The End of Civilization

In this post, we will cover the finale of the Decline of the West. For all the analysis of other cultures, it ultimately comes back to ours in its industrial age, the age Spengler wrote in, which informs many of his strengths and errors.

Faustian Civilisation is the only civilisation thus far that has conquered nature and put its secrets to mankind’s use, but its medium to do this is the machine. The machine possesses its own logic, which subjugates, not just the Earth, but mankind as well. The economy of the urban world is entirely dependent on the existence of machines to facilitate it, and with it, a symbiosis of man and his extended utilities determines if he is able to retrieve food from the shops, water from the taps, and cool air during the summer. Without it, a thousand works of literature forecast its end.

The urban economy today was, in feudal times, the smallest and most arbitrary: preparation. But in Spengler’s time, more so in ours, preparation is all that is done to keep us occupied and active. The entrepreneur dictates what is to be done, the worker follows, but they both rest their livelihoods on the existence of the machines that produce things, which are produced, to be sold in the markets. If the machine breaks, the factory floor stagnates, and the flow of cash ceases to return to the entrepreneurs and their investors. This logic applies as much to the flow of energy in the machine itself, or to the dynamic flow of cash in the abstract machines of the investors’ centre.

The entrepreneur can be seen as a modern aristocrat, possessing the money, power, initiative, and leadership to return home with wealth. The floor workers are, in the same respect, the modern peasants, living paycheque to paycheque to make ends meet for their families, either never having the opportunity to break out of the cosmic rhythm of their days and weeks or never having the capacity for it in the first place. But neither would exist without the engineer. The engineer Spengler literally calls ‘the priest of the machine’, a tech-priest if you will. Faustian civilisation’s new priesthood emerges out of universities by the tens of thousands every year with the sole goal of understanding the secrets of the machines built to keep us alive. Spengler rightly pointed out that, in his time, there were fears of the exhaustion of coal-fields, but that this was nothing to worry about so long as there were brilliant men who could discover new sources of energy, which they did.

But because the engineer is a priest, with faith and moral duty in understanding the devices of Faustian civilisation, there is a chance that centuries from now these men may exhaust themselves. Instead of understanding the secrets of Civilisation, mankind decides there are better spiritual pursuits. Earlier in the Decline of the West, Spengler estimates that the collapse and sudden disappearance of Mycenaean culture was due, not simply to material changes during the Bronze Age collapse, but also due to the spiritual birth of Apollinian man, who then regarded everything that came before him as not worth preserving. Why couldn’t this happen with the intense pressure of maintaining the modern economy? Were a future culture to emerge that viewed everything the machine represents as satanic, the house of cards falls.

Industry for Spengler is still landbound in its production of things. But what is not landbound is the power of money, which now, as it was then, has reached its hand out to grab everything and pull it into a dynamic financial system that quantifies the value of everything within it, separates it from the things-in-themselves, and invests it elsewhere to expand its empire of liquidity. A dynamic system of energy, as we Westerners interpret our universe, excites material objects when it is full of energy, and stagnates them when that energy is removed. In the same way, Capitalism can and does excite and stagnate fields of industry and job markets with its surpluses of cash, causing economic booms and busts when, on the ground, nothing tangible has actually changed other than the inflated shop prices. This, too, requires a way of thinking that is entirely temporary. Just as Spengler accounts for the decline in the Apollinian conception of money as physical metal coinage into bartered wares as the empire dissolved and moved east, the same fate will befall Western economics in the coming centuries. Maybe it will be unnoticeable, maybe there will be a slow reduction in energy for trade until we trade like feudal peasants again, or maybe Capitalism will try to preserve itself until a collapse forces us back into medieval conditions. Only time will tell.

What this draws civilisation closer and closer to as it comes to an end is one final battle: ‘the conflict between money and blood’. Specifically, Spengler predicts that Caesarism will break the dictatorship of money and its political weapon, democracy, and put an end to the era of the world-city and its interests. Spengler opposes money and law to one another. On the one hand, money power aims to subjugate the law to its own interests. But Law itself is specially conditioned to appeal to high tradition and the ambition of families who care, not for wealth, not for good, but for the task of rulership. Power can only be overthrown by power, and the final power that can’t be removed is Law, so it’s inevitable that the future Caesars of the West will emerge from this particular field. Truths, principles, and narratives will no longer be believed in; money will return to being the tool of the rulers and governments.

Spengler ends Volume 2 with a quote from Seneca: ‘Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt; The fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling’. It reads pessimistically – bad things are going to happen, and they can happen in a dignified or undignified manner – but it can also be read optimistically. The only measure of a man’s success in this world has always been the faith he puts in himself, and the most self-assured men in history are those who are prepared to put everything on the line for the chance at winning. Anyone without this faith and determination has no right to complain that things don’t go their way. You could be a man in a relationship trying to lead your girl’s emotions, a businessman making a pitch to investors, Christ dying in the name of his Father, or Octavian at Actium; self-certainty is what wins each encounter. That is the ultimate lesson of The Decline of the West. Spengler was a pessimist, but he had no reason to be. He shows us six thousand years of confident men winning and shows us eight cultures that have variously disappeared due to the loss of this confidence, condition, form, certainty, faith, conviction, or blood. The next 75 years will unfold as the last 114 have since Volume 2 was published. But for the fate of the West as much as the fate of your personal lives, you have the capacity to determine what that looks like.

https://spenglarianperspective.substack.com/p/the-end-of-civilisation