.

The “Second Law of Thermodynamics? Actually, it’s the physics, the force, of entropy that more accurately explains of the decline of Western civilization. Why entropy? The breakdown of traditional Christian values.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:37 | #

Thorn, where does one go to find the lawful basis for entropy? Also, all my scribblings on serious matters, as opposed to the knockabout of political issues, aim for absolute accuracy. As for “Christian values”, I wrote the following in my piece on reactionaries:

To be clear, it’s an imported and prescribed system of belief, and not an artefact fashioned for, and according to, our sociobiology. If one were to judge Christian belief by its Abrahamic parent and its secular child, which is liberalism³, one might easily conclude that we are not well served by it. So, for example, subtract from it the social conservatism and generally adaptive choices that travel with it (which nationalism would supply more openly and effectively). Now come to England, old and rural. Subtract a lone bell’s monotonously regular toll floating on the morning air; the ancient churchyard, a trespass on the tufts of dewy, springy grass past stones once stood erect but haphazard now, names carved all too long ago and washed away by the centuries of English rain; the dark-hued, ageless yew throwing its shadow; the oaken door silvering in its Norman arch; the stone flags worn by the feet of generations of the faithful and the not so faithful; the air in the place, heavy and autumnal, conjured into an otherliness that is expected yet retiring, unknowable; and, in the great and deep, unspeakable silence, a sense of time and not-time, of place and no place, of beauty, of sanctity, of light and of vastness, of stubbornness in the face of decay, of the smallness of men and of oneself – constituents all of an aesthetic belonging in a strange but definite sense more to English genes than to English religious history or English cultural history …. subtract all that and one is left with the plain, unadulterated post-Judaic dicta for the gentile. One is left with universal love, the praying for forgiveness from the sin of not loving universally, the judgement of the Judaic deity and the soul’s eternal damnation for some unknowable wrong-doing (not so popular since WW1), the grace of the said Judaic deity and the soul’s salvation and eternal life in Heaven (too lightly taken for granted since WW1), and belief, belief, belief … the circuitous track of eager belief. What, then, is there for us? Where is the ethnic and racial benefit of any of these leavings, given that death is certainly death, and that gods are for the benefit of the people of living peoples?

That’s the greater part of my opinion of the Christ cult’s utility to our race. I don’t demand or expect it to be accepted by anyone. I am open to non-faith arguments to the contrary.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:49 | #

“Thorn, where does one go to find the lawful basis for entropy?”

Entropy defined: 2. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

I would point to the U.S. Constitution as the lawful basis for order.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”—John Adams

Has the West gradually declined into moral / cultural disorder? If so, why?

Native Europeans are in the process of - in relative terms - rapidly rejecting traditional Christian values and replacing them with perverse faux Christian values and bizarre secular ones. A few examples on a long list of the negative consequences of such has given rise to radical feminism concomitant with abortion-on-demand; the radical gay agenda concomitant with transgenderism and the attack on the traditional nuclear family. The anti-Christ neo-Marxists have painted a target on the traditional one-man one-woman marriage - they have “reimagined” the family in scores of different ways. You, GW, may be happy to know that in most Western countries, the woke “ruling elites” are working assiduously crafting policies and laws to deem core Christian values/teachings as hate crimes. As a matter of law, they are making the practice of trad Christianity illegal. I see all that as fitting into an overarching anti-White/ anti-European-culture agenda. You, GW, have made it clear you see it quite differently.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 14:20 | #

No, Thorn, which general law of thermodynamics establishes entropy as a universal? I should not have to labour the point because that would be crass. I would prefer you to just to say, “Oh yes, sorry; missed that” off your own bat.

Why has the West declined into disorder? That is another essay. But, in fact, all my non-political efforts at this site address that question. It is the same question that Heidegger sought to dig beneath when he asked “What is the meaning of human being?” It goes to cause, and then it develops as something akin to this:

As a rule, in determinations of this kind we should always prefer analysis over the reifications of faith, which is incapable of knowing truth both because its method is emotionally centred and because it cannot acknowledge error in itself. You would know this instantly if you went to some distant island and listened to the local witch doctor explaining the truth of things. But all such truths are equal. The utter poverty of his religion does not change that. The problem is faith in Man.

On Christian teaching, I repeat, if you take the socially conservative out of it and then you take the socio-cultural heritage out of it, what’s left is Judaic dicta and a general failure of the monastic tradition to encompass the grand existential basis of it all (let’s say, consciousness over mechanicity) to which I have given the term esoteric. Christianity is an exoteric faith for the very reason that it is another tribe’s stratagem. If you think otherwise, fine; but that cannot be thoughts driven from faith. It has to be analytically-driven to be admitted to the debate.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:25 | #

GW, you mentioned the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that entropy is part of the dynamic.

I simply used “entropy” as an apt - but not perfect - analogy to explain the relationship or correlation between the moral decline of Western culture with the decline of native European’s practice of trad Christianity. An anti-Christian culture is taking over the USA. As a result, our once great cities have become filthy crime-ridden morally depraved cesspools. Our anti-Christ elites are largely to blame for the conditions there. Those demonic perves deliberately caused it. Moreover, they seem to delight in the destruction they’ve caused.

Detroit is the city I grew up in. Up until the mid 1960s, it had the highest per capita income in the entire USA. Detroit was known as the Paris of the Mid-West. By the time the mid 1980s rolled around, it had the dubious distinction of being known as The Murder Capital of the USA. The Motor City had become niggerized; practically devoid of Christain morals. The thug mindset prevailed.

The following article is about Boston. It’s a sample which illustrates just how far down our secularized “ruling elites” allowed this situation to deteriorate to ... and it will only get worse as the de-Christianizing of America along with the “Browning of America” moves forward apace.

Out-of-Control School Begs Massachusetts Gov. to Send Nat’l Guard to Restore Order

Officials have asked Gov. Maura Healey to send in the Massachusetts National Guard to stop violence and address security concerns at a troubled high school in a city south of Boston, some school committee members said Monday.

Four of the seven members of the Brockton School Committee backed the National Guard request amid teacher shortages and budget deficits, but city officials weren’t unanimous in their support.

The governor’s office acknowledged the concerns about Brockton High School, where teachers reported fighting and drug use in the hallways, and verbal abuse of staff.

“Our administration is committed to ensuring that schools are safe and supportive environments for students, educators, and staff,” Healey’s office said.
{snip}
Healey recently deployed the National Guard to help address the influx of illegal immigrants resulting from the Biden administration’s open borders.

It was unclear whether immigration was a contributing factor in the issues related to Brockton, although statistics have shown that the crisis is putting a heavy burden on schools nationwide, which are already struggling with post-pandemic learning loss.

According to data compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, which is part derived from Census Bureau statistics, as of last June nearly 30% of public school enrollment (about 3 million students) from immigrant households were from homes headed by an illegal immigrant.

Moreover, almost one-fourth of all U.S. public school students were from immigrant families of legal and illegal status (about 11 million total), and about one-fifth of those lived in poverty.

Source: https://headlineusa.com/high-school-natl-guard-restore-order/

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:36 | #

GW, when I observe what’s taking place in most western countries - particularly the USA, UK, and Canada - I’m reminded of this quote”

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf

Apparently, we’ve crossed the threshold into stage where weak men create hard times.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 23:55 | #

I don’t entirely agree with Hopf because Man is not merely a creature of circumstance, and always carries within him the possibility to make history after his own will. Apparently this has been a fixed idea of mine for a while, because on 1st July 2007 I posted a comment at MR to the following effect:

https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/tiger_tiger#c46188

This year, although I didn’t blog about it and perhaps should have, was the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War. When the troops were shipped south on board the QE2 there was a certain disquiet about the fighting qualities of this generation of servicemen. Youth had had a bad name for twenty years, and one could see that some unflattering generational analysis was being prepared for them in the event of failure. Too much narcissistic individualism would have been the least of it.

What the country then witnessed was a display of soldiering the equal of that in any period in Britain’s long acquaintance with warfare. And it was a remarkable thing to witness, even from 8,000 miles away in the safety of one’s own living room.

From it I took the lesson that the qualities which make us what we are as a people do not suddenly disappear in one or even two generations. The manliness and independence of the frontiersmen, the energy and creativity of the great 19th century city-builders, the sense of duty and the courage of the GIs on Omaha Beach or Guam ... these sorts of thing are still in the blood, and if the times demanded them they would be offered.

But it is a nice question as to whether there exists a median point at which the natural character of a people re-exerts itself, free of both the sickly, sapping, Weimar-esque excess of today and the heroic but still abnormal and not really desirable high dramas of the past. The point in question is whether the people are ever sufficiently free of the zeitgeist to express their essentiality. I am inclined to the view that the demands of an urbanised, highly artificial life probably increase our suggestibility in direct proportion to our disconnectedness from Nature. With suggestibility comes self-alienation: the lived narrative is not that of the liver. So no ... only something very special - like the Falklands campaign - or very revolutionary can lift him out of his dreams.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 22 Feb 2024 23:59 | #

To ask a serious question to you, GW, what path should the white race take for its survival given the 2020 US Census report reveals the white population in the age group of 18 and under has dropped to 47% of the total? The UK is on that same trajectory. Is pointing out the philosophies of Spangler or Heidegger is going to in any way going to change that trend? Do you actually think that will help?

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:19 | #

It would have been helpful, Thorn, if you cottoned on by now that in the above brief essay this question arises:

How, precisely, are we to adequately identify and define the natural law at work here, for such it must be? Is it, for example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics? But that would suggest a material (ie, biological) underpinning, which goes against Spengler’s culturist ideological grain.

It is not, therefore, correct that Spengler’s woolly thinking be granted access to an entropic explanation if he rejects physical systems, ie, biology. But, of course, when one brings in biology the thesis breaks down because permanence and creativity cannot be extirpated from it. Genes are communicated through Time. Natural selection is creative of fitness.

You criticise me for lack of clarity without apparently grasping the rapier to the heart of Spengler’s cultural thesis which is non-access to an entropic explanation. The rapier is further sharpened by the next two questions. He doesn’t have a modus operandum for his system, as dramatic and still popular as it is. It fails. I would have thought that was clear enough for anyone.

Now, I accept that the accuracy I strive to achieve makes a demand on the reader. But if you have read a more concise destruction of Decline by all means tell me where it is.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:38 | #

One of the grotesque failings of nationalism since 1945 has been the refusal to think past fascism and to fashion a politics from our essential truth. When I started MR less than three years before the date of that comment above I already knew this, and was concerned to discover how men could be awakened. MR at this time was an experiment in awakening (which I pulled in January 2008). Rather than the struggle to address sleeping European humanity direct I concluded that they had to be brought into an extant system which directed them to certain ends. This has been my “talking point” ever since. It is ideas, good or bad, which make the world, and we can’t get around that. There is no short-cut.

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:56 | #

#10 Indeed , GW . Your penultimate sentence raises obvious questions which you would be uncharacteristically disingenuous to ignore .

The main big new idea of the last Century was a Jewish effort to instill a self - destructive belief in Whites in Equality , which today is enshrined, sacrosanct nonsense.

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:58 | #

Brave Michigan Senator Pummeled [For telling the truth]

MICHIGAN state senator Josh Shriver has become the villain of the day for his common sense, true statement above.

In the clip below, reporters wonder if anything else can be done to penalize him other than stripping him of his staff and slandering him.

This is the status of the white man in his own country.

MUST WATCH video: https://youtu.be/bqcvNwypOdc

To his credit, Shriver has not backed down and has issued this statement:

h/t to The Thinking Housewife https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/2024/02/brave-michigan-senator-pummeled/

Thorn note: Actually, the white pop. dropped to 58% as of 2020. It’s probably down to 55% - or even less - today given the fact that in the year 2015 white deaths began to outnumber white births. Couple that with massive non-white immigration - both legal and illegal - and we can do the math and conclude the percentage of the white pop is decreasing at an ever-increasing pace.

Sadly, whites, in general, are too intimidated to confront - or even acknowledge - the genocidal policies their own ruling-class is imposing on them. Evidently and moreover, the vast majority of whites (I estimate it’s>90%) do not place enough value on their own preservation to fight back against their planned extinction/demise. They either choose the contend with the obvious using the ostrich strategy or the path of least resistance. Social pressure driven by academia and pop-culture’s messaging/narratives is both fueling and policing the anti-White agenda. It’s obvious that most white people have become incurable cowards - especially those who’ve been indoctrinated in colleges and universities. Again, anti-Whiteness is the current thing, and most white elites actually bask in it! It’s a sickness. We all can’t help but witnessing that! Journalist Pedro Gonzalez named that perverse mental condition as “psycho-sexual ethno-masochism.” I think Mr. Gonzalez is pretty much accurate with his description.

Bottom line,

The brave truth telling Michigan Senator will get next to zero support from his fellow whites. His fellow whites are too transfixed with thus controlled by “anti-racism” to fight back. Pathetic.

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:00 | #

@ 11

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, Whites refuse to believe blacks are, on average, significantly less intelligent than Whites. The brainwashing of Whites in that regard is very strong. When the subject of black dysfunction, or the academic achievement gap is brought up, the only acceptable explanation to them is “white racism” is at the root of the cause. That false narrative forms the basis of CRT; furthermore, CRT undergirds and provides the justification for DEI policies. Of course, in order to implement the DEI scheme, meritocracy must be sacrificed. CRT + DEI + constant massive immigration from the Third World adds up to the perfect recipe for a nation’s decline. Pat Buchanan is right.

Posted by Thorn on Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:58 | #

Good try, dipshits. But it was God that created it all and set the evolution of it in motion.

Scientists unveil ‘missing’ law of nature in landmark discovery

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-unveil-missing-law-of-nature-in-landmark-discovery/ar-AA1ilK76?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=0d99e95c4dbb4ba5b8199d3d42e0914f&ei=14

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:31 | #

One for Lifesite News, then.

Posted by Thorn on Mon, 18 Mar 2024 23:20 | #

GW,

Let me clue you in why whites are submitting to the genocide being imposed on them: they are too cowardly and weak to fight back - too stupid too. Period. Capiche?!?

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 19 Apr 2024 06:23 | #

Thorn , I know you are a forgiving Christian mattoid.

GW does need need to be ” clued in ” as you so San Fran Sixtiesly put it.

Your brain dead Christianity has been responsible for the non - aggression , forgiveness attitude to any attack on White EGI. See the USA today.

Which Churches want to stop illegals , dumbo ?

Also, the Mafia linguistical flourish at the end of your ordure , is hugely impressive .

All Mafia members are RCs

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