Word: spenglerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first press conference in July, France's President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing fielded questions while standing behind a lectern. At his second conference last week he somberly remained seated, in perhaps unconscious symbolism of the dour words to follow. Sounding like a Spengler with a French accent, for much of the conference he all but prophesied the decline of the West...
...validity of such visions and the nature of leadership itself depend very much on time and place, the deepest patterns of a society. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler constructed cyclical, organic theories of history. All civilizations, they said, passed through similar stages of growth and decay and eventually perished, whether from internal or external wounds. The 14th century Berber historian Ibn-Khaldun prefigured the idea by concluding that history repeatedly moves through the same cycles. According to Ibn-Khaldun's theory, a youthful, growing society is animated by asabiyya, the spirit of social solidarity found in what he called...
...spectacle that Heilbroner's thesis represents is almost as distressing as his prospect for the race. Here is no Spengler taking a sardonic pleasure in declines and falls. Here is a man of practical intelligence and good will, a man equipped by temperament and upbringing to hope. Yet his book is an epitaph on liberalism written with conspicuous pain by an author who includes himself in the epitaph. Heilbroner fits his own description of Promethean man, full of "driving energy," "nervous will": a problem solver. Now, he grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world...
...OSWALD SPENGLER ONCE SAID that a sure sign of the decline of the West would be its increasing preoccupation with religiosity rather than religion. Today, with pop monstrosities like Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway, Jesus freaks on the cover of Life, and cheap return tickets to Zen Satori available only Saturday night, we seem to be substituting an elaborate facade of images and facile spiritualism for any real commitments to spiritual growth. Our culture seems to be providing more and more channels for what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace," personal fulfillment, or the illusion of it, with no trial...
...Crimson's Ric Rojas will be trying to match his performance last Saturday against Cornell. Harvard won the meet, 19-40 Rojas set a new record of 26:06 on the live-and-one-half mile Franklin Park course, beating Tom Spengler's two-year-old record by one second...