The City Become

At last, we come to the end of examining the life cycle of cities and have in our pockets another frame of reference for Spengler’s model of higher cultures. With this final chapter, it’s apparent that the symptoms of decline, as psychological elements, run parallel to Sterility and, yet again, have parallels in our modern world.

To recap, cities, contrasted with the more earth-bound towns and villages and peasant hamlets, are defined by a deep-seated feeling of detachment from the land itself. Granted, the city was created by a race who by toil and effort built it motivated by land-symbolism, but within the city the intellect reigns over the soul, the act of being a peasant farming according to the weather cycles is unknown to the rationalistic minds of the city population and thus the ideas they produce, the history they make, reflects this in steadily obscene forms as the cities become more and more centres of all the operations of the higher culture.

In the end, the intelligence they pride themselves over becomes the sword that they fall upon, culture becomes an attempt to alleviate the pressure on the minds of the thinking populace, a distraction from the sameness of everyday life. Soon we see this utilitarian mindset begin to criticize the act of having children itself, killing the sustenance of the great cosmopolitan machine. The city, apprehending its demise, works to sustain itself by sucking in the peasantry from the provinces, making them, and thus their children into sterile cogs as well. Soon the vast majority of the whole higher culture is “civilized” and the cities rapidly shrink in population until all that is left is a hardened fellaheen type who were fortunate to trace their ancestry to the most stubborn of their now husk of a culture.

But mere population decline doesn’t result in the death of a higher culture and up until the colonial era the likes of India and China and various segments of the Islamic world thrived past their expiry date in their hardened forms, in fact Rome immediately succumbing to new arrivals from the North and East is a rarity among late civilizations.

When a civilisation detaches itself from the land, its forms must become popular in nature in order to appeal to the highest quantity of people. This, naturally, has its impact on the language of the new civilisation:

“In Egypt the writing that came into common use was not the hieroglyphic, but the letter-script, which was without doubt a technical discovery of the Civilisation age. And so in general – it is not true Culture-languages like the Greek of Sophocles or the German of Luther, but world-languages like the Greek Koine and Arabic and Babylonian and English, the outcome of daily practical usage in a world-city, which are capable of being acquired by anybody and everybody.”

Generally, one can notice that all things in our modern world have become “popular” so to speak. Pop culture, pop music, pop opinions, when half the world speaks a language like English, the customs and ways of the many multitudes of peoples will naturally come to try and claim dominance over the tongue, and secreted from this multicultural tension is the drivel we excuse as “modern” culture that cements these varying perspectives together. Since Volume 2’s publication, English itself has become more and more “Americanised”; Grammarly is reminding me to change my Ss to Zs, whilst MS Word is telling me to do the opposite resulting in a perpetual clash of spelling on my computer screen. American, as a vague dialect of English, and claiming victory over the 20^th Century, thus calls the shots when it comes to language and so it has been unconsciously dumbed down in favour of “the people”, a euphemism for the highest quantity of interchangeable individuals as possible.

Spengler also calls out the increased uniformity of cities as they spread over the surface of lands they weren’t born in.

“Go where we may, there are Berlin, London, and New York for us, just as the Roman traveller would find his columnar architecture, his fora with their statuary, and his temples in Palmyra or Trier or Timgad or the Hellenistic cities that extended out to the Indus and the Aral.”

Unfortunately, the skies of everywhere from Tokyo, to Melbourne, Berlin to LA are not filled with Neogothic imperial architecture of a global Western civilisation. A global civilisation like the West had to accommodate for all the regional nations and ways of life by creating a mean that would at least attempt to satisfy everyone (and in so doing satisfied no one); the secretion of a world of cultural tension is indeed the ugliest cultural cement. One might describe and justify the glass spires found in every city on earth now as “financially rational” but equally it was only the rationality of the West that permitted us to think this was acceptable in the first place, and only in this post-war era when before it was every wealthy man’s dream to build a Chysler or an Empire State for the world to see the might and prominence of their company.

Keeping in line with the popular nature of late civilisation, these land-severed styles and forms are more acceptable to the locals and so the forms persist. Dubai, with all its wealth, is not the Golden Age revival of Islamic culture it could afford to be on any day of the week but is a crystal parody of every Western city, as is every new metropolitan project. The surrounding lands soak in the style of the late civilisation, just as Japan did in awe at Han China, Java did as a relay of India and Carthage took inspiration from Babylon.

The radiation of these forms outward can continue indefinitely, as Spengler speculates the Chinese style was subtly picked up on as far as Scandinavia. As has been emphasised, the city burghers are at home anywhere because their ideas can be wholly accepted by all whom encounter it.

Whats most interesting about this final part of the chapter is that Spengler leaves an interesting speculation on his own country: the first act of the civilisation is the release of the city from the land, then comes a thorough production of the forms of said civilisation, before at last comes a final hardening; at the end of a civilisation’s development, everything is understood with full sobriety, all questions asked have been answered, or are being answered, and so the civilisation’s forms calcify as it runs out of new grounds for exploration. No Baroque formed without Descartes, nor Gothic without saintly myths, and it is veritably so that since the end of World War Two.

“Style, in the Cultures, has been the rhythm of the process of self-implementing. But the Civilized style (if we may use the word at all) arises as the expression of the state of completeness. It attains – in Egypt and China especially – to a splendid perfection, and imparts this perfection to all the utterances of a life that is now inwardly unalterable, to its ceremonial and mien as to the superfine and studied forms of its art-practise”

Rather than there being new and groundbreaking science, and artforms and culture to follow, instead the advances we find are more to the satisfaction of the engineer, who takes these solidified rules and toys with them to a personalised function. Religion and metaphysics are as sentimentalities with no place in the modern world, epistemology, ethics and politics are solidified by their unquestionableness, and aesthetics are left to spatter about trying to latch itself onto something meaningful in a world where meaning outside of the profane is dead. Legal inquiries are justified by centuries of case law and bureaucracy demands a regulation of act that suffocates any act of organic development.

For Spengler, before the National Socialists came to power, it was his conviction that Germany was to take the torch of Western Civilisation and embark down this road as the last nation of it’s regimented sort. Interestingly when Hitler did rise to power in the 30s, his opinions about Germany’s mass development and modernisation were rather critical, and by his estimations in 1936 he noted that the Regime wouldn’t last another decade, which it didn’t. Nevertheless, Germany did go on to become a powerhouse in the European Union, though I doubt that was Spengler’s vision of Germany in the year 2000.

And now there is one final question to be asked: Where does the West go from here? A global civilisation, with hardened laws of science and philosophy, all questions asked and answered, and facing the middle thrust of its sterility. For such a civilisation we can predict two rather dystopian outcomes: A Roman decline from here onwards would entail a declining population, stemmed by mass immigration into Europe, America and Oceania, among other Westernised lands, resulting in a lack of care and concern for the West as it’s self-hatred reaches a peak, before a steady decline due to racial tension and declining competency until the civilisation is unravelled. Competency especially, though not a Spenglerian problem, is a uniquely Faustian problem when we harness the powers of the universe to provide food on our tables, light to our homes, and trust in our futures. The West is too complex now not to see some kind of devolution and inequality in access to complex structures should it slowly collapse in the style of South Africa.

This ending, though violent, I suspect not being as damaging as it is firstly perceived currently (Great Replacement included, due to many migrants living in the cities and raising their next few generations in full exposure to it), and secondly, giving us an opportunity to return to a homesteading lifestyle, would be a significantly better option then a Chinese or Indian decline, whereby the civilisation chooses to repel its invaders and threats and stops the mass suicide in order to pursue a foolproof hardening of technocratic power. Instead of soldiers, we’d have drones and AI enforcing standards, currency is only available online, in the name of the environment and diversity people must only claim housing in smart cities, and by Western Civilisation’s unique status as a global civilisation, it lacks any potential future enemies who can’t be readily dealt with using the vast scientific, political, and psychological knowledge of this new Babylon. Such an end to the West may be indefinite, so pick your poison carefully.

The next chapter focuses on the idea of Race, so stay tuned.