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2011-11-13 Home Front: Culture Wars
Book Reviews: 'Spengler' on the Collapse of Civilizations, with Some Surprising Predictions
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Posted by  2011-11-13 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11130 views ]  Top

#1 Maybe include a link to Amazon? Then we can buy the book and contribute to Rantburg without leaving the comfort of our morning slippers.
Posted by Skidmark 2011-11-13 00:30||   2011-11-13 00:30|| Front Page Top

#2 Ok, Amazon.com links added to the titles, per Skidmark's request. I don't know if that connects to whatever Amazon does to credit Fred's account. If someone cleverer than I about such things would be kind enough to check, I'd be grateful.
Posted by trailing wife 2011-11-13 01:07||   2011-11-13 01:07|| Front Page Top

#3 Forgive me for pointing it out, but both Indian & Chinese civilizations been around a lot longer than Christianity, or even Judaism.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2011-11-13 03:06||   2011-11-13 03:06|| Front Page Top

#4 I've never bought the demographic collapse argument.

Look at Germany and Japan. Two of the lowest birthrates in the world, yet still highly succesful societies.

What do Germany and Japan have in common, social cohesion based on a common ethnicity.

A very un-PC thing to say in the Anglosphere but true nonetheless.

And BTW, I'm not suggesting common ethnicity is the only source for social cohesion.
Posted by phil_b 2011-11-13 03:08||   2011-11-13 03:08|| Front Page Top

#5 To embrace paganism is, at heart, to embrace despair.

So according to Spengler's view, is Buddhism a pagan religion of despair?

I am inclined to agree strongly with the idea that spiritual disease/maladjustment can tip a civilization over; I'm not so sure that the emergency exit is quite as narrow as described.

Many thanks to lopt for the review!
Posted by Free Radical 2011-11-13 06:42||   2011-11-13 06:42|| Front Page Top

#6 @trailing wife

If Fred takes part in the Amazon partner program he'd need to rewrite the Amazon link, so that any sale on Amazon coming from that link will be credited to him.
Posted by Flavitle Fillmore3265 2011-11-13 07:01||   2011-11-13 07:01|| Front Page Top

#7 Morning cookie, that was me
Posted by European Conservative 2011-11-13 07:02||   2011-11-13 07:02|| Front Page Top

#8 Look it's quite simple.

Cultures with reciprocation get wealthy.
Cultures that leech OPM get poor.

Everything else is rather irrelevant.
Why? Reciprocation is just another word for comparative advantage.
Posted by Bright Pebbles 2011-11-13 07:08||   2011-11-13 07:08|| Front Page Top

#9 So according to Spengler's view, is Buddhism a pagan religion of despair?

Yes, I think he would say so. (See, for instance, The 3 Vinegar Tasters, where the Buddha finds the world bitter.)

Forgive me for pointing it out, but both Indian & Chinese civilizations been around a lot longer than Christianity, or even Judaism.

Certainly true for Christianity. A little more ambiguous with regard to both Chinese and Indian culture vs. Judaism. It depends on whether you're tracing a general cultural thrust or a specific sense of shared identity.

What we now think of as Chinese civilization is seen in a few parts of China by 1700 BC (Shang dynasty). Does the Jewish identity start with the Exodus from Egypt, usually dated to around 1300 BC, or with the patriarchs (roughly 2300-2000 BC)?

The Exodus is roughly in line with the postulated IndoAryan move into the Indian subcontinent. But if you start Indian culture earlier, say, at Harappa, I suppose it would be equally appropriate to date Judaism back to its geographical predecessors as well, in which case there is Jericho, which has been occupied for several millenia longer than Harappa's founding. And if you date Indian culture to the old oral parts of the Vedas, well, how far back do you want to trace the equivalent oral traditions in the Pentateuch?

FWIW, Spengler tells us he takes his cue on such things from the early 20th century German Jewish philosopher/theologian Franz Rosenzweig. He is less interested in archaeology than he is in the experience of religion in a day to day setting, and how it influences our choices. This passage from It's Not the End of the World might make Spengler's position a little clearer:
"The history of the world is the history of Israel," Rosenzweig asserted. That is not an utterance of ethnic megalomania but rather a statement that human history is a quest to overcome mortality. Religious faith is woven into the fabric of traditional society, in which individuals have no choice about the roles and rhythms of life.

Unravel this fabric, and faith dissolves. That was the position of Europe after the First World War ... That is the predicament of the Islamic world today .... Nietsche insisted that God was dead. In 1914, Europe believed not in God but in nation and Kultur. By 1918, these gods were toppled, and Europe began to worship the false gods of historial materialism and national socialism....

Along with the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, Rosenzweig opened a path for a modern faith, a faith strengthened by skepticism as if by innoculation.... It was not science that threatened the faith of the West, Rosenzweig explained, but rather a competing idolatry: the resurgent "inner pagan" inside every Christian ... It is the Jew, he argued, who converts the inner pagan inside the Christian, because the existence of the Jewish people itself stands surety for God's promise to Christians as well ....

So that is a taste of the underpinnings that Spengler brings to bear on current events. He gets a lot more detailed and focused on here/now, but he starts with some explicit theological and philosophical positions as his basis.

These are just my musings, FWIW. I don't necessarily agree with Spengler on all points, just felt the books were noteworthy and worth reading / thinking about / debating.
Posted by lotp 2011-11-13 07:35||   2011-11-13 07:35|| Front Page Top

#10 there is Jericho, which has been occupied for several millenia longer than Harappa's founding

What do Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain and Hebrew conquest of Canaan have in common?
Posted by gr(o)mgoru 2011-11-13 07:37||   2011-11-13 07:37|| Front Page Top

#11 My view on Japan follows that of John Mauldin: Japan is a disease. They're like a bug searching for a windshield. It's a dying country. Nominal GDP is where it was 17 years ago. Plus, the population is very old. When they stop funding their own debt [as a result of retirees ceasing to save], it's going to get ugly.
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 08:29||   2011-11-13 08:29|| Front Page Top

#12 Forgive me for pointing it out, but both Indian & Chinese civilizations been around a lot longer than Christianity, or even Judaism.

And both Indian and Chinese civilizations have collapsed and been rebuilt several times. Not always improving in the process. The Confucius the Ming built their dynasty around was a different set of writings than the Han or Tang used, and formed the basis of a much more oppressive and stratified society. And the descendants of the refugees from one of the collapses of Indian civilization, the Roma, are scattered across Europe and the world. The British did a lot to rebuild it, much of which got undone because Gandhi was as interested in partition as the Pakistanis were.

-----------------------------------

Regarding the whole Christianity/Judaism/Buddhism/Paganism thing... it's kind of hard for me to square the circle in light of the paganization of the worldview of all the mainstream Christian denominations in the West, as they are currently practiced, and not as they are described in theory.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-11-13 10:01||   2011-11-13 10:01|| Front Page Top

#13 Snowy, you might like Spengler's analysis of the growing Christianity of the global south. I'll include some of that in next week's review. Spengler suggests that the West will be rather taken aback at the vigor that is emerging.
Posted by lotp 2011-11-13 10:06||   2011-11-13 10:06|| Front Page Top

#14 I was searching online for the book. At the Barnes & Noble web site, they offer a sample of some of its pages (unfortunately not in order). You have to create a free account with B&N, download their NOOK software, then the free sample. It's better than nothing.
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 13:29||   2011-11-13 13:29|| Front Page Top

#15 The connection between Spengler's thesis and the WOT is this: The simple truth--call it Spengler's Universal Law #1-- is "A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a "rational self interest." p. 24
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 13:40||   2011-11-13 13:40|| Front Page Top

#16 AH "A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a "rational self interest." p. 24
That hit home.

Well done Lotp. Book review is a nice addition.
Posted by Dale 2011-11-13 13:55||   2011-11-13 13:55|| Front Page Top

#17 Some must-read material! Thanks, LOTP for the review and 'burgers for the comment threads. There is a lot of protein to digest here.

I think that every nation and individual should think about these things. It adds depth to the individual and the society, and makes an individual sense his/her place in society and the big scheme of things.

It would be asking too much at this point to put aside our useless fixations on the screwed up lives of Michael Jackson, Lindsay Lohan, et al. But I can dream, can't I?
Posted by Alaska Paul 2011-11-13 14:35||   2011-11-13 14:35|| Front Page Top

#18 OK. Left brain going off. Right brain firing up. Later.......
Posted by Alaska Paul 2011-11-13 14:37||   2011-11-13 14:37|| Front Page Top

#19 The point is, Thing, they're still around.
p.s. Look up Toynbee.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2011-11-13 14:47||   2011-11-13 14:47|| Front Page Top

#20 paganization of mainstream Christianity? I think you missed the last quarter century of Catholicism return to orthodoxy under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, both of which emphasized the vital role Judaism has as the foundation of Christianity.
Posted by OldSpook 2011-11-13 18:21||   2011-11-13 18:21|| Front Page Top

#21 Re: GWOT, from How Civilizations Die, pg 111+:
Iran's leaders warn openly that a rapidly aging population portends national extinction. And the depletion of Iran's aging oilfields has their undivided attention ... Iran's economic decline is irreversible, - and so is its complete demographic collapse - unless Iran can conquer adjacent oil production in Southern Iraq, neighboring Azerbaijan, and perhaps northern Saudi Arabia ...

"Geopolitics" that confines itself to the rational interests of nations is wholly inadequate to explain how the American South poured out its young men's lifeblood in defeat, or why Russia descended into bloody terror at the beginning of the twentieth cenury and risked nuclear annihilation near its end. How much less can conventional political science cope with the motivations and choices of Muslim nations that are currently living under existential threat?

Spengler has a strong recommendation re: our response:
The lessons of the First World War, the Civil War and the Cold war point to the same conclusion:

preemption with overwhelming force is the appropriate means to contain an adversary who knows he has nothing to lose. The strategy most likely to avoid war in the Middle East is not to reach out to Iran but to humiliate it. (emphasis added)
Posted by lotp 2011-11-13 18:27||   2011-11-13 18:27|| Front Page Top

#22 OS: a) I'm waiting to see how effective it'll be.

b) I'm specifically talking about those protestant groups, both evangelical and "mainstream," who push a strongly gnostic and/or manicheistic viewpoint, a world balanced between The Forces of Good and (under the command of the almost-equal-and-opposite Anti-God) The Forces of Evil, complete with end-time Eschaology (or however that's spelled) and all that stuff, people beaming up, etc. Also all the little groups that teach about a small group of elect, usually themselves, and a great mass of safe-to-judge unbelievers or corrupt christians-in-name-only.

See for reference Milton, who looks as if he filed the serial numbers off of Norse myth and turned it into Christian mythology, complete with a rebellious divine being of fire and the underworld in rebellion against the One God or the Rest of the Gods. Also see the entire history of the Covenanters in Scotland, who more or less broke their country's chance at independence because it was too horrible to contemplate to cooperate with Catholic highlanders or various Episcopal groups in fighting Cromwell's forces.

c) Gr(o)m, after I'm through with my current fit about reading about the history of Scotland and England, next on my list is the history of China and other parts of East Asia. But to make a long story short, look at these figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms#Population.

There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going on during this period, and "Chinese" civilization wound up with a much different ethnic composition than it started out with. The focus changed from North to South, such that the groups we think of as "Classically Chinese" are more typical of Southern China than the Northern Chinese who actually founded the country. I suspect large segments of the populations of surrounding countries are basically descended from Northern-Chinese-origin groups who couldn't get along with what the central government became and either left (in the case of the Philipines) or rebelled (in the case of Vietnam). And the Northern-origin "guest workers" (or as they were called in Chinese, Hakka) didn't always get along with their neighbors, even a thousand years after their migration. In the 19th century there were the Hakka-Punti clan wars, that killed more people than the US Civil War, but barely rates an extended footnote in the history of the civil wars that were happening in China at the time.

They literally became, to coin a phrase, strangers in a strange land, in the country their ancestors founded, while subsequent dynasties (in particular the Ming) rewrote Confucius to keep all the Wrong People from actually getting decent educations to the point where they could pass the examinations and join the pseudo-aristocracy. Someone should have told them to take their vases and shove them up their asses.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-11-13 19:20||   2011-11-13 19:20|| Front Page Top

#23 Oh, and those population figures? You can see stuff like that happening after virtually every major dynastic change.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-11-13 19:21||   2011-11-13 19:21|| Front Page Top

#24 The US is hardly in peril. But a balance between no-regulation and over-regulation must be set. The status quo is not an alternative.

Anything DONE can be UNDONE, except islam.
Posted by Slats Gurly-Brown5454 2011-11-13 19:38||   2011-11-13 19:38|| Front Page Top

#25 Nominal GDP (Japan) is where it was 17 years ago.

Which means GDP per worker is much higher.

And individual wealth has increased dramatically over the last 20 years.

John Mauldin is talking nonsense. Declining population makes everyone richer.

The Left's argument that you need immigration to maintain national wealth is really all about the Left needing to maintain the Left voting demographic as an aging population moves to the Right.
Posted by phil_b 2011-11-13 19:52||   2011-11-13 19:52|| Front Page Top

#26 My previous page enumeration was wrong - the printed version is different.

Spengler's opinion on the GWOT aka Jihad:

America will prevail, provided the Muslim world does not take us down with it first. p. 96
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 19:53||   2011-11-13 19:53|| Front Page Top

#27 Declining population makes everyone richer.
The Roman Empire must be the richest of all, by that reasoning.
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 19:55||   2011-11-13 19:55|| Front Page Top

#28 For everyone's consideration, from "How Civilizations Die" the first 20 of Spengler's Universal Laws, with page numbers where the quotes came from. There are more. I think this is fair use, but if mods don't agree, please delete this post.

#1 A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a "rational self-interest." x
#2 When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. xiii
#3 Contrary to what you may have heard from the sociologists, the human mortality rate is still 100 percent. xviii
#4 The history of the world is the history of humankind's search for immortality. xxi
#5 Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality p. xxii
#6 You don't know who's naked until the tide goes out. 21
#7 Political models are like automobile models: you can't have them unless you can pay for them. p. 35
#8 Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women. p.46
#9 A country isn't beaten until it sells its women, but it's damned when its women sell themselves p. 48
#10 There's a world of difference between a lunatic and a lunatic who has won the lottery. 67
#11 At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other p.75
#12 Nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has only just discovered it is dying. p. 99
#13 Across epochs and cultures blood has flown in inverse proportion to the hope of victory. p. 102
#14 Stick around long enough, and you turn into a theme park. p. 120
#15 When we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed. p. 122
#16 Small civilizations perish for any number of reasons, but great civilizations die when they no longer want to live. p. 122
#17 If you stay in the same place and do the same thing long enough, some empire eventually will overrun you. p. 124
#18 Maybe we would be better off if we never had been born, but who has such luck? Not one in a thousand. p. 126
#19 Pagan faith, however powerful, turns into Stygian nihilism when disappointed. p. 128
#20 Democracy only gives people the kind of government they deserve. p. 128
Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-11-13 20:03||   2011-11-13 20:03|| Front Page Top

#29 Heinlienian, Anguper.
Posted by Betty Scourge of the Brontosaurs6664 2011-11-13 23:22||   2011-11-13 23:22|| Front Page Top

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