Word: spenglerism
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...Spengler's The Decline of the West...
When World War II began to inundate the world, he began to think about west ern civilization. He evolved a panacea, full of the gusty notions of Oswald Spengler. He proposed that the battling nations abandon their differences, present a united front against "foreign races." Among those he described as inferior aliens were the Mongols, the Persians and the Moors, who he feared would corrupt the blood stream of the west. That bloodstream, he pointed out, was our most precious pos session...
...general tenor of all literary history has been of courage and faith in human nature, according to Brooks, but American authors during the last twenty years have tended to take the opposite viewpoint. Possibly throught Spengler's influence, certainly through the cynicism and disillusionment caused by the World War, modern writers like Hemingway, Eliot, O'Neill, and Dreiser are primarily concerned with pointing out that "life is a dark little pocket." Brooks appeals for more of the Homeric mood, for writers like Robert Frost and Lewis Mumford, genuine idealists who have an appreciation of human nature and the heroic aspects...
...course will include an examination of various philosophical interpretations of Christianity, including interpretations given by its critics, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler. The relation of Christianity to contemporary issues will also be discussed...
Classical civilization, says Peattie, was sunlit, but Western civilization was born in shadowy forests. "Never in a history is there adequate description of the dark forests in which the story of early medieval Europe was enacted," he claims, forgetting that both John Ruskin and Oswald Spengler made the point long ago. The Renaissance was the product of nasty weather. Rain, cold, floods, plagues, famines, sunspots flourished in the 14th Century. Result: Giotto, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, the Medicis. Confessed Leonardo da Vinci: "All the genius that I have comes from the air [climate] of my native province." When the weather cleared...