Oswald Spengler

Can the West and its peoples be saved? And what will this take–particularly if we are concerned with a long-term solution rather than a last ditch “stop gap?” Can a new High Culture of the West arise to secure the existence of the peoples of the West for an extended time frame? What characteristics should such a new culture have?

I will assume the reader is familiar with the civilizational model of Oswald Spengler, a model essentially adopted by Francis Parker Yockey in his various works on the West and its future possibilities. With a Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter of a High Culture, “Winter” is the phase of oncoming oblivion. It is clear, at least to me (and it seems that Michael O’Meara agrees with this assessment), that we are in the “Winter” of our current modern Western (i.e., “Faustian”) High Culture. And, immersed within this decay, bereft of an overriding organizing principle to provide a spiritual structure for its continued existence, the white race is dying, failing to reproduce, being displaced by aliens, and offering an inadequate level of resistance to the death of the West.

In actual physical weather/climate seasons, spring follows winter. Can the same hold true for particular peoples and their High Cultures? If civilizational (re)birth will lead to long-term racial survival, should we at least consider the possibilities? Of course, one cannot predict with full accuracy if a civilizational (re)birth will take place, much less the precise form such an event would take. Further, one cannot pre-plan and create a High Culture in the manner of a general formulating a strategy and then leading troops into battle. A High Culture must develop along its own lines, according to factors not entirely within (conscious) human control. However, one can, and should, examine the evidence, consider the possibilities, and to the extent it is possible, encourage those trends leading to a civilizational (re)birth. Further, these trends could, and should, be guided, to the extent possible, in directions that would be most fruitful and most consistent with the nature of our people.

A starting point is to consider our present High Culture, the dying remnants of which we see around us. The so-called “Western” or “Faustian” civilization has been described by Spengler and is summarized thus (emphasis added):

. . . the modern Westerners being Faustian. According to its theories, we are now living in the winter time of the Faustian civilization. His description of the Faustian civilization is one where the populace constantly strives for the unattainable—making Western Man a proud but tragic figure, for while he strives and creates he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.

Here we see two defining characteristics of the “Faustian” civilization of the modern (i.e., post-Classical) West: first, a focus on infinity and the unknown, and second, that the striving toward that focus will always be unsuccessful; the objectives of Western Man are always “unattainable.” The second point, and its implications, will be further discussed below. For now, let us accept the Spenglerian model and also accept that we are in the Winter of the Faustian culture. Now, the Spenglerian school, steeped in “stoic acceptance” (“pessimism”) will advise us to accept, and make the most of, our circumstances. The era in which we live in is what it is, and, like a Roman soldier on guard under erupting Vesuvius, we must stand at our post until the end, until all is enveloped in inescapable decay (civilizational entropy, if you will).

But if race and culture are linked, the dissipation of the culture means the destruction of the race. Or does it? The Faustian is not the first High Culture of Europe; it was preceded by the Classical. Spengler and his follower Yockey break with previous cultural interpretations to stress the sharp discontinuity between Classical and Faustian. These are perceived as being two distinct High Cultures, as different from each other as each is to, say, the Egyptian or the Magian.

Therefore, from the same article on Spengler’s work, we read (emphasis added):

Spengler borrows frequently from mathematical philosophy. He holds that the mathematics and art of a civilization reveal its world-view. He notes that in Greek classical mathematics that there are only integers and no real concepts of limits or infinity. Therefore, without a concept of the infinite, all events of the distant past were viewed as equally distant, thus Alexander the Great had no problem declaring himself a descendant of a god. On the other hand, the western world—which has concepts of the zero, the infinite, and the limit—has a historical world-view which places a high amount of importance on exact dates.

Similarly, Revilo Oliver writes (emphasis added):

Spengler identifies as two entirely separate and discrete civilizations the Classical (“Apollonian”), c. 1100 B.C.-A.D. 300, and the Western (“Faustian”), c. A.D. 900-2200. These are the two for which we have the fullest information, and between them Spengler establishes some of his most brilliant synchronisms (e.g., Alexander the Great corresponds to Napoleon). Even a century ago, this dichotomy would have seemed almost mad, for everyone knew and took for granted that whatever might be true of alien cultures, our own was a continuation, or, at least, revival of the Classical. Spengler’s denial of that continuity was the most radical and startling aspect of his historical synthesis, but so great has been his overshadowing influence that it has been accepted by a majority of the many subsequent writers on the philosophy of history, of whom we may mention here only Toynbee, Raven, Bagby, and Brown. (20) The Classical, we are told, was a civilization like the Egyptian, now dead and gone and with no organic connection with our own. . . . Spengler (whom Brown especially follows in this respect) supports his drastic dichotomy by impressively contrasting Graeco-Roman mathematics and technology with our own; from that contrast he deduces differences in the perception of space and time, exhibited particularly in music, and reaches the conclusion that the Classical Weltanschauung was essentially static, desiring and recognizing only a strictly delimited and familiar world, whereas ours is dynamic and exhibits a passionate yearning for the infinite and the unknown. One can advance various objections to the generalizations I have so curtly and inadequately summarized (e.g., is the difference in outlook really greater than that between the “classical” literature of Eighteenth-Century Europe and the Romanticism of the following era?), but the crucial point is whether the differences, which belong to the order that we must call spiritual for want of a better term, (21) are fundamental or epiphenomenal.

I have tended toward the “epiphenomenal” explanation – but in any case, one can agree with Oliver’s overarching conclusion in his various works: either the Classical and Faustian are different yet connected phases of the same Civilization, or, even if completely distinct, Western Man is capable of producing multiple High Cultures. Either way, one can conclude two things: (1) a successor to the Faustian High Culture is possible and has a precedent, and (2) this successor will be intimately connected in important ways to its predecessor (s) (even if Spengler and Yockey would deny this could be possible).

Therefore, either the Classical and Faustian are indeed linked (by a generalized common gene pool, “racial soul,” and Western outlook) or, if they are indeed distinct, they are not completely unconnected, as they derive from a common wellspring or foundation (again, the generalized gene pool, “racial soul,” and Western mindset of greater individualism and empiricism compared to other peoples and cultures). Not only are the Classical and the Faustian in some sense linked but, contrary to Spengler and Yockey–and, indeed, a blasphemy of the Spenglerian school that rejects a linear history–there is a sense of progression, in that the worldview of the Faustian is broader than that of the Classical; indeed, this greater breadth of vision is a defining characteristic of the Faustian. This breadth being manifested in such phenomena as high level technics, and a mass knowledge base of science, history, philosophy and morality-ethics, the foundation is therefore laid for a new High Culture of a vision even broader than that of the Faustian. A Spenglerian would argue that any new High Culture of the West, even if possible (and they may deny this possibility), would be completely disconnected to the “Faustian” aspects of the former, (i.e., present) Western Faustian High Culture. However, I argue that, having being awakened to the universe at large, it is unlikely that the white man would create a new High Culture that would be insular, rejecting the infinite. To the (albeit limited) extent we can predict, or even influence, the development of a new High Culture, a potential direction is one that is not purely “Faustian”–in the sense of striving for the unattainable. Instead, one can project a future High Culture that is based upon the ultimate and successful (eventual) achievement of what was previously considered to be “unattainable.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

I would argue that the Christian foundation of the Faustian High Culture is responsible for the fact that the ultimate goals that Western man strives toward end up being “unattainable” – and secretly known by him to be “unattainable.” The Christian mindset places inherent limits within the mind of Western man, so he is doomed to ultimately fail even if full success is theoretically possible (eventually). After all, the focus of Christianity is God and not Man, it is “salvation” and not overcoming, and it is a focus on “the next world” and not this, our real world. For man to achieve godhood–or to even have that as a goal–is a form of “blasphemy,” it is something that cannot be countenanced. Therefore, ultimate failure must occur, for attainment of the “Faustian” goal (attainment itself would then make the event no longer be truly “Faustian”) is simply not possible in a High Culture based upon Christianity. The full development of Western man has been restrained by an alien religion that has placed shackles on his mind and his soul. Nietzsche well recognized the constraints imposed by (Judeo-) Christianity; in his The Antichrist we find (emphasis added):

Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible–of God’s mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, ”God” faces only one great danger.–

The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He creates man–man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining–he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.–So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end–and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.–”Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”–every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”–every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.–What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike–it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!–Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.–”Thou shalt not know”–the rest follows from that.–God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought–and all thoughts are bad thoughts!–Man must not think.–And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness–nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think. . . Nevertheless–how terrible!–, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods–what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (–the priests have always had need of war….). War–among other things, a great disturber of science !–Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.–So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific–there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”

Indeed. If “the meek shall inherit the Earth” there is no place for any human striving for the infinite that is successful, and which places Man on the same plane as God. If meekness, humility, the “humble lamb of God” is the foundational archetype of a culture, then of course infinity and the unknown will always be unattainable. “Thou shalt not know”: it is amazing how much we have achieved despite that, and these remarkable Western achievements coming have occurred–not by coincidence–primarily during the Autumn and Winter periods of the Faustian High Culture. Only when the constraints imposed by the Christian-defined culture have to a large extent dissipated has the a priori acceptance of failure been weakened. The problem is that with a decaying, dying High Culture, this (partial) emancipation from the cult of humility will go for naught. Only a new High Culture built upon the fundamental concept of human transcendence, and on the attainment of infinity/the unknown, will allow Western Man to fulfill his density. The crumbling ruins of the previous High Culture can serve as building blocks for the future, certainly, they can provide inspiration, certainly, and be a source of pride, certainly. But we need to look toward the Future, and not stand guard over a dying, or dead, Past, analogous to Spengler’s Roman soldier.

While I mean no disrespect to anyone’s beliefs, be they Christian or Pagan, I do not see a revival of ancient pagan gods as a forward-thinking improvement over the decay of Faustianism. Replacing Jesus with Thor, in my mind, simply replaces one fantasy-crutch with another. White men should no longer require any exogenous gods, whether new or old; we instead should strive toward godhood for our race. It is time for the white man to grow up and put away the fantasies of childhood, fantasies of gods and external intelligent forces controlling a destiny that should be ours, and ours alone, to mold. The motto of the Classical World was “Know Thyself,” while that of the Faustian Age was a combination of “Thou Shalt Not Know” with “Thou Shalt Try to Know and Thou Shalt Fail.” I propose that the new High Culture of the West have the motto: “Thou Shalt Know and Thou Shalt Overcome.” This will usher in an era in which Western Man unlocks his potential by unlocking the shackles imposed by an assumed inferiority to imaginary gods.

Francis Parker Yockey

The following quote from Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe summarizes the palingenetic objective that we could, if we so wished, strive for:

Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods.

In other words, no imaginary gods. It is Man that will become “God.” In the book The Portable Nietzsche, editor Walter Kaufmann interprets Nietzsche’s “overman” thus:

what is called for is not a super-brute but a human being who has created for himself that unique position in the cosmos that the Bible considered his birthright.

That was going well until that last part – “The Bible.” No, Mr. Kaufman, the Bible does not consider the Overman to be the ultimate birthright of humanity but instead the “last man” as the “prize” instead. It is we who must choose what our “birthright” is, not the wild fantasies of “the Bible.” However, that being so, the rest of the description is sound, if we consider that it is to be applied to the race as a whole and not only to selected individuals within the race. No more “proud, tragic” failure in “striving for the unattainable” in the “Faustian” culture – instead the Overman Culture will be characterized by the proud successful attainment of the infinite. That is what a hopeful individual can project as the new High Culture of the West, with links to the Classical and the Faustian, but surpassing both in the aim and objective of the human spirit. That is what Western Destiny can and should be.

What can we do to get things on the right track?

Although the Jewish author Isaac Asimov may not be popular among many white gentile racial nationalists, his Foundation series can provide a useful analogy here. “The Foundation” was meant to jumpstart a new civilization after the collapse of the “Galactic Empire,” so that the post-collapse “era of barbarism” would be a mere thousand years, instead of 30,000. Facing as we do the collapse of the West through the Winter of the Faustian age, it may be prudent to lay the seeds of a new emergent white, Western civilization for the long term, as we also fight the more short-term and medium-term battles to preserve the white race and save as much of Western Faustian civilization as possible. Without these shorter range objectives, the long term civilizational (re)birth will not be possible. Conversely, without a civilizational (re)birth, long-term white preservationism would be questionable.

So, there are two things that need to be going on here. First is the ongoing struggle for white racial preservationism and to save as much of the Faustian culture as possible, to serve as a knowledge base and building blocks for the new High Culture of the West. Second, an effort must be initiated to begin the process of laying the groundwork for this new High Culture. As indicated above, of course a High Culture is an organic phenomenon that cannot be created in a pre-planned form and artificially imposed on a people. However, it is possible to plant the seeds and to have some choice as to which seeds are planted. And then, we can nurture the seedling as it grows, and as it develops according to its own inherent character. This we can do and this we must do.

This is a serious matter requiring forward-thinking strategy of an extreme visionary character, not something that can be productively “discussed” on “blog threads” or other (typically inane) public forums. It is not something that can occur overnight. This is a long-term, multi-generational project that needs to be undertaken by dedicated individuals who wish to lay the foundation of something great and noble for posterity. This will not be not any “quick fix” whose results may be seen in a decade or two; instead, this is a project that has the potential to influence the course of human history and it must be conducted on that higher level.

Therefore, this essay is simply a call for action and an initial and cursory consideration of the possibilities. If such a project is ever initiated, it should not, and must not, devolve into the mundane “movement” minutiae that many obsess over, nor can it be linked to the more serious, yet short-term, necessary “stop-gap” activism required to save our people and culture today. This is another matter, on another level, entirely.

Many are called; few are chosen. The Future Awaits.

To the modernist, this trend must appear very strange. American women are liberated from their homes, unburdened by the biological curse of motherhood, and treated by society like tiny castrated men. They’ve achieved the feminist dream! For some reason, a growing number of White American women aren’t even grateful for the cubicle that they’ve worked so hard for the opportunity to dwell in. They spend their lunches in the corporate break room, eating corporate food, in their corporate pantsuits, reading fantasy novels about being barefoot and pregnant in a country kitchen.

Early last year, I was reading National Geographic’s excellent article on the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church and it suddenly clicked for me. I was peering into America’s future . . . at a future stage of the same historical process. Every White Advocate ought to take the time to read this article and envision a restoration of Tradition here in America. Picture the return of righteous indigenous authority. How can we spearhead or even trigger it? How can we lead by example?

Every few months, somebody in the White Advocacy movement writes an article lamenting the fact that our movement ought to have more ladies. Our atheists and materialists will keep writing these because they’re fundamentally incapable of offering what women want: Tradition. When I go to church, I’m surrounded by beautiful young women, women who outnumber the men. In fact, women even outnumber men at our monthly White Advocacy meetings. I believe that it’s due to our chapter’s unique emphasis on fostering a family-friendly environment, embracing tradition, and focusing on local community concerns.

People who see things through modern eyes often mistakenly perceive tradition as being oppressive toward women when it’s anything but. For example, the institution of marriage has always been an imposition on men on behalf of women, with traditional women as union members and libertine women serving as “scabs” undermining the collective bargaining power. Ironically, the true enemies of female empowerment are the sluts. At least prostitutes are compensated for their treason!

Tradition is the weapon of choice of the tiny elderly women — the matriarchs:

I recognize her kind from my years in the Soviet Union. There were always women like her in the few churches that were open in those days, women who scrubbed the floors, tended the candlestands, and stood through all the services when Soviet disapproval had frightened off everyone else. In a sense, they nursed the church through its long incarceration. They were the custodians of propriety and custom: Stand like this! Face the altar! Cover your head! Cross yourself! They were insufferable, but the church owes them a great debt. So I do what other Russians do when confronted by these vigilantes: I meekly bow and put away my camera.

One message this excellent article drives home is how some people under even the most hostile and oppressive alien regimes are quietly keeping the flames of religion, tradition, nationalism, and family alive.

This is a tremendous inspiration for me.

Travel back in time and tell a Russian dissident in the eighties that his omnipotent oppressors would disappear altogether within a few years; that the Russian national spirit would rise like a phoenix from the ruins of the once-invincible Jewish oligarchy. Would he believe you? Would you believe me if I told you that there are millions of potential matriarchs hiding in plain sight in corporate break rooms across America, patiently awaiting the opportunity to restore our White American nation and its communities to their former glory?

Occidental Dissent, February 12, 2010

[. . .]

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.

is section no. 43 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

43. Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.

Revilo Oliver in 1938

Conceived before the First World War is Oswald Spengler’s magisterial work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1918). Read in this country chiefly in the brilliantly faithful translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of the West (New York, two volumes, 1926-28), Spengler’s morphology of history was the great intellectual achievement of our century. Whatever our opinion of his methods or conclusions, we cannot deny that he was the Copernicus of historionomy. All subsequent writings on the philosophy of history may fairly be described as criticism of the Decline of the West.

Spengler, having formulated a universal history, undertook an analysis of the forces operating in the immediately contemporary world. This he set forth in a masterly work, Die Jahre der Entscheidung, of which only the first volume could be published in Germany (Munich, 1933) and translated into English (The Hour of Decision, New York, 1934). One had only to read this brilliant work, with its lucid analysis of forces that even acute observers did not perceive until 25 or 30 years later, and with its prevision that subsequent events have now shown to have been absolutely correct, to recognize that its author was one of the great political and philosophical minds of the West. One should remember, however, that the amazing accuracy of his analysis of the contemporary situation does not necessarily prove the validity of his historical morphology.

The publication of Spengler’s first volume in 1918 released a spate of controversy that continues to the present day. Manfred Schroeter in Der Streit um Spengler (Munich, 1922) was able to give a précis of the critiques that had appeared in a little more than three years; today, a mere bibliography, if reasonably complete, would take years to compile and would probably run to eight hundred or a thousand printed pages.

Spengler naturally stirred up swarms of nit-wits, who were particularly incensed by his immoral and preposterous suggestion that there could be another war in Europe, when everybody knew that there just couldn’t be anything but World Peace after 1918, ’cause Santa had just brought a nice, new, shiny “League of Nations.” Such “liberal” chatterboxes are always making a noise, but no one with the slightest knowledge of human history pays any attention to them, except as symptoms.

Unfortunately, much more intelligent criticism of Spengler was motivated by emotional dissatisfaction with his conclusions. In an article in Antiquity for 1927, the learned R. G. Collingwood of Oxford went so far as to claim that Spengler’s two volumes had not given him “a single genuinely new idea,” and that he had “long ago carried out for himself” — and, of course, rejected — even Spengler’s detailed analyses of individual cultures. As a cursory glance at Spengler’s work will suffice to show, that assertion is less plausible than a claim to know everything contained in the Twelfth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Collingwood, the author of the Speculum Mentis and other philosophical works, must have been bedeviled with emotional resentments so strong that he could not see how conceited, arrogant, and improbable his vaunt would seem to most readers.

It is now a truism that Spengler’s “pessimism” and “fatalism” was an unbearable shock to minds nurtured in the nineteenth-century illusion that everything would get better and better forever and ever. Spengler’s cyclic interpretation of history stated that a civilization was an organism having a definite and fixed life-span and moving from infancy to senescence and death by an internal necessity comparable to the biological necessity that decrees the development of the human organism from infantile imbecility to senile decrepitude. Napoleon, for example, was the counterpart of Alexander in the ancient world.

Oswald Spengler

We were now, therefore, in a phase of civilizational life in which constitutional forms are supplanted by the prestige of individuals. By 2000, we shall be “contemporary” with the Rome of Sulla, the Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and China at the time when the “Contending States” were welded into an empire. That means that we face an age of world wars and what is worse, civil wars and proscriptions, and that around 2060 the West (if not destroyed by its alien enemies) will be united under the personal rule of a Caesar or Augustus. That is not a pleasant prospect.

Greatness or Optimism

The only question before us, however, is whether Spengler is correct in his analysis. Rational men will regard as irrelevant the fact that his conclusions are not charming. If a physician informs you that you have symptoms of arteriosclerosis, he may or may not be right in his diagnosis, but it is absolutely certain that you cannot rejuvenate yourself by slapping his face.

Every detached observer of our times, I think, will agree that Spengler’s “pessimism” aroused emotions that precluded rational consideration. I am inclined to believe that the moral level of his thinking was a greater obstacle. His “fatalism” was not the comforting kind that permits men to throw up their hands and eschew responsibilities. Consider, for example, the concluding lines of his Man and Technics (New York, 1932):

Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

Now, whether or not the stern prognostication that lies back of that conclusion is correct, no man fit to live in the present can read those lines without feeling his heart lifted by the great ethos of a noble culture — the spiritual strength of the West that can know tragedy and be unafraid. And simultaneously, that pronouncement will affright to hysteria the epicene homunculi among us, the puling cowards who hope only to scuttle about safely in the darkness and to batten on the decay of a culture infinitely beyond their comprehension.

That contrast is in itself a very significant datum for an estimate of the present condition of our civilization …

Three Points of Criticism

Criticism of Spengler, therefore, if it is not to seem mere quibbling about details, must deal with major premises. Now, so far as I can see, Spengler’s thesis can be challenged at three really fundamental points, namely: (1) Spengler regards each civilization as a closed and isolated entity animated by a dominant idea, or Weltanschauung, that is its “soul.” Why should ideas, or concepts, the impalpable creations of the human mind, undergo an organic evolution as though they were living protoplasm, which, as a material substance, is understandably subject to chemical change and hence biological laws? This logical objection is not conclusive: Men may observe the tides, for example, and even predict them, without being able to explain what causes them. But when we must deduce historical laws from the four of five civilizations of which we have some fairly accurate knowledge, we do not have enough repetitions of a phenomenon to calculate its periodicity with assurance, if we do not know why it happens.

(2) A far graver difficulty arises from the historical fact that we have already mentioned. For five centuries, at least, the men of the West regarded modern civilization as a revival or prolongation of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Spengler, as the very basis of his hypothesis, regards the Classical world as a civilization distinct from, and alien to, our own — a civilization that, like the Egyptian, lived, died, and is now gone. It was dominated by an entirely different Weltanschauung, and consequently the educated men of Europe and America, who for five centuries believed in continuity, were merely suffering from an illusion or hallucination.

Even if we grant that, however, we are still confronted by a unique historical phenomenon. The Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, and Arabian (“Magian”), civilizations are all regarded by Spengler (and other proponents of an organic structure of culture) as single and unrelated organisms: Each came into being without deriving its concepts from another civilization (or, alternatively, seeing its own concepts in the records of an earlier civilization), and each died leaving no offspring (or, alternatively, no subsequent civilization thought to see in them its own concepts). There is simply no parallel or precedent for the relationship (real or imaginary) which links Graeco-Roman culture to our own.

Since Spengler wrote, a great historical discovery has further complicated the question. We now know that the Mycenaean peoples were Greeks, and it is virtually certain that the essentials of their culture survived the disintegration caused by the Dorian invasion, and were the basis of later Greek culture. (For a good summary, see Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, London, 1961). We therefore have a sequence that is, so far as we know, unique:

Mycenaean>Dark Ages>Graeco-Roman>Dark Ages>Modern. If this is one civilization, it has had a creative life-span far longer than that of any other that has thus far appeared in the world. If it is more than one, the interrelations form an exception to Spengler’s general law, and suggest the possibility that a civilization, if it dies by some kind of quasi-biological process, may in some cases have a quasi-biological power of reproduction.

The exception becomes even more remarkable if we, unlike Spengler, regard as fundamentally important the concept of self-government, which may have been present even in Mycenaean times (see L. R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, cited above, p. 97). Democracies and constitutional republics are found only in the Graeco-Roman world and our own; such institutions seem to have been incomprehensible to other cultures.

(3) For all practical purposes, Spengler ignores hereditary and racial differences. He even uses the word “race” to represent a qualitative difference between members of what we should call the same race, and he denies that that difference is to any significant extent caused by heredity. He regards biological races as plastic and mutable, even in their physical characteristics, under the influence of geographical factors (including the soil, which is said to affect the physical organism through food) and of what Spengler terms “a mysterious cosmic force” that has nothing to do with biology. The only real unity is cultural, that is, the fundamental ideas and beliefs shared by the peoples who form a civilization. Thus Spengler, who makes those ideas subject to quasi-biological growth and decay, oddly rejects as insignificant the findings of biological science concerning living organisms.

It is true, of course, that man is in part a spiritual being. Of that, persons who have a religious faith need no assurance. Others, unless they are determined blindly to deny the evidence before us, must admit the existence of phenomena of the kind described by Franz E. Winkler, M.D., in Man: The Bridge Between Two Worlds (New York, Harper, 1960), and, of course, by many other writers. And every historian knows that no one of the higher cultures could conceivably have come into being, if human beings are merely animals.

But it is also true that the science of genetics, founded by Father Mendel only a century ago and almost totally neglected down to the early years of the Twentieth Century, has ascertained biological laws that can be denied only by denying the reality of the physical world. Every educated person knows that the color of a man’s eyes, the shape of the lobes of his ears, and every one of his other physiological characteristics is determined by hereditary factors. It is virtually certain that intellectual capacity is likewise produced by inheritance, and there is a fair amount of evidence that indicated that even moral capacities are likewise innate.

Man’s power of intervention in the development of inherited qualities appears to be entirely negative, thus affording another melancholy proof that human ingenuity can easily destroy what it can never create. Any fool with a knife can in three minutes make the most beautiful woman forever hideous, and one of our “mental health experts,” even without using a knife, can as quickly and permanently destroy the finest intellect. And it appears that less drastic interventions, through education and other control of environment, may temporarily or even permanently pervert and deform, but are powerless to create capacities that an individual did not inherit from near or more remote ancestors.

The facts are beyond question, although the Secret Police in Soviet Russia and “liberal” spitting-squads in the United States have largely succeeded in keeping these facts from the general public in the areas they control. But no amount of terrorism can alter the laws of nature. For a readable exposition of genetics, see Garrett Hardin’s Nature and Man’s Fate (New York, Rinehart, 1959), which is subject only to the reservation that the laws of genetics, like the laws of chemistry, are verified by observation every day, whereas the doctrine of biological evolution is necessarily an hypothesis that cannot be verified by experiment.

The Race Factor

It is also beyond question that the races of mankind differ greatly in physical appearance, in susceptibility to specific diseases, and in average intellectual capacity. There are indications that they differ also in nervous organization, and possibly, in moral instincts. It would be a miracle if that were not so, for, as is well known, the three primary races were distinct and separate at the time that intelligent men first appeared on this planet, and have so remained ever since. The differences are so pronounced and stable that the proponents of biological evolution are finding it more and more necessary to postulate that the differences go back to species that preceded the appearance of the homo sapiens. (See the new and revised edition of Dr. Carleton S. Coon’s The Story of Man, New York, Knopf, 1962.)

That such differences exist is doubtless deplorable. It is certainly deplorable that all men must die, and there are persons who think it deplorable that there are differences, both anatomical and spiritual, between men and women. However, no amount of concerted lying by “liberals,” and no amount of decreeing by the Warren [Supreme Court] Gang, will in the least change the laws of nature.

Now there is a great deal that we do not know about genetics, both individual and racial, and these uncertainties permit widely differing estimates of the relative importance of biologically determined factors and cultural concepts in the development of a civilization. Our only point here is that it is highly improbable that biological factors have no influence at all on the origin and course of civilizations. And to the extent that they do have an influence, Spengler’s theory is defective and probably misleading.

Profound Insights

One could add a few minor points to the three objections stated above, but these will suffice to show that the Spenglerian historionomy cannot be accepted as a certainty. It is, however, a great philosophical formulation that poses questions of the utmost importance and deepens our perception of historical causality. No student of history needed Spengler to tell him that a decline of religious faith necessarily weakens the moral bonds that make civilized society possible. But Spengler’s showing that such a decline seems to have occurred at a definite point in the development of a number of fundamentally different civilizations with, of course, radically different religions provides us with data that we must take into account when we try to ascertain the true causes of the decline. And his further observation that the decline was eventually followed by a sweeping revival of religious belief is equally significant.

However wrong he may have been about some things, Spengler has given us profound insights into the nature of our own culture. But for him, we might have gone on believing that our great technology was merely a matter of economics — of trying to make more things more cheaply. But he has shown us, I think, that our technology has a deeper significance — that for us, the men of Western civilization, it answers a certain spiritual need inherent in us, and that we derive from its triumphs as satisfaction analogous to that which is derived from great music or great art.

And Spengler, above all, has forced us to inquire into the nature of civilization and to ask ourselves by what means — if any — we can repair and preserve the long and narrow dikes that alone protect us from the vast and turbulent ocean of eternal barbarism. For that, we must always honor him.

Journal of Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (March-April 1998), 10-13.

The Dark Side of the Sun

Since World War II, the West has forgotten the Shadow soul of Japan, as Jung would have termed it, the collective impulses that have been repressed by ‘Occupation Law’ and the imposition of democracy. The Japanese are seen stereotypically as being overly polite and smiling business executives and camera snapping tourists. The emphasis has been on the soft counterpart of the Japanese psyche, on the “chrysanthemum” (the arts) as Mishima puts it, and the repression of the “sword” (the martial tradition). The American anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote of the duality of the Japanese using this symbolism in her The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, to which Mishima referred approvingly. He insisted that Japan return to a balance of the arts and the martial spirit, to what, again referring to Jung, would be called individuation, in allowing the repressed Shadow archetype to reassert itself. Mishima was himself that synthesis of the scholar and the warrior, who rejected pure intellectualism and theory in favor of action.

The Way of the Samurai

Mishima’s aesthetic was the beauty of the violent death, the death of one in his prime, an ideal common in classical Japanese literature. As a sickly youngster, Mishima’s ideal of the heroic death had already taken hold: “A sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling . . .  the ways they would die.”

He was determined to overcome his physical weaknesses. There is much of the Nietzschean ‘Overman’ about him, of self-overcoming personal and social restraints to express his own heroic individuality. His motto was: “Be Strong.” (He had read Nietzsche during the war.)

World War II had a lasting impact on Mishima. Along with his fellow students, he felt that conscription and certain death waited. He became chairman of the college literary club, and his patriotic poems were published in the student magazine. He also co-founded his own journal and began to read the Japanese classics. He associated with a literary group, Bungei Bunka that believed war to be holy. The Japanese Romanticists were another literary group avowing the same principles with which Mishima was in contact. Mishima barely passed the medical examination for military training. He was drafted into an aircraft factory and several other such jobs.

In 1944, he had already had his first book, Hanazakan no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom) published, a considerable feat in the final year of the war, which brought him instant recognition.

The Will to Health

In 1952, Mishima, established as a literary figure, traveled to the USA. Sitting in the sun in transit aboard ship, something he had been unable to do in his youth because of his weak lungs, Mishima resolved to match the development of his physique with his intellect.

His interest in the Hellenic classics took him to Greece. He wrote that, “In Greece there had been however an equilibrium between the physical body and intelligence, soma and sophia . . . ” He discovered a “Will towards Health,” an adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” and he was to become almost as noted as a body builder as he was a writer. In 1966 Mishima wrote; “The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior.”

His ethos was that of the Samurai Bunburyodo-ihe: the way of literature (Bun) and the Sword (Bu), which he sought to cultivate in equal measure, a blend of “art and action.” “But my heart’s yearning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.”

He expressed the Samurai ethos: “To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each moment upon, inevitable death, . . . the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me [World War II] had also become possible. I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting man.” In 1966, he applied for permission to train at the army camps.

In the spirit of Bunburyodo, Mishima’s novels plotted the course of his life. In 1967, Runaway Horses had as its hero a right-wing terrorist who commits hara-kiri after stabbing to death a businessman.

Already in 1960 Mishima had written his short story Patriotism, in honour of the 1936 Ni ni Roku rebellion of army officers of the Kodo-ha faction who wished to strike at the Soviet Union in opposition to the rival Tosei-ha, who aimed to strike at Britain and other colonial powers. The Kodo-ha officers had mobilized 1,400 men and taken Tokyo. However, Emperor Hirohito ordered them to surrender.

The incident impressed itself on Mishima. In Patriotism the hero, a young officer, commits Hara-kiri, of which Mishima states: “It would he difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment.”

Mishima was again to write of the incident in his play Toka no Kiku and in his 1966 novel The Voices of the Heroic Dead. Here he criticizes the Emperor for betraying the Kodo-ha officers and for renouncing his divinity after the war as a betrayal of the war dead. Mishima combined these three works on the rebellion into a single volume called the Ni Ni Roku trilogy.

Mishima comments on the Trilogy and the rebellion:

Surely some God died when the Ni Ni Roku incident failed. I was only eleven at the time and felt little of it. But when the war ended, when I was twenty, a most sensitive age, I felt something of the terrible cruelty of the death of that God . . .  the positive picture was my boyhood impression of the heroism of the rebel officers. Their purity, bravery, youth and death qualified them as mythical heroes; and their failures and deaths made them true heroes in this world . . . .

In early 1966, Mishima systemised his thoughts in an eighty-page essay entitled Eirei no Koe (The Voices of the Heroic Dead), after which he decided to create the Tatenokai (Shield Society). In this work he asks, “why did the Emperor have to become a human being.”

In an interview with a Japanese magazine that year, he upheld the imperial system as the only type suitable for Japan. All the moral confusion of the post-war era, he states, stems from the Emperor’s renunciation of his divine status. The move away from feudalism to capitalism and consequent industrialisation in the modern state causes relationships to be disrupted between individuals. Real love between a couple requires a third focus, the apex of a triangle embodied in the divinity of the Emperor.

The Tatenokai

The following year Mishima created his own militia, writing shortly before this of reviving the “soul of the Samurai within myself .” Permission was granted by the army for Mishima to use their training camps for the mostly student followers he recruited from several right-wing university societies.

At the office of a right-wing student journal, a dozen people gathered. Mishima wrote on a piece of paper: “We hereby swear to be the foundation of Kokoku Nippon [Imperial Japan].” He cut a finger, and everyone else followed, letting the blood fill to the brim of a cup. Each signed the paper with their blood and drank from the cup. The Tatenokai was born.

The aims of the society were:
(i) Communism is incompatible with Japanese tradition, culture, and history and runs counter to the Emperor system;
(ii) the Emperor is the sole symbol of our historical and cultural community and racial identity; and
(iii) the use of violence is justifiable in view of the threat posed by communism.

The emblem that Mishima designed for the society comprised two ancient Japanese helmets in red against a white silk background. The militia was designed to be a “stand by the army,” described by Mishima as “the world’s least armed, most spiritual army.”

By this time, Mishima felt that his calling as a novelist was completed. It must have seemed the right time to die. He had been awarded the Shinchosha Literary Prize in 1954 for The Sound of Waves and the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1957 for The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. His novels Spring Snow and Runaway Horses had sold well in 1969, but Mishima started to feel the antagonism of the Left-wing dominated literary elite and his Sea of Fertility [a series of four books encompassing Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel] received the silent treatment. His sole defender at this time was Yasunari Kawabata, who had received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, Mishima missing out because the Nobel Prize committee assumed he could wait awhile longer in favor of his mentor. Kawabata considered Mishima’s literary talent as exceptional.

Mishima wrote of the intellectuals as:

The strongest enemy within the nation. It is astonishing how little the character of modern intellectuals in Japan has changed, i.e., their cowardice, sneering, ‘objectivity.’ rootlessness, dishonesty, flunkeyism, mock gestures of resistance, self-importance, inactivity, talkativeness, and readiness to eat their words.

The Hagakure

Mishima’s destiny was shaped by the Samurai code expounded in a book that he had kept with him since the war. This was the Hagakure, the best-known line of which is:

I have discovered that the way of the Samurai is death.

The Hagakure was the work of the seventeenth-century Samurai Jocho Yamamoto, who as a priest was to dictate his teachings to his student Tashiro. The Hagakure became the moral code taught to the Samurai, but did not become available to the general public until the latter half of the nineteenth century. During World War II, it was widely read, and its slogan on the way of death was used to inspire the Kamikaze pilots. Following the occupation it went underground, and many copies were destroyed rather than have them read by the Americans.

Mishima wrote his own encapsulation and commentary on the Hagakure in 1967. He stated in his introductory remarks that this is the one book that he has referred to continually in the twenty years since the war, and that during the war he had always kept it close to him.

Immediately following the war, Mishima relates that he felt isolated from the rest of literary society, which had accepted ideas that were alien to him. He asked himself what his guiding principal would be now that Japan was defeated. The Hagakure was the answer, providing him with “constant spiritual guidance” and “the basis of my morality.” Like all other books of the war period, this had become loathsome, to be wiped from the memory, but in the darkness of the times it would now radiate “its true light.”

The heroic death is the culmination of the life of the man of action. For the man of action death is the single point of the completion of one’s life. It must be taken at the right time. Mishima found the social and moral criticism of Jocho relevant to post-war Japan.

The Feminization of Society

The feminization of the Japanese male (contemporarily as a result of the influence of American democracy) was, Mishima pointed out referring to Hagakure, also noted by Jocho during the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era. The eighteenth-century prints of couples together hardly distinguish between male and female, with similar hairstyles, cut and pattern of clothes, even the same facial expressions, which make it impossible to tell who is the male and who the female. Jocho records in Hagakure that during his time, the pulse rate that differed between the genders had become the same, and this was noted when treating medical ailments. He called this fumigation “the female pulse.”

Celebrities Replace Heroes

Jocho condemns the idolization of certain individuals achieving what we’d today call celebrity status. Mishima comments:

Today, baseball players and television stars are lionized. Those who specialize in skills that will fascinate an audience tend to abandon their existence as total human personalities and be reduced to a kind of skilled puppet. This tendency reflects the ideals of our time. On this point there is no difference between performers and technicians. The present is the age of technocracy . . .  differently expressed, it is the age of performing artists. It means specialization and therefore the confinement of the individual into a single cog.

The Boredom of Pacifism

Under pacifism and democracy, the individual is literally dying of boredom, rather than living and dying heroically.

Ours is an age in which everything is based on the premise that it is best to live as long as possible. The average life span has become the longest in history, and a monotonous plan for humanity unrolls before us.

After finding his place in society and the struggle is over, there is nothing left for youth, apart from retirement, “and the peaceful, boring life of impotent old age.” The comfort of the welfare state ensures against any need to struggle, and one is simply ordered to “rest.” Mishima comments on the extraordinary number of elderly who commit suicide. Now we might add the even more extraordinary number of youth that commit suicide.

Mishima equates socialism and the welfare state, and finds that at the end of the first, there is “the fatigue of boredom”; whilst at the end of the second there is suppression of freedom. People desire something to die for, rather than the endless peace that is upheld as a Utopia. Struggle is the essence of life. To the Samurai death is the focus of his life, even in times of peace. “The premise of the democratic age is that it is best to live as long as possible.”

The Repression of Death

The modern world seeks to avoid the thought of death. Yet the repression of such a vital element in living will become ever more explosive, as do all such inner-directed impulses. Here the psychologist Jung would concur. Mishima states:

We are ignoring the fact that bringing death to the level of consciousness is an important element of mental health . . . Hagakure insists that to ponder death daily is to concentrate daily on life. When we do our work thinking that we may die today, we cannot help feeling that our job suddenly becomes radiant with life and meaning.

Extremism

Mishima states that Hagakure is a “philosophy of extremism.” Hence, it is inherently out of character in a democratic society. Jocho stated that whilst the Golden Mean is greatly valued, for the Samurai one’s daily life must be of a heroic, vigorous nature, to excel and to surpass. Mishima comments that “going to excess is an important spiritual springboard.” There is something in this that is reminiscent of Nietzsche and of the heroic vitalism expounded in the west by D. H. Lawrence and Ernst Junger and others.

Intellectualism

Of intellectuals, Mishima shares the same contempt as the other Thinkers of the Right who are attuned to the life force or elan vital that transcends the intellectualism that arises from the cities of civilizations in decline. Jocho had stated that:

The calculating man is a coward. I say this because calculations have to do with profit and loss, and such a person is therefore preoccupied with profit and loss. To die is a loss, to live is a gain, and so one decides not to die. Therefore one is a coward. Similarly a man of education camouflages with his intellect and eloquence the cowardice or greed that is his true nature. Many people do not realise this.

Mishima comments that in Jocho’s time there was probably nothing corresponding to the modem intelligentsia. However, there were scholars, and even Samurai themselves, who began to form themselves into a similar class “in an age of extended peace.” Mishima identifies this intellectualism with “humanism.” This intellectualism means, contrary to the Samurai ethic, “one does not offer oneself up bravely in the face of danger.”

No Words of Weakness

The Samurai in times of peace still talks in a martial spirit. Jocho taught that “the first thing a Samurai says on any occasion is extremely important. He displays with this one remark all the valor of the Samurai.”

Mishima comments that there is never a word of weakness uttered by a Samurai.
“Even in casual conversation, a Samurai must never complain. He must constantly be on his guard lest he should let slip a word of weakness.” Another principle; “One must not lose heart in misfortune.”

The Flow of Time

Something of the cycles of a civilization from health to degeneracy and death, as Spengler and Julius Evola showed, are also portrayed in Hagakure by Jocho as “the flow of time.” Mishima points out that whilst Jocho laments “the decadence of his era and the degeneration of the young Samurai,” he observes “the flow of time,” realistically stating that it is no use resisting that flow.

As Jocho stated: “The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered the last stage of the Law.” This refers to the entering of three progressively degenerate stages according to the Buddhist cycles of history.

Jocho employs the analogy of seasons just as Oswald Spengler did in describing the cycles of a civilisation from birth, flowering, withering and death: “However, the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its nature.”

Jocho does not recommend either nostalgia for the return of the past, or the ‘superficial’ attitude of those who only value what is modem, or ‘progressive’ as we call it today.

Julius Evola, the Italian ‘Thinker of the Right,” elaborating on the cyclical nature of history similarly recommended to young activists concerned at the demise of Western Civilization that they cannot return to the past nor prevent the present cycle. They must “ride the tiger,” see out the present era, and to lay the foundations for a cultural renewal.

A Samurai’s Destiny

November 25, 1970: Mishima addresses Japanese soldiers before committing ritual suicide

November 25, 1970 was chosen as the day that Mishima would fulfil his destiny as a Samurai. Four others from the Tatenokai joined him. All donned headbands bearing a Hagakure slogan. The aim was to take General Mishita hostage to enable Mishima to address the soldiers stationed at the Ichigaya army base in Tokyo. Mishima and his lieutenant Morita would then commit Hara-kiri. Only daggers and swords would be used in the assault, in accordance with Samurai tradition.

The General was bound and gagged. Close fighting ensued as officers several times entered the general’s office. Mishima and his small band each time forced the officers to retreat. Finally, they were herded out with broad strokes of Mishima’s sword against their buttocks. A thousand soldiers assembled on the parade ground. Two of Mishima’s men dropped leaflets from the balcony above, calling for a rebellion to “restore Nippon.”

At mid-day precisely Mishima appeared on the balcony to address the crowd. Shouting above the noise of helicopters he declared: “Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai [army] must be the soul of Japan.”

The soldiers jeered. Mishima continued: “The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan.” His last words were: “I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!”

Morita joined him on the balcony in salute. Both returned to Mishita’s office. Mishima knelt shouting a final salute, and plunged a dagger into his stomach, forcing it clockwise. Monta bungled the decapitation leaving it for another to finish it. Morita was then handed Mishima’s dagger but called upon the swordsman who had finished off Mishima to do the job, and Morita’s head was knocked off in one swoop. The remaining followers stood the heads of Mishima and Morita together and prayed over them.

Ten thousand mourners attended Mishima’s funeral, the largest of its kind ever held in Japan. “I want to make a poem of my life” Mishima had written at 24 years of age. He had fulfilled his destiny according to the Samurai way:

To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.

After his death, his commentary on the Hagakure became a best seller.

Chapter 12 of K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003).

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler loom large over the horizon of twentieth-century European thought. Nietzsche was influential in the thinking of Spengler, whilst either one or both had a major impact on the thinking of most of the writers we deal with herein.

Both were primarily concerned with questions of decay and the possibilities of regeneration. Both held that Western Civilization had entered a cycle of decadence that was particularly evident in the cultural, moral and spiritual spheres. They were therefore of great relevance to many of the new generation of artists, writers and poets who emerged from the First World War, a war which made transparent the crisis of Western Civilization which had really entered its cycle of decay several centuries previously. The English and French Revolutions, in the name of “The People,” marked the overthrow of the old order by the new bourgeoisie, the victory of money over blood-family lineage.

Democracy for many of the cultural elite was not a political creed to be welcomed but rather a symptom, like Bolshevism, of the rise of the masses and behind them of the rule of money: of quantity over quality, with the arts being the first to be degraded.

Nietzsche and Spengler stand as the great thinkers that sought to ennoble, in a tide of intellectualism that degraded man and culture. Against them stood Marx and his opposite numbers, the liberal economic theorists, who make of everything a matter of economics and Freud who reduces man and culture to a mass of sexual complexes. In addition to Darwin, who reduces man to being just another animal

To Nietzsche the meaning of man was that of “overcoming” his present state, to Will higher forms of existence, which are ultimately expressed in the arts. This was seen as being embodied in the great men of history. These great men, creators via their own individual will, are separated from the mass of humanity by a great gulf. Man is the tightrope between animal and Overman,

A rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

Among the first sentences uttered by Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra are these words that define the purpose of man,

I teach you the Overman. Man is something that should overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All creatures have hitherto created something beyond themselves and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide and return to the animals rather than overcome man?

The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth.

Despite the Darwinian interpretations that have been placed on Nietzsche, it was a rejection of Darwinism that prompted Nietzsche to herald the Overman as an act of Will rather than as evolution through random genetic mutation. The human existence beyond any other organism is only justified by culture, which is the perfection of nature through human Will.

This basic idea of culture in so far as it assigns only one task to every single one of us: to promote inside and outside of ourselves the generation of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, and thus to work at the perfection of nature (Untimely Meditations).

In the same essay Nietzsche states that the goal of humanity lies in its “highest specimens.” Nature wants to make the life of man “significant and meaningful by generating the philosopher and artist. . .” Thereby not only is man redeemed but nature herself.

With the central focus of history, of mankind, of nature herself being epitomized by the artist, it is no wonder that Nietzsche’s philosophy caught the imagination of so many of the creative elite.

Prefiguring Spengler with a rejection of history as linear and progressive, Nietzsche states that what comes later in a civilization is not necessarily what is best. What is best is reflected in the highest specimens, the artists and philosophers, where the gulf that separates these higher men from the average citizen is greater than that which separates the average man from the chimpanzee.

Hence Ezra Pound’s Nietzschean attitudes towards the artist and the mass was reflected by many other contemporaries. Some, such as Wyndham Lewis and Evola, were even suspicious of Fascism as being “too democratic,” too much of a mass movement. Pound states:

The artist has no longer any belief or suspicion that the mass, the half-educated simpering general . . . can in any way share his delights . . . The aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service. Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits, and . . . we artists who have been so long despised are about to take over control.

D. H. Lawrence went so far as to see himself as a coming dictator who would relieve the masses of the “burden of democracy.” whilst D’Annunzio did actually become a ruler of his own State (Fiume) for a time, where the arts were the focus.

Nietzsche demanded new law tablets upon which would be inscribed the word ‘noble’ (Zarathustra). The creative elite make their own laws through their acts of creation, and are not constrained by the democratic mob with their laws, morals and values that are designed for the control of the average. Hence, Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra counsels higher man to stay aloof from the masses, and from the market place, as the masses will drag the higher man down to the dead level of “equality” with such doctrines as democracy.

The Overman would be willed into creation by Higher Men striving to “self-overcome,” to reach beyond themselves through placing hardships upon oneself. The Nietzschean brute is one of many distortions of Nietzsche, who states that the strong are compassionate towards the lesser.

Oswald Spengler

Whilst Nietzsche places culture as the criterion for defining the value of both societies and individuals, Oswald Spengler develops a morphology of culture as the basis of historical analysis. Both philosophers elevate the cultural beyond the contemporary fads of economic, sexual, and biological determinism, as the basis of their world-views. Spengler in the preface to The Decline of The West states that the two figures to whom he owes most are Goethe for “method” and Nietzsche for the “questioning faculty”

Hence, Spengler was also of great interest to the new generation of artists, poets and authors. Spengler explains that by drawing on analogous cycles of history in each of the civilisations he could explain how and why Western Civilisation was undergoing a cycle of decay. Like Nietzsche, Spengler sees democracy, parliamentarianism, egalitarianism, and the rise of money and the merchant on the ruins of the old aristocracy of birth (or blood) as symptoms of the decadence that are reducing the arts to the lowest denominator.

Many of the cultural elite were of a mystical nature, such as Yeats and Evola, and their knowledge of the cyclic myths of many ancient cultures of East and West and the Americas accorded with the cyclical conclusions drawn by Spengler.

In his influential magnum opus The Decline of the West Spengler rejects the Darwinian, linear, progressive approach to history, explaining:

I see in place of that empty figment of one linear history . . .  the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each having its own life; its own death . . . Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return . . . I see world history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the other hand, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding to itself one epoch after another.

This cyclic approach to history is organic. It sees cultures as living entities with a birth, a flourishing, a decay and death. Each civilization, although self-contained, has the same cyclic phases, which Spengler identifies with the four seasons. The winter phase is the advanced civilization where the city replaces the country, profit replaces heroism, and the merchant replaces the aristocrat. As for the social castes, these cease to have a cultural value and are mere economic reflections. The rootless city dwelling proletariat replacing the rural yeoman and craftsman, the merchant replacing the warrior, and the banker replacing the noble. Hence, what is often regarded as “new,” “progressive,” “modern,”and “western.” the rise of abortion, family planning, of banking practices, of parliaments and voting majorities, of feminism, socialism, revolutions . . .  have already been played out in the “winter” phase of prior civilizations. Spengler describes it thus:

You, the West, are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your birth control that is bleeding you from below and killing you off at the top in your brains. I can prove to you that these were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states . . .  Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome . . .

Many of the new generation of writers were thus drawn to Spengler’s analysis of the way the rule of money, of money values and of the money baron’s control of politics, had become determinative of the tastes of a civilization in its final cycle. They were concerned with overthrowing the rule of money and returning civilization to its “springtime” where the arts flourished under the patronage of born nobles. Yeats and Evola look to certain epochs of the Medieval period of the West. Ezra Pound sought the overthrow of the banks through the economic theory of Social Credit; Hamsun and Williamson wished for a return to rural values in place of those of the City; many were attracted to Fascism.

Spengler states that in the final phase of the winter cycle there arises a reaction against the rule of money. Money marches on reaching its peak then exhausts its possibilities:

It thrust into the life of the yeoman’s countryside and set the earth moving; its thought transformed every son of handicraft: today it presses victoriously upon industry, to make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer alike, its spoil. The machine with its human retinue. The real queen of this century is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. Money, also. Is beginning to lose its authority, and the last conflict is at hand in which civilization receives its conclusive form–the conflict between money and blood.

The rule of money will be overcome by new “Caesars,” strong leaders not harnessed to the plutocrats and their parliaments and media. In Spengler’s last book, The Hour of Decision, he sees the Fascist legions in Italy as heralds of the “new Caesarism.” Mussolini was much impressed with both Nietzsche and Spengler.

Spengler resumes:

The sword is victorious over money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will . . .  Money is overthrown and abolished by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream in microcosmic form . . . And so the drama of a high culture–that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities–closes with the return of the pristine facts of blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow.

Preface to K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003).