Cyclical History As Prophetic Literature

Ultimately, then, we may conclude that all cyclical theorists, whether or not they lay claim to scientific validity, play the role of intuitive seers. They are all doing what Spengler alone quite frankly says he is doing. If we decide to adopt this attitude toward them, then we shall judge them far differently from the way in which they have generally been judged up to now. We shall worry far less about the mistakes, the irritating dogmatism, of a writer like Spengler than we should do if we imagined that he and his kind were about to deliver themselves of some sort of final truth. We shall discount his errors and try to appreciate the positive suggestions he can offer. In fact, once we have adopted such an attitude of radical skepticism, we may learn to esteem and relish even the dogmatism of Spengler’s utterance. Since we shall not take what he says too literally, we may find that the very intemperance of his statements enhances their imaginative impact.

From this standpoint, we may take our choice of the cyclical constructions on frankly non-scientific grounds. We may judge them first as literature, as imaginative creations, second as prophecies of varying degrees of discernment. On both these grounds, Spengler comes off rather well.

As literature, the Decline is without equal in the field of cyclical writing. Spengler’s pictorial, figurative language, his talent for finding the images and personalities that set off in high relief an entire epoch of the past—these give to his work a character of excitement, of tension, and of evocative melancholy. He is a master of the telling epithet, of contrasts epitomized in a single abstract noun, of the alternation of involved, architectural sentences with the short hammer blows of unqualified assertion. In its final form the Decline becomes the elaborate reconstruction of a vision, a series of “perspectives”—as Spengler himself puts it—shot boldly into the past and future. Even for those who do not choose to follow them to their ultimate perspectives may conclusions, these illuminate the understanding and offer guidance for fresh investigation. The “Magian” culture may never have existed—but we may use the concept to deepen our imaginative comprehension of a variety of seemingly unrelated manifestations in the art and religion of the Mediterranean world. True or false, such creations as these have permanently enriched our understanding of our past and of our future.

It is not true, as Spengler once boasted, that he had been proved mistaken “on no essential point.” Two at least of his predictions have quite obviously failed to materialize. In Western Europe, parliamentary institutions—despite signs of advanced anemia—have to date continued to function. And the major armies of the world have not reduced themselves to small, supranational, strictly personal followings; they are still combinations of mass and professional forces, finding their indispensable support in the patriotic sentiments and industrial productivity of national populations. Here and there, however, bands of expatriated mercenaries, inspired with the desperation of permanent exile from their own country, such as General Anders’ Poles of the Second World War and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese of today, have offered a preliminary view of what may prove to be the new model. These things may be still in the future. But in more general terms we may conclude that Spengler’s failure to establish a number of vital links in the sequence of future events reflects the inadequacy of his personal preconceptions. His faulty economics, his “metaphysical” and unrealistic definition of social classes, drastically limit his comprehension of twentieth-century political movements. As a result, his notion of Caesarism remains too much a matter of mere personal leadership to embrace in its entirety the contemporary phenomenon of totalitarianism.

Yet, as with the overwhelming majority of the predictions in the Decline, the basic idea is there even when the formulation is faulty. More poignantly than any of his successors, Spengler has sensed the unprecedented character of our time—the resurgence of those primitive values that so sharply divide the twentieth century from the centuries that went before it. This feeling for essentials extends even to his less fortunate utterances. Under the crude phraseology of a “colored peril,” for example, Spengler expresses something of the tragic cultural misunderstanding between Asia and the West—an incompatibility far transcending the clash of political institutions and economic interests.

And beyond this inter-continental struggle, he sees the terrible outlines of a whole world delivered over to conquest and virtually perpetual war. He depicts the coming of an age of iron in which the traditional political issues, having lost any contemporary relevance, will have reduced themselves to a simple choice between technical expedients. He grasps the dilemma of creative endeavor in an era of mass culture—its fatal division between a merely repetitive popular art and the esoteric experiments of the “progressive” schools. And he understands t the implications of mass culture itself. He sees what one of his German critics (using the American expression) calls the whole “phonyness” of contemporary life—the depressing uniformity of great city society and its deadening effect on democratic procedures. Finally, he comprehends the emptiness and despair that are leading so many of our contemporaries—the untutored and the highly sophisticated alike—to seek solace in a return to dogmatic religion.

Spengler’s talent as an imaginative writer, however, and the accuracy of his major predictions do not exhaust, or even properly establish, his intellectual importance. It is somewhere between literature and prophecy that the Decline has made its most telling contribution. It is as symptom, as synthesis, as symbol of a whole age that Spengler’s book remains one of the major works of our century. Indeed it has gained in stature as the passage of time has enabled us to place it in the context of the events of the past three decades and the further catastrophes that nearly all of us anticipate. For when everything else has been said, the Declinebulks largest as the massive concretization of a state of mind—the state of mind of an old society anticipating its end. And this—despite brief flurries of hope—has become the characteristic attitude of social observers and the general public alike, both in Europe and, more recently, in the United States. Hence, as imaginative literature, if not as history in the strict sense, The Decline of the West offers the nearest thing we have to a key to our times. It formulates more comprehensively than any other single book the modern malaise that so many feel and so few can express. It has become the classic summary of the now familiar pessimism of the twentieth-century West with regard to its own historical future.

Together Spengler’s predictions, and the state of mind they express, set before us the emergence of a new barbarism. In them, we have learned to recognize our own era.

-excerpted from “Oswald Spengler” by H. Stewart Hughes (1952)