In the final segment of the chapter Primitives, Culture-Peoples, Fellaheen, Spengler finishes on the late peoples that rise up in counter to the early nations. At first, in the early period, it is intuitive. A minority that rules and represents a nation is usually an aristocracy, and in our Feudal era, as in Greece, the nobility ruled over a peasantry that was passive to history and awakened with them a collective conscience when times called for it. Nationhood in this time is cherished by a minority, be they initiated into it, or elevated from a lower class or granted it by lineage and ideas of freedom and honour are thus heralded by these people before the rest follow, because most peoples, even today, are only concerned with immediate problems such as family or profession and, until given sufficient existential reason, do not look to higher tasks.
When the world cities come along a new elite embodies them as nobles embodied the land. These are the rational men, whose politics are set in aims and not lived, who are not anchored to the land, and thus the necessity of their race, but roam free in their minds and their mind-constructed cities, their feet never leaving the concrete. These men often lead their masses through literature, spreading their ideologies across civilisations. Their strength lies solely in the strength of their arguments and the reason of their beliefs. Violence is considered unnecessary and world-peace becomes the ultimate goal they all end at, be they in the Contending states of China, Hellenistic Greece, or the modern world. Spengler here outright declares that whether there is evidence for this or not, these movements are inherently anti-national, else what is anti-national if not those that attempt to unwind the political tensions that made Athens Athens or Rome Rome, or England England? Those that thrive in global cities thrive on the power of truth and reason, but nations thrive on the opposite, the relative will-to-power that allows one not to be right in a war, but to survive it.
But ofcourse the problem with world-peace comes when the ideologue, who has come to the head of his people and carefully instilled his beliefs within them, comes into contact with someone who has had no such history. A barbarian perhaps who existed outside the main direction of Classical or Islamic or Western history, and thus his race remains spiritually strong. We got a glimpse of what this will look like in the West in the last half a decade. The move towards increased technocracy during the pandemic was a clear sign of the intellectual having full sanction to define our lives and lead us by ideas and not by force, because the people were too reasonable not to obey. Then came the sudden coming-to from the fantasies of the elites as Russia invaded Ukraine and gave the world a grim reminder that politics still existed. Immediately the WEF blueprints were stuffed in the deskdraws as the West now must find means to counter this external threat. In an intellectual space, naturally the intellectual wins, but in a political space, naturally the political wins.
As a result, the nation which is best able to protect itself from the intellectuals of the civilisation period is often the best suited to survive and inevitably come out on top. The Qin state in China had kept itself insulated from Taoism as Rome had kept itself insulated from Hellenism and so they became the Imperial nations of their respective civilisations whilst those successful in their anti-national philosophies, not so successful in preserving world peace, became subservient to another nation by abolishing themselves. The most damning case of an intellectual powerhouse falling to more secure peoples is when Baghdad was sacked in 1401, and the skulls of those that did not defend themselves were stacked as high as hills outside the city walls by the Mongol invaders. Ultimately that is all a population of rational men earn for themselves, becoming a treasure trove unguarded for any adventurer to seize upon and exploit. In pursuit of world-peace, the host nation sacrifices its spine, and often, even worse, uses reason to justify the injustices enacted against them. No prizes for any thing that comes to mind.
Boiling all this down to simple terms, Spengler’s point here is that every culture, by way of its move towards increased intellectualism, will inevitably reject violence. These movements are describably anti-nation because nations are built upon violence, right or wrong, whilst intellectuals prefer the comfort of causes and certain truths. This deference to intellectualism weakens these peoples and opens them up to be conquered by other groups which have not been inflicted with such a mindset. Its quite obvious that Spengler would see modern progressives as those strong in mind but weak in spirit, capable of aggressively deconstructing the nations they come from in the name of a “global” world with rhetoric and reason, but when it comes to dealing with the often violent consequences of their beliefs, namely terrorism and crime wrought by migration policy, and the slow creep of powers like Russia and China upon the Western hoard, their political solutions fork between weak handed policies which don’t fix the fundamental issues, and being compelled to necromance national sentiments to convince young men to die on the front for the ideologies that have made of them enemies for so long. In virtue of their behaviour, destined inevitabilities like the Great Replacement may conjure up images of a fallen Baghdad in an age where ignorance, hate and violence were thought to be far in the past.
As eulogised by H.G Wells et al.