Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West: The 100th Anniversary Update
Over on the Archdruid Report a busy-sounding person asked John Michael Greer to just send him a list of predictions, presumably so the commentator could check them off as the years go by. I suppose you could do this, but it misses the point of describing a historical trend; the narrative is essentially poetic, and you can either grasp some deeper layers of the poetry or you can’t; furthermore the layers you see might be invisible to the author. I think such a list would be of no value at all for Greer, since most of his historical writing took place in the past five years and most of what he talks about has yet to come, but we can get some value from writing up a list of the predictions made by his predecessor, Oswald Spengler. We now have about a century of difference between Spengler and us and can judge the accuracy of many of his statements.
So, I have attempted a 100th anniversary update to Spengler, maybe not quite in the same vein that caused people to write 20th and 30th anniversary updates to The Limits to Growth (“We’re still telling you so, and in 30 more years we’ll say we told you so”), but at least in the same great Western conceit that theories should make testable predictions. It became obvious while attempting this task that Spengler’s claims could not be written in checkbox form, and that if I quoted the entire supporting argument found in the text, this post would be book-length in short order. I have therefore paraphrased Spengler. Let us hope that it does not have to happen again.
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Posted: October 23rd, 2014 | History 4 Comments »