Primitive and Higher Cultures
Genotypically, humanity has hardly changed over the prior half a million years; five hundred thousand years where any number of great human accomplishments could have occurred, hundreds of higher cultures each expressing their own perspective of the world and contributing to man’s story on Earth. However, this is not the case. For most of modern humanity’s existence, we were secluded to tribes of perhaps only two hundred people at most, and so sparsely spread over the surface of the world that it would have been a generational event for one tribe to make contact with another. Only in the last 5000 years do we see concrete evidence of complex human society, specifically of higher cultures, starting with Egypt and Mesopotamia. This begs the question: if man didn’t change at all, what allowed him to go from sparse tribes, hardly able to reach the mountains on the horizon, to complex city sprawls that could organize voyages to the moon in such a short period of time?
This question is important because according to the Darwinist (in his time as in our own), the forwards and upwards struggle for survival and improvement would result in a soup of chaotic forms through the ages; there would be no distinct dinosaur species that could have existed for tens of millions of years, before suddenly disappearing and being replaced by a new flurry of forms, because such transitions would be continuous. If man were capable of what he is now, hundreds of thousands of years ago, why didn’t he?
Instead of a Darwinian model, commonly associated with the Anglo-Saxon science and its industrial ethic, Spengler replaces this with one of epochs: a form may exist for a time, centuries, millennia, eons even, but then overnight a great shift may occur that changes that form into something new, an observable example of this would be the overnight death of the Dinosaurs, where a cosmic event such as the impact of Chicxulub forced life to change rapidly into something new.
Spengler divides the history of man into two ages: there is the age of primitive cultures (not to be associated with pre-cultures), which takes place mostly during the ice age, and the age of higher cultures, which begins naturally on the Nile and Euphrates in the 3rd Millennium BC, before expanding outwards and inspiring new forms like a spreading seed. What separates these two ages and how they manifest is exactly the degree to which smaller tribes are able to commune with one another. The primitive cultures struggle to find an “other” on the vast Russian steppe, infinite deserts and African and European plains because humanity is so few and far between in the first place. But as man’s presence on the Earth increased, contact between tribes became more and more commonplace. Suddenly the “other” was a guarantee, which led to a dialectical “oneself” and a whole flurry of abstract meanings which manifested through language and higher thinking. It should be seen as no coincidence that the first higher cultures, Egypt, Sumer, India and China, where all river cultures where many roaming tribes would be forced to mingle with other roaming tribes.
It would be out of place for Spengler to make definitive declarations as to the cause of this or that epoch and so no specific cause is ever mentioned, however there is a strong implication that the end of the Ice Age brought about some kind of cosmic change that enabled man to flourish into higher forms of development. Before, a harsh and cold world with intimidating wildlife, and afterwards an empty canvas for man to collectivise and claim masterdom over. Primitive cultures were not homogenous in their own symbolism, but show forms as varying as the higher cultures, but primitive they remained until we were pushed into a social setting where abstract thinking became more and more prevalent. In the distant future there may yet be another shift towards a new style of culture, but the character of which will remain uncertain until it has long since arrived.