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8 he ate of ‘estern ivilization’ Just as the popular mind separates the lightning from the ›ash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a ‹ction added to the deed—the deed is everything. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals or oswald spengler, the study of the rise and fall of civilizations was far more than a matter of antiquarian interest. Indeed, Spengler’s purpose was an entirely “presentist” one, in that he sought guidance for the future in the dynamics of the past. Although this in itself is not particularly unusual, Spengler ’s particular twist on the notion of learning from the past is quite striking. He saw his task as the explication of “an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny ”—a kind of causation deeper than ordinary cause and effect, which “suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history” (1926: 7). His researches into the logic of Destiny led him to the conclusion that every civilization “passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood, and old age” (107), a rigid four-part sequence that Spengler elsewhere refers to as Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter. At each stage of development, critical events take place as a result of the civilization’s unfolding Destiny—a Destiny with an inevitable end in the soul-less, rationalized, abstract Cosmopolis inhabited by people who had lost all organic connection with the natural world (1928: 99–102). And after this, only a steady slide into the ahistorical night, and the abandonment of the West to history.1 Spengler’s consistency is admirable: having set out to identify an unbreak239  1. There is some evidence that Spengler changed his mind about this in his later writings , noting that the great technical advances of Western Civilization combined with its global reach meant that even those struggling against the West would be in important respects Western—and so in a sense the West would be the last civilization (Farrenkopf 2000: 34–36). But this is a complex question of Spengler scholarship (particularly involving the interpretation of the rough notes that Spengler left behind at his death) that need not detain us here. able pattern characteristic of the life-course of a civilization, he applied that pattern rigorously to the civilization within which he found himself. This dogged persistence makes a certain kind of sense: if civilizations have essences, and if those essences unfold according to an unshakeable logic, then the only logical conclusion is that the West, like every other civilization, will also have its inevitable period of decline. It is thus Spengler’s civilizational essentialism that permits him to make such a bold (if perhaps disheartening) prediction: no civilization “is at liberty to choose the path and conduct of its thought, but here for the ‹rst time a Culture can foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it” (1926: 159, emphasis in original) and meet its end bravely and stoically. Of course, civilizational essentialism only points in the direction of an inevitable decline if the author in question claims to have identi‹ed a pattern of civilizational rise and fall. Samuel Huntington, so much like Spengler in his conception of civilizations as constitutively autonomous communities that exchange nothing of consequence, nonetheless offers different predictions for the future because his civilizations are not marked by anything like an inherent life-course. Instead, civilizational decline for Huntington means not the exhaustion of spiritual energies and a loss of vitality but merely a shift in the relative capabilities of civilizations vis-à-vis one another (1996: 83–84). Civilizations themselves remain intact in Huntington’s analysis; the boundaries between them seem to have been set centuries ago, and no amount of contemporary political effort can do much to alter them (157–58). Here we see a different, although equally essentialist, prediction: because civilizations are relatively immutable cultural communities, we will always have the West with us, although its relative power and in›uence will diminish. ssentialism and rediction The logical link between essentialism and prediction is a profound one. Prediction ordinarily rests on...

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