Word: spengler
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...gloomier metaphor was ever coined to lend a semblance of shape to man's long struggle through history. Cultures, said Oswald Spengler, are limited biological forms of life?like inchworms, like oak trees, like men. Mysteriously born, they inexorably grow old, decay according to discernible pattern and then die. What is more, Spengler insisted, Western culture has already reached the last stages of its allotted life span...
...troll-eyed German high school teacher, Spengler looked at history not as a linear series of events but as the organic flowering and dying of eight major cultures: ancient Egyptian, ancient Semitic, Peruvian, Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Greco-Roman and Western. All had flourished for the same amount of time (about 1,000 years). All showed the same development. By comparing the dead to the living, the historian could tick off the inevitable signs of decay and predict how death would come again...
Staked Continents. Writing in a shabby Munich apartment just before and during World War I, Spengler gloomily concluded that history was witnessing the decline of the West. As in the "age of the Caesars," art and music had lost all real creative vitality. Power over the affairs of men had centered in a few enormous cities (megalopolis). Soon the masses of people, without hope or sense of form, would turn to a "second religiousness," clinging to blind faiths out of desperate need, while a series of world leaders backed by enormous military power would vie with one another over...
...exhausted postwar world swallowed Spengler's gloomy brew as a confirming, almost a soothing draught. What matter if the drink were hemlock? At least the worst was known. The Decline of the West, despite its Germanic prolixities, sold more than 100,000 copies in the first eight years, mostly in Germany. Spengler was the talk of every campus...
...book. The answer is no. Anyone who has read the History knows that he treats himself too harshly. The ignorance he pleads is, in fact, a relative thing: what single historian other than he knows so much or has used his knowledge with such soaring imagination? And who besides Spengler has had the audacity to escape from the drugging minutiae of documentary sweepings into the exhilarating reaches of man's whole past? Toynbee lacerates himself too much, and the total effect is damaging. But not annihilating. For after all, A Study of History exists, and it is Toynbee...