Broken Dreams, Broken Promises

At the moment that Spengler wrote The Decline of the West modernity was in decline… WWI had devastated Europe and the supposed Great Powers were all losing or had lost their pirate Empires across the Third World. Mechanistic science and philosophy were under attack from all sides as Einstein’s revolutions began to modify and take hold of Newton’s worldview that would soon fragment into an array of competing theories leading to the Quantum revolution of the 30’s…

So the vitalism of Goethe and Nietzsche seemed to flow into such prequels of fascism with its notions of Eliot’s Wasteland, Pound’s Cantos, Yeats nostalgic Celtic Twilight… visions of ancient utopias that never existed but that could still hold sway over an age of bitter defeats and late romanticism, decadence, and disenchantment…

The postmoderns would later try to destroy the metanarratives of modernity, try to relativize history and all its theories; its historicist mythologies… did it accomplish its task. No. Humans are in love with the Mind’s inventions, and even now people project their wants and fears into dreams of past or future narratives. One reason Fantasy and Science Fiction still hold sway over a vast swath of readers imaginations.

I think one thing most fear above all is that modernity, progress, and democracy all arose with this strange amalgam of the Enlightenment’s dreams of Reason, Disenchantment, and Western Civilization. That this seems now to be crumbling around us due to our ill-choice in an economic system that embodied both the central motif of this worldview, along with all its ruinous consequences for the planet and for the stability of Western Civilization is coming to fruition.

We attack it and label its economic engine, and yet we do not see that one cannot rip out the engine without destroying the vehicle within which it has mobilized its forces. Spengler along with his mentor Nietzsche believes that somewhere in the decades of this new century we are living in that Western Civilization would enter it’s last stages of decline and fall… is this myth, metanarrative, or just a mental fiction about a process we still do not have much control over but that the Mind in its inventive powers dreams forward? As Spengler said:

“At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave.”