Word: spenglers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Shot Down. As they would later with Arnold Toynbee, whose sweeping theory of flowering civilization resembles Spengler's earlier conception, teams of specialists ? anthropologists, economists, art critics as well as historians ? fell upon the cosmic thinker. Toynbee is an immeasurably more learned and more scrupulous scholar than Oswald Spengler, and his Christianity helped him to see not only the possibility of self-rejuvenation in a dying civilization but the hope as well of a spiritual development for mankind...
Under attack, Toynbee merely revised some of his broader conclusions. Spengler was all but shot down in flames. The experts demonstrated that he knew almost nothing about Chinese culture, nothing at all about Mexican. His Time Chart, marking off the exact number of years spent by each culture in each Spenglerian phase of its doomed history, was riddled with errors of fact. His parallels between cultures were often forced. All this was true. If the West was declining, it was not doing so according to any rules or laws the book had demonstrated...