Sterility

Sterility is a very dense section of Volume 2 which touches continuously on many aspects of city life. As a century has passed since Volume 2’s publishment the effects of what Spengler described are now being readily perceived as a reality of modern life, though evidence had already become apparent even in the 1920s.

Upon the supremacy of the city, they begin to reek of the symbolism of death. Spengler immediately draws attention to the form of the house:

“These cities are wholly intellect. Their houses are no longer, as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old peasant’s house, whence the Culture took its spring into history. They are, generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises which have been fashioned, not by blood, but by requirements, not by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise.”

I feel more and more demanded by the modern gurus of wealth to never buy a home, to never root yourself down before you become rich but instead to rent a home and use the extra money on building a business. It’s the rational thing to do in this modern economy, but it’s the mark of the city to never be truly rooted anywhere and simply wander, like the nomad or animal here and there, hunting for mammoths, buffalo, plunder, and paycheques. These tenements are often built to house as many people as possible and so take on a bland, soulless, “economically viable” appearance and are then pasted across the empty countryside as battery cells to fuel the city’s appetite for newcomers.

You see this especially guilty and archetypical crime around many universities that funnel students into college apartments with shared showers and laundries, quickly manufacturing another year of students before passing them onto the nearest business district. If you live in Britain, you’ll be all too familiar with the conspicuously identical suburbs being laid over fields outside growing towns, giving off an uncanny veneer of a traditional brick terrace, some of these building companies even offer you to rent out your homes to help pay the mortgage.

To accommodate the rapidly growing cities, all traces of organic development, as seen in old villages and town centres, are erased in favour of a top down centrally planned “chessboard form”:

“In all Civilisations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodatus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of “abstract” cities begins with Thurii, which was “planned” by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441 (BC). Prienne, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan.”

Consider Japan, whose cities were utterly decimated during the war, erasing over two thousand years of steady organic development. Under the watchful gaze of the American empire, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, all the low lands were cut into in this predicted grid style of city, undoubtedly abetting the poor cultural state of the nation today as every Japanese citizen was exposed to the foul nuclear radiation of the city-intellect. But after the war everyone suffered the same question of the need to rehouse as many people as possible, resulting in many architects of the post-war era becoming inspired by Russia’s “commie-blocks” and importing them to skylines across Europe, with plastic model replicas of the plans as pre-sentiments of their hubris. Communist nations are well known for their central planning of city architecture, namely the Parliamentary Palace in Bucharest, it was every dictator’s dream to leave an architectural mark as a sign of their mass splendour from the Palace of the Soviets to Neue Berlin. Though Liberal democracies try their best to veil their desire to mimic the Soviet Union in housing, they still can’t escape the plain reality that building companies will buy up swathes of fields at a time to build and plan new residences, not because of a high birthrate, but because cities and large towns are inviting more and more people to work there in quantities that cannot be accommodated organically.

All this central planning and all these poor-quality tenement apartments exist because of the city’s appetite for new populations:

“Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. Once the sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can lose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is an alien territory. He will sooner die on the pavement than go “back” to the land.”

Especially with the internet advertising the aesthetic of a New York or a Tokyo or a Los Angeles without having to live the downsides, often I find those I'm acquainted to drawn to the city’s neon lights. The country appears slow compared to the city, in towns and villages nothing happens, but among the skyscrapers is history itself in its final shape. When one may browse the glass fronts of Samsung and Apple, then Armani and Huntsman, and then eat at McDonald’s, or Nando’s if it better suits them, and gawk at monuments devoted to men who died for the freedom of the people, it hurts not that you return to a small apartment that costs all your monthly wages to live in. Being an ant in an ant-nest has never felt more important and surrounded with so many interesting things you would rather continue to dream of owning them, or at least being part of the same world as them, than suffer withdrawal and move back to the small town you grew up in.

By sucking up the populations of the country, and more recently the world, into these grand metropolises, it also serves to take away the best and brightest from the land and fully extract their usefulness away from where they’re most needed. No African village was ever benefited by money flow when what they needed was the doctors that left for the NHS. Equally, in more developed parts of the world, taking the best and brightest away from the country creates that self-fulfilling prophecy of the bland country-side contrasted by the gleaming city. When history is hoarded in the city, it can make the rest of the world seem slow, but more than that the city begins to shape your mind and transform you into a more intellectual type. Citied men are useless on the land because the pulse of their being is being overshadowed by the tensions of their waking-consciousness. These tensions, without the rhythm of being are the exact source of the city mindset that sees one’s intellect detached from, and in control of, the land:

“The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilisations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every culture these heads are the types of its final men – one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city’s street-life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom – “slimness,” mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life – through the city spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence – the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation – can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality. Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune”

Let's separate intelligence, that is, IQ, from the intellect created in the cities and consider that IQ peaked (at least in the UK) sometime around the late 1800s as highlighted by Edward Dutton. What follows from this is arguably a “pseudo-intelligence” that is able to hold all the tensions required to understand science, mathematics, and other realms of causality, but its interior is dulled and it reveals this via a rapidly decaying set of cultural forms. This is enough to grant millions university degrees by having them memorize the knowledge of the giants before them, but of their own accord and creations there is little intelligence to be found. It sets up a population of peasants to think intellectually without having a good use for it whilst maintaining the arrogance of being smarter than your uneducated, country swine, and the critical skills that paralyze any aspect of the soul from taking the reins.

What difference is there between the forms of entertainment of the city and of the country? With the city bound by its tensions, overwhelmingly the form of entertainment is one of détente, relaxation, it is the toying around of the tensions in one's mind via cinema, circuses, game playing and dances. It is the bread and circuses of the late Roman period, to be contrasted with the joie de vivre of the peasant, who goes about life channelling contentment and happiness into his otherwise hard labour, the city however separates work from enjoyment and makes it an industry to be worked in and for, something quantified by money, to be assumed upon the end of your shift as an additional distraction in your life.

And finally, this decadency leads us to the main subject of this long, long commentary: Sterility. Sterility is the turn towards death that collectives make when they begin to view the world through causality, specifically by the slow decline in birthrates, hence the name:

“When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable”

With the state of our modern political beliefs, the idea of one not having children for some banal cause such as “the environment” serves as a perfect archetype of the problem here. Ideologies, our very symbol structures, capture us and force us to justify ourselves by its rules. “Why bother having children when you could have the world’s riches instead?” Is another phrase all too often heard, usually by the aforementioned rentiers of city tenements. In the footnotes of this chapter Spengler makes light of a French peasant who was informed that his family had occupied the same home since the 9^th Century (One can only hope he’s still there) in reverence to the blood of the peasant enduring the ages. Everything about his home, his furniture, his land, is not a temporary tool but an enduring connection to the land he lives on as did his ancestors and his potential descendants, thus the death of these things is the death of the man, but the city-dweller is blind to this and does not fear death without children. He is Nietzsche’s Last Man, fearful of his own death but not of the society he lives within.

The last man would challenge the very importance of these identities. “What is my nation or culture?” “How does its immediate end after my life affect me anyway?” Today, even the environmental causes so many young people profess are only preached because the perceived future climate disaster is going to affect them as they exist and not the ignorant old people they accuse of having caused the crisis. It’s utilitarian through and through and should they reach 80 they’d force you to justify why they should care all over again.

This feeds back into the point that cities will endlessly consume new populations to fuel themselves until those populations are spent, with a whole nation addicted to the internet and so infected by the waking consciousness of city culture, this results even in the importation of peoples from foreign lands. Here Spengler then divulges a bit on the role of Feminism, and its analogous movements in other cultures, towards this state:

“…a man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,” becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the “higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free” – free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.” The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from the northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself” – they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.”

Some of these quotes are quite long and continuous because there can rarely be any more to add from a modern perspective. Has not what we now call Feminism proved his assessments correct? In Faustian fashion, women’s liberation has come by contraception and abortion, an explicit act of denying the future in favour of the now, married with an underlying cockiness in denying the unborn their future potential. Women are obviously not alone in this mindset but it has affected them uniquely compared to men. With these medical advances we are told to push off the having of children to a much older age where they become much harder, and in doing so we find that these newly wedded lovers, hastily ready to start a family the moment they turn 30, often don’t last more than a few years. A soul conflict may build itself up over your entire life, but it seems to not make you more mature or weathered than your grandparents who, married at 20, remained together and prosperous their entire lives.

Women were often the centrepiece of many communist regimes, plastering their gleeful faces across every other piece of propaganda to show how liberating the regime was, to the extent that there is almost an archetype of the female comrade, with short curled hair and military uniform to boot, ready to tear down the old guard in the name of the revolution, seen throughout Russia, China, in Oceania, in every inter-war revolution, and deep in the eyes of certain faces today. The intellect they acquired first demanded an equal say in politics, then equality through culture, then the destruction of culture itself, all in the name of emancipation from natural bonds.

Eventually, sterility catches up with the growing population and for centuries a steady decline occurs, emptying the grand imperial cities, then the provincial cities, then the towns, all the while meekly attempting to maintain the declining system by fuelling it with more biomass from the country. When it runs out of that biomass, it simply dissipates, leaving the country cold and quiet once more as all the potential energy of an entire higher culture, possessed by men who left for the big cities long ago, is now spent. Those that remain are what Spengler describe as the Fellah type.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rome shrank into oblivion due to the pillaging of German invaders, for sterility had taken hold already by the time of Augustus, at least in its earliest stage. The timeframe of Octavian loosely aligns to the post-war era including today. It was well organized, peaceful, sophisticated and enjoyed prosperity through its many early emperors, and yet, just as in our time, its birthrate decreased. Like in Orban’s Hungary, Augustus established laws to promote high birthrates. Like in the UK, Germany, France, America and so on, who fill their nations with foreign workers, the imperium did the same by filling its legions with barbarians, the poor were alleviated of their child-related stress by the likes of Nerva and Trajan. The course remained the same. By 193 AD (2200) the peasants had all left for the cities, resulting in swathes of unutilised empty farmland which, by decree of Pertinax, anyone could take for themselves should they labour upon it.

This decrease in population is finally what opens up invasions from one’s neighbours:

“Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background of the Egyptian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards. Steet widths like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna – of fifty years – would have been unthinkable with the denser population of the old days. The onset of the “Sea-peoples,” too, was only barely repulsed – their chances of obtaining possession of the realm were certainly not less promising than those of Germans of the fourth century vis-à-vis the Roman world. And finally the incessant infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their leaders seized the power, in 945 BC – precisely as Odoacer seized it in AD 476”

So it wasn’t that good times made weak men, resulting in bad times, but more so that the enormous populations that sustained enough strong men to defend the empire dissipated, and even the Spartans at Thermopylae couldn’t hold back the Persian hordes forever. The genocide against the Meso-Americans wouldn’t nearly have been so damning had it happened two centuries prior when the country and cities could replenish their stock.

At last, the cities are emptied and all that remains are a spattering of fellaheen, living alone on the stadium grass, farming goats and crops on pitches meant to be seen by medium-sized towns. The great Caesars may still inhabit their palaces but will be alone on their thrones inside decaying cities that not even the barbarians will populate. Samarra may have been planned out in grand fashion in the 8^th century, but 300 years later it was completely abandoned. Rome in the 5^th century had the population of a small village when once it had 9 million residents.

There is still much to read into this depressing state. The Roman 5^th century is our 25^th and so in the West, with declining birthrates across all nations, we may be due for at least another century or two of mass immigration to fuel the cities before things begin to implode. With rising technocracy, I wouldn’t even rule out a subtle push of the world population into smart cities to keep the imperial economy afloat, for the environment of course. But when the tides turn towards the lowest and most decadent point of the West’s decline, we can be sure that nature will return to balance this discord.