Spengler, History, and Sin

Harold Town, Spengler Writing The Decline of the West at His Desk on Top of the Kitchen Table, 1980

Having recently obtained an abridged translation of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, I’ve decided I will refute its main claim before I read the book. Yes, this is somewhat presumptuous, but when a student of medieval thought apprehends any German thinker, his sober speculation often penetrates the heart of the work better than his obscured pointing, his drunkenness on sensational particulars that inevitably succeeds a good reading. The claim in question is that with which Spengler opens his book: he will predict, as has been never done before, the death of a civilization before it happens; namely, the West. The question that follows pertains to human will: how can man, especially the average man, have any effect on history when it is so determined that it can be predicted accurately and with certainty?

Spengler adopts a model of history much inspired by Goethe: civilizations live as organisms. They have a lifespan consisting of a development period and a decay period, paralleling the human life each step along the way. The model can be juxtaposed with the Hindu Yugas, which is a four-stage deterioration beginning with a golden age and ending with the apocalyptic Kali Yuga. Both are compatible with Christianity; the former parallels with Christ’s Incarnation at full organismic development – “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4) – and the latter echoes the praise of infantile qualities that Christ delivers in the Gospels. But as Spengler’s English counterpart, Toynbee, states, the decline and death of a civilization is inflicted not by some grand apocalypse, but by a thousand papercuts. And the sickness and death of human life has been inflicted upon us by original sin.

The west’s decline could be attributed to a number of watershed moments throughout the Renaissance, and these undoubtedly serve as checkpoints for the manner of deterioration. However, each of these “papercut” events have papercuts themselves, rooted in collections of trivial human actions. Here is where human agency meets the collective whole, and where the Christian doctrine of sin comes to temporal fruition. Just as the death of civilizations has a kind of inevitability, so does our personal sin. And this sin is what gives the downward trajectory of history its momentum: the vainglory of a writer, the greed of a publisher, and the weakness of any other mediators, are all that is required for a historical event.

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say each of our actions have cosmological effects; it would be statistically more accurate to say you have no influence on anything grand. But with a human mind that thinks in extremes, perhaps imagining that our virtue and vice has a little bit of influence over historical events is more pragmatically beneficial. Moreover, as of Christ’s Incarnation, the acts of the individual member of the Church Militant have virtually cosmological effects, in that our cosmos are determined by the way we live and think: heaven or hell.

A final thought to entertain: perhaps the moral agency of historical figures is actually minimal in the events they precipitate. Who knows whether medieval excellency resulted from the prayers of a few, or whether the French Revolution could’ve been prevented the same way? Teresa of Avila was told that her short session of meditative prayer caused the conversion of 1000 souls, so maybe history should mean nothing to us. Regardless, the subject does reflect God, and Spengler seems like a fun and informative read. I will eventually confirm whether these ideas still hold after I’m done reading the book.

Against Clocks

Continuing my tirade against basic household items, I'd like to draw attention to the sequential view of time, embodied by clocks, and how it renders our view of reality handicapped. Recently I've taken up a more philosophical study of music, which is of course the art form proper to time, in that it doesn't occupy space. This is true not only of music which progresses, but even of singular momentary pitches and beats, since the resonance of the sounds are air particles in rapid fluctuation, necessarily over a period of time: hence the term "frequency" used to refer to singular pitches. The fact elicits wonder about the celestial music of the angels in heaven, where popular opinion dictates time does not exist (although minimal reflection shows that bodily beings, such as ourselves, undergo change by necessity).

However, time is not as strict as we make it. Few ancient philosophers treat time with any great scrutiny - undoubtedly because time is change, while Being is unchanging - although Aristotle states that it is "a measure of motion." This delineates not only the dependence of time on space for meaning, but also its insignificance to us: it is simply how we measure change. If we do not detect change, time does not really happen to us; this obsolesces the undetectable "change" taking place when one sings a singular, prolonged note. Only when time becomes isolated in Cartesian phase space does it take on a character of its own, and one which is so illusory it evades definition. Indeed, Spengler quotes Augustine in addressing the problem of time, where Augustine roughly states that he knows what it is in his mind, but when asked to define it, he no longer knows. Thus, to aid in its comprehensibility, we have no way to see it except as a sequence of moments; rather than an extension, it is a series of discontinuous points. This precipitated the downward spiral of music, when linear notation of Gregorian Chant was substituted by Guido for singular spots or squares. Minutes and seconds, unlike the hours, days and beyond that are spoken by astrology, are inventions designed to be rhythmically detectable, such that we never exit the present blip; seconds have no substance between them, and so every moment, necessarily falling within a second, has no substance at all; everything means nothing.

The fiendish blink of the clock is a brutish reminder of our autistic scientism and isolation from ourselves. The contours of a day's hours are no longer felt in the soaring of the sun's rays, but in constant mechanical hiccups that drain the blood from our actions. Rather than synchronizing ourselves with the universe by observing the spheres for indications of our current age, we jolt and jerk with digital instances of infinitesimal value. Unfortunately, clocks are made indispensable by the culture of scheduled nowness, so ridding oneself of time-telling means is impractical. Hopefully the neo-Feudal-paleo peasants of the 2030 West will have that chance.