Keyserling’s Europe (1928) and Spengler’s Hour of Decision (1934)

Snapshots Of The Continent Entre Deux Guerres: Keyserling’s Europe (1928) and Spengler’s Hour Of Decision (1934)
from The Brussels Journal, August 18, 2009

[. . .]

The Hour of Decision, like everything that Spengler authored, is a rich mine of observation and insight, difficult to summarize, mainly because it communicates so thoroughly with the monumental Decline, to which it forms an epilogue.  The core of The Hour is its diptych of concluding chapters on what Spengler calls “The White World-Revolution” and “The Coloured World-Revolution.”  [. . .]

Conjuring the image of the modern megalopolis and echoing Ortega’s alarm over the masses, Spengler writes, “A pile of atoms is no more alive than a single one.”  Crudely quantitative in its mental processes, the modern mass subject equates “the material product of economic activity” with “civilization and history.”  Spengler insists that economics is merely a sleight-of-hand discourse for disguising the real nature of the “catastrophe” that has overcome the West, which is a failure of cultural nerve.

In The Hour, Spengler builds on notions he had developed in The Decline, particularly the idea that the West has ceased to be a “Culture,” a healthy, vital thing, and has entered into the moribund phase of its life, or what Spengler calls “Civilization.” Into the megalopolis, “this world of stone and petrifaction,” writes Spengler, “flock ever-growing crowds of peasant folk uprooted from the land, the ‘masses’ in the terrifying sense, formless human sand from which artificial and therefore fleeting figures can be kneaded.”  Spengler stresses the formlessness of “Civilization,” in which “the instinct for the permanence of family and race” stands abolished.  Where “Culture is growth,” and “an abundance of children,” “Civilization” is “cold intelligence… the mere intelligence of the day, of the daily papers, ephemeral literature, and national assemblies,” with no urge to prolong itself as settled custom, well-bred offspring, or a posterity that honors tradition.  The “White World-Revolution” consists in the triumph of “the mob, the underworld in every sense.”

The mob, which sees everything from below, hates refinement and despises anything permanent.  The masses want “liberation from all… bonds [and] from every kind of form and custom, from all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior.”  Hence the appeal of egalitarianism to the masses.  But, as Spengler argues, egalitarianism is really only a slogan, a euphemism.  The real trend is “Nihilism.”

The pattern of “Nihilism” emerged in the French Revolution, with its vocabulary of leveling, as in the radically politicizing etiquette of “citoyen” and in the supposedly universal demand for “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”  “The central demand of political liberalism,” writes Spengler, consists in “the desire to be free from the ethical restrictions of the Old Culture.”  Yet as Spengler insists: “The demand was anything but universal; it was only called so by the ranters and writers who lived by it and sought to further private aims through this freedom.”  We see this identical pattern today in the various concocted emergencies and so-called universal demands that the current thoroughly liberal-nihilistic regime in the United States trots out serially to justify its consolidation of power, whereby it ceaselessly attacks what remains in the American body-politic of form and custom.  In Spengler’s aphorism: “Active liberalism progresses from Jacobinism to Bolshevism logically.”

In Spengler’s judgment, moreover, one would make a mistake in equating Bolshevism, as people would have done in the 1930s, uniquely with the Soviet Union.  “Actually [Bolshevism] was born in Western Europe, and born indeed of logical necessity as the last phase of the liberal democracy of 1770 – which is to say, of the presumptuous intention to control living history by paper systems and ideals.”

When Spengler remarks on the theme of tolerance (so-called) in liberalism-nihilism, one thinks again of the existing situation in Europe and North America the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.  Inherent to form is its rigorous exclusion of the formless.  In its aggressive demand for inclusion of the rightly excluded, which belongs to its destructive impetus, the liberal-nihilistic regime works actively to de-stigmatize anti-social behavior.  Thus under liberalism-nihilism “tolerance is extended,” by self-denominating representatives of the people, “to the destructive forces, not demanded by them.”  Of course, the “destructive forces” do not refuse the extension.  On historical analogy, Spengler refers to this as “the Gracchan method.”  When once, as had already happened in Europe in Spengler’s time, “the concept of the proletariat [had] been accepted by the middle classes,” then the formula for cultural suicide had at last all of its ingredients in place.  “I am aware,” writes Spengler, “that most people will refuse with horror to admit that this irrevocable crashing of everything that centuries have built up was intentional, the result of deliberate working to that end… But it is so.”

[. . .]

IV. Like another, later analyst of modernity in its agony, Eric Voegelin, Spengler sees at the root of Liberalism-Nihilism the perversion of a religious idea.  “All Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More’s Utopia, the Sun-State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther’s disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte’s state-socialism… Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”  The materialism – which is again a type of nihilism – of Marxism and socialism never contradicts the case for liberalism-nihilism as a perversion of Gospel themes.  “As soon as one mixes up the concepts of poverty, hunger, distress, work, and wages (with the moral undertone of rich and poor, right and wrong) and is led thereby to join in the social and economic demands of the proletarian sort – that is, money demands – one is a materialist.”  But, this being Spengler’s point, one may have the belief-attitude with respect to one’s materialist doctrines that the fanatic of God has for his mental idol, with the concomitant fierceness and ruthlessness.  The end of real Christianity is “renunciation.”  With reference to the sentence of Adam, writes Spengler, the Gospel tells men, “do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics.”

In a precise description of the modern, immigration-friendly, general-welfare state, Spengler remarks that “for proletarian election propaganda,” an opposite principle to the Gospel one is required: “The materialist prefers to eat the bread that others have earned in the sweat of their face.”  When the Gracchan rabble dominates from below so that the demagogues might manipulate from above, then it will come to pass that “the parasitic egoism of inferior minds, who regard the economic life of other people, and that of the whole, as an object from which to squeeze with the least possible exertion the greatest possible enjoyment” will seek its bestial end in “panem et circenses.” Once the majority descends to vulgar consumption through extortion – and through a mere pretence of work under the welfare-umbrella of “the political wage” – then the society has doomed itself.  It can only lurch in the direction of its inevitable demise.  Even the keen-eyed will not want to confront reality.  They will, as Spengler writes, “refuse in horror” to believe what they see.  Spengler might have been thinking about a letter from his correspondent Roderich Schlubach dated 9 October 1931.  Schlubach writes: “I frankly admit that much of what you prophesied [in The Decline] has taken place.  The decline of the West seems to be at hand, and still I do not believe in an end of the world, only in an entire change in our circumstances.”

That is “The White World-Revolution” – the triumph of rabble-envy, the destruction of form, childlessness, and the childishness of mass entertainments.  Indeed, “an entire change in our circumstances,” as Schlubach says, not grasping that his words mean the opposite of what he intends.  What of “The Coloured World-Revolution”?  Keyserling had admonished, in the concluding chapter of Europe, that Europe in its chafing unity would come under threat from the nearby non-European world.  In Spengler’s historical theory, the threat of external barbarism always coincides with the passage of the “Culture” into its deliquescent rabble-stage – the stage that the Decline-author ironically calls “Civilization.”  Earlier, in the robustness of the culture-stage, the ascendant people inevitably imposes itself on neighboring and foreign peoples whose levels of social complexity and technical sophistication are lower and who cannot effectively resist encroachment.  Spengler emphasizes that it cannot be otherwise.  The people of the less-developed society gradually grow conscious of a difference, which the emergent demagogue-class of the more-developed society in its liberal paroxysm swiftly encourages them to see as an injustice.

Thus, Spengler asserts, “the White Revolution since 1770 has been preparing the soil for the Coloured one.”  The process has followed this course:

The literature of the English liberals like Mill and Spencer… supplied the “world outlook” to the higher schools of India.  And thence the way to Marx was easy for the young reformers themselves to find.  Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Chinese Revolution, found it in America.  And out of it all there arose a revolutionary literature of which the Radicalism puts that of Marx and Borodin to shame. . . . Read the whole article.