O S W A L D   S P E N G L E R

Introduction

Oswald Spengler expressed a decidedly cyclical view of human history in his controversial work, The Decline of the West. I'm not going to try to review that entire work; what matters to this discussion is Spengler's notion that human societies were functionally similar to both terrestrial seasons and the human lifespan.

The Biological Metaphor

Both of these processes seemed to Spengler (and, it should be noted, plenty of other historians) to be composed of specific kinds of events in a definite sequence. In terms of life: youth, maturity, decline, and death; in terms of seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The biological pattern is persuasive as a metaphor for existence: new life comes into being; it matures into fullness and settles into a preferred form; it conserves its resources by refining the chosen form to its highest level; and it grows weak and dies.

Spengler adapted this biological metaphor to describe civilizations. First, a culture is born out of a critical mass of sufficiently similar-minded individuals. This culture "wins" over other nearby challengers for local resources; when this happens, the social customs and innovations developed to promote survival crystallize into institutions. At this point, the culture becomes a "civilization." It then spends the next phase of its existence refining its habits without really changing them; merely doing the same old things better. Finally, no longer able to respond to an environment that has continued to change, it disintegrates and its remaining resources are absorbed by new cultures.

The End of the Road

For all its limitations as an explanation for why civilizations perish, there is something appealing about this model of what has come to be known as "cultural morphology," or the forms civilizations take. Perhaps we find this explanation so plausible for the same reason our model of the solar system looked the way it did for so long: we like to think of ourselves at the center of the universe. "The proper measure of everything is Man," to paraphrase an old saying.

But this may be mere vanity. Not only is it perhaps too appealing, it leads to intense pessimism because it implies that civilizations, like life, are doomed to eventual extinction no matter what their worth might be. If the end of all effort is extinction, the study of history is worthless--after all, the point of studying history is to learn what directions lead nowhere. But why bother, if all roads are dead ends?

Conclusion

Even the title of Spengler's opus insinuated that Western civilization was already descending toward an inevitable demise. It is a testament to the power of Spengler's expression of this view that universities today are filled with academics--historians and otherwise--who echo the Spenglerian lament of hopelessness with pessimism, cynicism, and anomie.

The Chart

Over a period of fifteen years, the British science fiction author James Blish wrote a series of four novels which were published together in the omnibus volumed titled "Cities in Flight." These works, which chronicled some 2000 years of future human history, were to some degree inspired by concepts found in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.

Around 1968, the Riverside Quarterly published an analysis by Dr. Richard D. Mullen of the Spenglerian aspects of Blish's "Cities in Flight" novels. In his analysis, Dr. Mullen included a chart he derived from Spengler. This chart provides an excellent at-a-glance comparison of three civilizations (and Blish's imaginary future civilization). I have adapted elements of that chart, which you can see below.

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