A Colossal Collection Of Ruins

Carl Vollgraff (1792-1863), professor of law and politics at Marburg, Germany, produced the first modern system of historical pessimism. At first sight, Vollgraff’s First Attempt looks like a caricature of German scholarship. Alas, from its 2500 pages of torturous terminology, floods of footnotes which cover the four corners of the earth, and the constant division of the text by the Pythagorean key figure four, there emerges an amazing anticipation of Spengler.

Vollgraff considered the cultures of the world “a colossal collection of ruins” consisting of civilizations that died long ago; nations that were destroyed in springtime and never grew up to enjoy summer and fall; underdogs who forcibly or voluntarily adopted the culture of a conqueror, and who now were raging in the strait jacket of an alien civilization; and cultural crossbreeds without national origin and ethnic homeland, who cursed their creators.

Among the still living cultures Vollgraff detected the same symptoms that distorted the faces of the dead. There was a loss of faith and fellow feeling, the vulgarization of language, the break with tradition, the disruption of social and family ties, and the lack of cultural creativity, except for the foundation of national libraries and museums, a fading civilization’s formation of seed pods. The vanishing of these values which set man apart from the beast started with the most advanced nations and drifted down to the backward. The decline of the West would be hastened by the triumph of science and technology which made work scarce and poverty abundant, by mounting drug addiction (in which Vollgraff included coffee and tea), and by the speed with which people tried to get rich at all costs.

Although Vollgraff based his dance of death on natural law rather than on original sin or tragic guilt, he recognized religion, like Donoso-Cortés, as a barometer of decline. The gods forsook men; and men, their gods. With the power failure of the divine, faith in one’s fellow men faded away. Distrust bred hatred and fear. Force formed the new foundation of human and international affairs. Violence would erupt within and among the states and leave on our planet a landscape of the moon.

-excerpted from the introduction to “Decline of the West?” edited by Mandred P. Fleischer