Category: Ideas

In the last post of my recent series of Spengler, I noted how the historian used the phrases “human insects” and “human vermin” in his book The Hour of Decision. Spengler was not alone in the use of dehumanising language to refer to his fellow countrymen. The Nazis were fond of referring to others as vermin but then so were the communists of the time. Meanwhile, the propaganda of the world wars often portrayed the enemy as an animal of some kind. Not much has improved since then, either. Social media these days is rife with the same dehumanising tone.

It seems to me that this phenomenon is related to another which is implied in Spengler and that is the rise of the individual-ego. Spengler gives the leaders and the experts of a country the right to use citizens as mere “objects”. This is an express violation of Kant’s moral imperative which stated that humans should always be treated as subjects and never objects. But nobody cared about such ethical niceties in the early 20^th century. And they still don’t, as the last three years has shown.

This trend to egotism can be seen in the developments in storytelling from ancient times til now and which I also looked at recently in the comparison between ancient Greek tragedy and Shakespearian tragedy. For our purposes here, there are three categories that are relevant in such stories and the wider culture they represent: the individual, the family and the collective (society).

Ancient Greek tragedy, and Greek society in general, is generally seen as giving birth to the idea of the individual and therefore also the ego. The birth of the hero as a distinct character from the chorus seems to have come out of the Dionysian rites that gave rise to Greek tragedy. But those rites were a collective phenomenon and thus the original appearance of the individual in Greek theatre was still counterbalanced by the strong presence of both the family and the collective.

The tension in Greek tragedy is not between the individual and their family or the collective but of all of them against fate or the gods. Thus, the chorus would often console or advise the main character since they were on the same team. The collective was there as a moral support to the hero. This is very different from the stories we see today.

We can trace the development from ancient times to ours by looking at Shakespeare’s tragedies. In Shakespeare, the collective is all but absent. Although Shakespeare sometimes used a “chorus”, it was nothing like the Greek chorus. It was usually a single person who functioned as a narrator and certainly not as a counterweight to the hero.

The family is often represented in Shakespeare. But, almost universally in the tragedies, the individual and the family are at loggerheads. Romeo and Juliet’s love is ruined by their families’ quarrel. Desdemona marries Othello against her father’s wishes and dies later as a result. The Hamlet family is destroyed by its lust for power. A similar lust for power causes Macbeth to kill Duncan who, as king, is the “father” of his people. The subsequent carnage destroys any potential for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to have a family of their own.

We see a similar breakup of the family due to the wilful behaviour of the hero in Faust, Don Juan, Don Giovanni, even Don Quixote, and numerous other works of this time. It’s possible to read such works as moral warnings about excessive individualism but, as Spengler pointed out, the opposite was mostly true and the daring behaviour of the hero was seen as exciting and stimulating. This was the celebration of the individual-ego at the expense of both the collective and the family.

By the time we get to modern Hollywood movies, it’s fair to say that the individual-ego now exists independently of the collective and the family. If Macbeth or Don Juan could still be viewed as a warning about excessive individualism, the warning no longer exists in modern storytelling where the collective and the family become Spenglerian “objects” to be used as the ego sees fit.

Consider The Matrix. At the beginning of the movie, Neo is alone. Any connection with his own family is unknown and he is neither married nor has a family of his own. The collective in the movie, the others who live in The Matrix, consists of people who are completely de-humanised. They are nothing more than human batteries. Moreover, as Morpheus points out, most of them cannot be “saved” because their minds couldn’t handle it.

The Terminators have been programmed (ideologically?) to treat humans as just things to be used, ignored or removed at will. They might be “on different sides” of the ideological fence, but their methods are identical. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth went mad for having treated Duncan as an object instead of a subject. But for the robot-humans in Terminator or The Matrix, such moral issues are of no real concern.

The individual-ego has come a long way from its birth in the Dionysian rites of ancient Greece where it was still safely enmeshed in the family and the collective. The modern West now represents the other extreme and it’s fair to say that we are taking it about as far as it can possibly go. The individual now reserves the right to make the collective bow to its will and to create its identity in complete independence of the collective and even the family. If that means standing all nature, all history and all morality on its head, then so be it.

From Charles Rollin writing in the middle of the 17^th century through the Enlightenment which gave birth to the USA and the French Revolution and on to Spengler we can see a clear progression in worldview. For Rollin, the problem of history was a moral one. The fall of past civilisations was due to moral corruption and there were various religiously-inspired debates about whether that corruption could be avoid through the exercise of free will or whether it was preordained.

By the time you get to the Enlightenment, the question was not primarily a moral but a rational one. Past civilisations had fallen due to errors and we could apply our intellect to learn from those errors so as not to repeat them. This was the attitude that motivated the French and American Revolutions against the order of old Europe which was assumed to have already entered the tyrannical/decadent phase of civilisation.

The intellectual dreams of the Enlightenment were shattered by The Terror, Napoleon and various other developments. By the end of the 19^th century there was a crescendo of pessimism seen most clearly in Schopenhauer and the artistic movement called the fin de siecle with its themes of degeneracy, cynicism and fatalism. It is into this world that Spengler was born and he made no bones about the fact that he was a pessimist and even a misanthrope.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of society continued apace. The industrial revolution and corresponding rise of modern banking chewed up and spat out what was left of the nobility and peasantry. Nobody took the church seriously anymore. The army, which had previously upheld codes of honour and rules of engagement, was replaced by conscription and meat-grinder battle tactics while the advent of Total War meant that it became a viable tactical approach to try and destroy the enemy’s economy to prevent them from being able to wage war at all. This led to the perception of betrayal by soldiers on the battlefield. Breakthroughs in science and technology were also radically transforming society.

The psychological effect of all these trends was that people had the feeling that all tradition had been lost. Society seemed to be driven by new and mysterious forces that could scarcely be identified let alone controlled. Some tried to identify those forces. Among them were Jung and Freud, who went looking into the unconscious to account for personal psychology. Spengler and Toynbee turned their attention to the macro picture and investigated the patterns that underlay history.

I have already mentioned that there are two separate types of analysis going on in Spengler. There is the cyclical analysis of civilisation on the one hand and the phenomenological analysis of culture on the other. Toynbee only worries about the cyclical analysis and his work is clearer and more concise. It’s also more careful, restrained and humble. Toynbee openly admits we do not have the data to draw many firm conclusions. Spengler is quite happy to jump to conclusions. He cannot keep his “will” out of his history which is rather fitting since he defines the Faustian culture itself as a culture of will. This is the key difference between him and Toynbee and also the crucial fact that must be understood to make sense of Spengler and his work. As we will see, Spengler’s seeming ignorance of his own will makes his story a tragedy.

Because Spengler bases his psychology on will alone, in my opinion he downplays the fairly obvious generalisation which I presented earlier in the series which is that Faustian culture is the opposite of the Classical. We can tease out that distinction by comparing two of the great tragedies of the respective cultures: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Consider these inversions. Oedipus is king at the beginning of his story while Macbeth will become king. Oedipus has already inadvertently committed parricide and incest. Macbeth will consciously choose to commit regicide. Nothing Oedipus does in his story is personally revealing. He does what anybody would do and comes to grief through no fault of his own. Everything Macbeth does hinges on himself. He has numerous choices to make each of which would change his story completely. Right up until the end, he could “save himself”.

There is also an important distinction in thinking/knowledge in the two stories which relates to a broader distinction between the Classical and the Faustian and that is a crucial point in Spengler’s history. The information Oedipus gets from the oracles and the other characters in the play is clear and unambiguous. Some characters attempt not to give him information because they know it will be personally damaging to him. But Oedipus is not trying to get the information for his own purposes. He is trying to solve the problem of the plague affecting his kingdom. In this way, he is doing exactly what we would expect from a good king.

When all the information comes out at the end of the play, it is also clear and unambiguous. Because of that clarity, it instantly overturns Oedipus’ world. He is a mighty and powerful king one minute and the next minute his life in ruined. He responds by gauging out his eyes raising the philosophical question of whether ignorance is bliss. Sophocles invites us to imagine that Oedipus could have remained happy if he didn’t know the truth.

The clarity of the information means that Oedipus does not have to think. There is no reflection required on his part to make sense of what has happened to him. His world is a binary. There is the world before he knew the truth and the world after. Moreover, the knowledge he discovers is universal. Even the lowest peasant can understand what has happened to Oedipus. There is no ambiguity in the story and therefore no need to think about things.  

We see the same thing in Hamlet with a ghost providing the information which kicks the plot into action. Hamlet shows himself to be an empiricist by not taking the ghost’s word at face value. Rather, he sets up a test which will corroborate the information given by the ghost. Based on the results of that test, he concludes that the ghost spoke truth. Macbeth doesn’t need to test. Immediately after his encounter with the witches he receives information that seems to validate what they told him; that he will become king.

Even with this corroborating evidence, however, the information is not conclusive and the reason is because the information itself is only half the issue. The other half is the interior state of Macbeth and Hamlet; not just their mind but also their will.

To be or not to be. To slay Duncan or not to slay Duncan. These are interior questions. Oedipus does not have to face any such problems. His will and his mind plays no role in his downfall. For Macbeth and Hamlet, will and mind and the confusion between them are central to the story. The two men live in a world where appearance is deceptive and where they themselves are the wilful propagators of, to use a term that has become popular in recent years, misinformation.

Oedipus and everybody else in his story, including the oracles, are an open book. Everything  takes place out in the open; extroverted, exoteric and unambiguous. Nobody is trying to fool anybody. By contrast, Macbeth is introverted, esoteric and ambiguous. When he does become king, it is by deception and subterfuge. The other characters are suspicious but they too live in a world of ambiguity where they cannot know the truth without willingly setting out to find it through investigation.

What we have here is a distinction which takes several forms: politics vs psychology; will vs reason; instinct vs mind.  Spengler, following Nietzsche, wants to get rid of mind altogether and say that the real Faustian is all about will. This is a very strange thing to say for a scholar, who works exclusively with the mind, but it was part of the disillusionment with the Enlightenment that prevailed at that time. Spengler puts it this way:

“The rationalism of the late Baroque….decided in favour of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jacobins) but almost immediately thereafter the 19^th century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Volunatas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us.”

(Note that Spengler likes to use the word “blood” a lot even though he didn’t mean it in the way that the Nazis would later use it as a catchword for genetic determinism. He was talking about a kind of collective will/consciousness).

I don’t believe you can understand Macbeth, and by extension Faustian culture, on will alone. Mind and will are intrinsic to the story. Back in the Classical world, Oedipus had solved the riddle of the sphinx. But that riddle was completely objective and nothing to do with Oedipus as an individual. By contrast, the riddles given by the witches to Macbeth are personal. It’s because they are personal that they trigger what we might as well call Macbeth’s will.

Macbeth clearly desires to become king. It is that desire which the witches play on at the beginning of the story. What Macbeth perceives in their information, the picture he forms in his mind, is inseparable from his will, his vanity and his ambition. Similarly, when Macbeth returns to the witches for more information later in the story, he is not a disinterested participant. He is looking for reassurance that he has nothing to fear from Macduff. The witches information is again ambiguous but Macbeth cannot see that because they are telling him what he wants to hear. At no point does he ask the obvious question: what is in it for these witches? Why are they supposedly helping me? Is it a good idea to believe strange creatures that have no skin in the game?

Macbeth lacks the self-knowledge and scepticism to distrust information that he wants to hear. Is this a problem of mind or of will? Viewed through the lens of will, we would say that Macbeth does not own his will. It is the witches and Lady Macbeth who use their will to shape his thoughts. But therein lies the whole problem. How can Macbeth tell the difference between his thoughts and the will of himself and others. We see the same dynamic in Hamlet who kills Polonius through a combination of misunderstanding and misguided will. To simply insist that mind plays no role is to lose half the meaning of these stories.

But that’s what Spengler does in his historical analysis. For him, the statesman or nobleman has an “instinct” or feel for history that has nothing to do with mind. Therefore, the real changes, the important political decisions, do not require mind at all. They are carried out by intuition (another concept popular in the 19^th century). By contrast, the priesthood, and their modern counterparts the intellectuals, flounder away with airy-fairy theories that get nothing done. That is the story Spengler paints for us in Decline of the West.

I have already pointed out the obvious problem here that Spengler himself was a practitioner of mind. But Spengler claimed to be doing a new kind of history, one that saw beneath the surface appearance to the deeper symbolic meanings. Thus, Spengler could have his cake and eat it too. He could claim to be in the instinct and intuition camp, not the intellectual one. He was not an intellectual like the Enlightenment philosophes who were detached from the stream of history. Ironically, and maybe tragically for Spengler, this turned out to be true. His concepts were eagerly adopted by the nascent Nazi Party and incorporated into their ideology. When the party came to power, they proceeded to put those concepts into action.   

Let’s assume, as I believe, that Spengler is wrong. Let’s assume that what distinguishes Faustian psychology is the inextricable combination of will and mind. In that case, for any product of the mind such as a work of history, there is inevitably an element of will involved. Just as we cannot understand Macbeth except by the combination of his will and his mind which create his picture of the world, so too we cannot understand Spengler without understanding what will he is bringing to his work of history. This is all the more important because it turned out that Spengler was not a disinterested observer after all.

A few biographical details will suffice to make this clear.

When Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, he was unknown. He was not a professor at a university but a self-funded scholar living alone on a small family pension. With the publication of the first edition of the book in 1918, he became an overnight celebrity. This makes a great deal of sense in hindsight because Germany had lost the war and there were a lot of people who were trying to make sense of that loss. Spengler provided a new way of looking at things, one that fitted the pessimistic mood of the time.

With the success of the first edition, Spengler then worked on the second edition of the book which was published in 1922. In 1924, no doubt encouraged by his growing celebrity and social connections, Spengler got involved in politics but proved ineffectual in that field. He went back to writing and published two more books – Man and Technics (1931) and The Hour of Decision (1934) – before his death of a heart attack at age 55 in 1936.

But he did not. The only explicit reference he makes to the Nazi ideology was a rejection of the idea of genetic “race”. By contrast, Spengler refers to the Nazi takeover of power in 1933 as a “mighty phenomenon” that was guided by the “Prussian spirit”. This error was not random bad luck or a one-off mistake. It happened precisely because Spengler had allowed his will to come into the picture and distort his understanding. Or, we might say that Spengler’s understanding changed now that he believed he could make a difference in the world.

Consider this passage from the introduction of The Hour of Decision:

“The man of action is often limited in his vision. He is driven without knowing the real aim. He might possibly offer resistance if he did see it, for the logic of destiny has never taken human wishes into account. But more often he goes astray because he has conjured up a false picture of things around and within him. It is the great task of the historical expert (in the true sense) to understand the facts of his time and through them to envisage, interpret, and delineate the future…”

This represents a 180 degree turn on what Spengler had written in Decline of the West. In that book, it was the man of action who had direct access to the course of history. He had no need of intellectuals because he didn’t need to consciously understand what he was doing. He felt “destiny” in his “blood”. Spengler explicitly relegated the intellectual to a useless appendage who only appeared in the late urban decline phase of the culture.

But in The Hour of Decision, Spengler paints himself as the historical “expert” who will tell the “man of action” what is going to happen. This is all very convenient. When Spengler wrote his first book he probably assumed nobody would read it. But now that he was famous, suddenly he recommended that intellectuals should be listened to. Spengler had also tried and failed to influence politics directly. So, he fell back to doing what had worked before, writing books.

The Hour of Decision contains one other big change that differentiates Spengler’s view in 1934. In his earlier work, Spengler had presented a fatalistic view of history as a cycle that was inevitable. The cycle would be repeated whether anybody liked it or not. The only thing to do was to stoically resign yourself to it. But in the Hour of Decision, suddenly that is not the case anymore. Spengler presents a program that he literally says can be the “saviour” of the “white world” (Faustian culture). All of a sudden, the Buddhistic and Schopenhauerian pessimism had gone.

More specifically, Spengler uses pessimism for effect. The first 190 pages of The Hour of Decision are a repetition of Spenglerian history with a specific focus on recent European history and Germany’s place within it. It’s 100% doom and gloom; a detailed account of everything wrong with the modern world presented without a glimmer of positive emotion. This is the Spengler we know from the earlier works albeit with a more explicitly political bent.

All that changes in the last 40 pages of the book. Spengler switches gears altogether and presents a vision for the future of Germany. We don’t need to worry about the details but suffice to say they are very Nazi-like and involve everybody doing their duty and following great leaders to victory.

This last 40 pages forces a complete re-evaluation of Spengler’s previous works. Spengler’s earlier pessimism had created a strange kind of trust. If somebody sugar coats things, we assume they are buttering us up for some ulterior motive or maybe even deceiving themselves. But when somebody tells us everything is hopeless, we are inclined to trust them as objective observers. They seem to have no reason to lie; no ulterior motive.

As soon as Spengler starts to present a positive vision for the future, he reveals his own will and therefore his own bias. More importantly, that view necessarily contradicts his earlier history because now he is implying that the future is not inevitable after all. Spengler doesn’t clarify how exactly how his vision will work or what is going to happen if it’s implemented. He simply asserts that Germans are the chosen people because they display “Prussianism”. The irony is that this opens Spengler up to the exact criticism he had earlier made of Nietzsche which was that he was good at pointing out what was wrong with the world but not so good and coming up with a productive vision for how to make things better.

When Spengler was able to keep his will out of the equation, he presented a consistent and compelling analysis. As soon as his own will came into play, he became contradictory and ambiguous. In other words, he became Faustian. It’s because of the will that we live in a world where appearance cannot be taken for granted. What we see in the world is fundamentally determined by what we are looking for and because we are all looking for slightly different things we do not see the same thing.

But more than that, unless we have mastered our own will, we become victim to it and it influences our mind in ways we do not understand. This is the Faustian condition that Shakespeare so perfectly described in Macbeth and it is the one that Spengler was trying to pretend didn’t exist by stating that the will could exist without the mind. Ironically, the desire to get rid of mind and revert to will is nothing more than a yearning for the Classical world where people really did operate far more from instinct (will) alone. Spengler wanted Germany to become like the Roman Empire.

The Faustian condition creates an anxiety that was unknown to the ancients and has been unknown to most of the people in the West for most of its history for the simple fact that the majority of people worked on the land and retained an intrinsic connection with reality. Once upon a time, it really was just the nobility and the priesthood who had to face the inherent uncertainty of the Faustian mindset. That changed with the Reformation but really kicked into gear in the 19^th century as we began to democratise the culture. Fast forward to today and we have created the perfect Faustian world where nothing can be taken on face value and where anxiety is all pervasive. We are all Macbeth now.

Just like Macbeth, our anxiety sends us off looking for certainty. Spengler found that certainty in the cycles of history. With those cycles he was able to locate the place of western history as if on a map and give context to what was happening. In my opinion, however, he failed to extrapolate the essence of the Faustian onto where we are in the cycle. If Faustian culture is the inverse of the Classical, we would not expect the same pattern to play out. We would expect its opposite.

And this brings us to Caesarism and the concluding point of this post and this series of essays.

Caesarism was one of Spengler’s predictions for the future. As the name suggests, it is based on the declining period of Roman history where dictators ran around chopping people’s heads off and feeding them to lions (OK, there were some good Caesars too, I’ll admit).

In Decline of the West, Spengler presents Caesarism as the inevitable part of the cycle that we must go through. But in The Hour of Decision we can see that he is emotionally attached to the concept because now he presents it as part of his vision for the future that will “save us”. It is implied in his concept of Prussianism which entails a dictator for whom the rest of the public is happy and content to “do their duty”.

This admiration for the strong man was not just theoretical. Spengler speaks in glowing terms of the Italian dictator. “Mussolini sees everything.” Yes, Spengler actually wrote that. But it gets worse:

“Mussolini is a master-man with the Southern cunning of the race in him….and is therefore able to stage his movement in entire consonance with the character of Italy – home of opera – without ever being intoxicated by it himself…”

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight and we know that Mussolini did become intoxicated by his power. Spengler was also not alone in thinking that Mussolini and Hitler really did “see everything”. What is important here is not so much that Spengler got it wrong but why he got it wrong. In the Hour of Decision, Spengler lets the cat out of the bag. He was not a disinterested, pessimistic, sceptical observer as he portrayed himself to be in Decline of the West. He wanted Caesarism to happen. He is very clear on that point. That explains his support for the Nazis and for Mussolini.

This feeling is understandable. Like Spengler, we also live in crazy times where all kinds of mad things happen on a daily basis. Many people would love it if some strong man came along and made it all stop. “Make it make sense,” is the catchcry you can still hear today. The problem is that the world we live is far too complex to be managed by a single person. All a strong man can do is simplify the world and that simplification necessarily happens at the end of a gun barrel. You can have complexity or you can have Caesarism. You cannot have both.

Where things get weirder in relation to Spengler is that he lived right in the middle of Caesarism. Caesarism was everywhere in Europe in the 1930s. Apart from Hitler and Mussolini, you had Franco in Spain and numerous other dictators popping up all over the place (the interested reader can find a list of interwar European dictatorships here). Spengler wished for Caesarism and yet it was right in front of his face.

And here we come to a very Faustian question: to what extent did Spengler help to create the Caesarism of the 30s? He gave intellectual cover to the strong men not just in the concept of Caesarism itself but in the idea that everything was now a matter of will and nothing else. The Nazis carried out their first book burning in 1933. Spengler makes no mention of it in The Hour of Decision. For a man who wrote books, that’s a strange thing. But they weren’t burning his books. They were burning the books of those other intellectuals, the ones who didn’t have their finger on the pulse of history.

The time for thinking was over. The time for ideas was over. That’s what Spengler said and that’s what happened. Meanwhile, in The Hour of Decision he uses terms like “human vermin” and “human insects” to describe the people who he claims had brought about the dire state of the world. And he gave full permission for the leader who understands history to use people as “objects”. That was what history showed, therefore it must be right.

We know where such ideas led. They led to the gas chambers. Should Spengler have predicted that? The great historian who had won his reputation on his predictive powers did not see the most important thing. Spengler claimed to be a misanthrope. But he had also earlier claimed to be a pessimist. That was all fine in theory. I suspect if Spengler had lived to see his misanthropy put into action he would have been appalled. If he was honest with himself, he would also have wondered whether he was partly responsible.

If he had not published anything else after Decline of the West, we wouldn’t be able to hold Spengler responsible. But The Hour of Decision had revealed that he was not disinterested in these matters. It’s because mind and will are not separate that we can hold Spengler accountable. His ideas helped to unleash a misanthropic will that led to the deaths of millions of innocent people. The fact that he wasn’t aware of his error makes him a tragic figure just like Macbeth. Like the fictional character, he lacked self knowledge of his own will and that of others around him. He gave intellectual cover to barbarism.

And here is the final irony: on the second-last page of The Hour of Decision, Spengler writes as follows:-

“And what if some white adventurer…whose wild soul cannot breathe in the hothouse of civilisation and seeks to satiate its love of danger in fantastical colonial ventures, among pirates, in the Foreign Legion – should suddenly see this grand goal staring him in the face…
The loathing of deep and strong men for our conditions and the hatred of profoundly disillusioned men might well grow into a revolt that meant to annihilate.”

This must be one of the more extraordinary passages in the history of scholarship. It’s the perfect description of Hitler and the Nazis. Spengler knew the Nazis directly and yet he did not realise that the profoundly disillusioned men with hatred in their hearts were right in front of his face and that they would take his beloved Prussian army and unleash the exact annihilation he warned of. On the most important matter, Spengler was unable to differentiate appearance from underlying reality in his own life and with his own eyes.

What Spengler saw in Hitler was “Prussianism”. But Prussianism was nothing more than Spengler’s own idea, the contents of his own mind and his own will. Just as Macbeth convinced himself that the murder of Duncan was justified based on his own will, Spengler convinced himself that the crimes of the Nazis were justified based on his own view of the future. Unlike his earlier work, it was not a view based on analysis of real data but a story he had concocted for himself.

This is the fundamental condition of Faustian culture. Know thyself for us means to know our will and to know the will of others. Only that way can you understand the Faustian world. Spengler didn’t know his own will or the will of the Nazis. He fell into the same error he had accused the Enlightenment thinkers of. Just like them, he ended up wanting to change history. And he did. But not in the way he could have imagined.

It is the invisible element of will which makes the Faustian world ambiguous and mysterious and which creates the anxiety that we seek to relieve by turning to religion and ideology. Spengler ended up turning history into his own religion and ideology. He made history into a god and himself into its prophet. In doing so, he ended up playing the role of the witches to Hitler’s Macbeth. He would use his books to make the “man of action” do what he wanted. And that’s exactly what happened. For that he can be held responsible in a way that only the Faustian culture can hold somebody responsible: the wilful deception of oneself and of others.

All posts in this series:-
Re-thinking Spengler Part 1: Morphological Thinking
Re-thinking Spengler Part 2: The Psychology of Pseudomorphosis
Re-thinking Spengler Part 3: The Problem of the Magian
Re-thinking Spengler Part 4: Bourgeoisie vs Romantics
Re-thinking Spengler Part 5: On Elitism
Re-thinking Spengler Part 6: Rogue Priests and Rebel Commanders
Re-thinking Spengler Part 7: A Pop Culture Interlude
Re-thinking Spengler Part 8: Kings and Commoners
Re-thinking Spengler Part 9: Escape from the Tyrannical Father
Re-thinking Spengler Part 10: The USA (Universal State of America)
Re-thinking Spengler Final

I said in the last post that the creation of the USA was a victory of Rebel Priests and Rebel Commanders that seemed to have no precedent in history. And, yet, the United States has now become the Universal State of Faustian civilisation. The contradiction between these two facts seems to me to be at the heart of why the US is the Unconscious Empire. In this post, I’ll try to explain how this came about.

The birth of the United States takes place in the phase of Toynbee’s cycle where the Creative Minority becomes the Dominant Minority and the Internal Proletariat is formed. A useful way to put these concepts into concrete terms is to compare the histories of the United States and Australia. Both nations were born out of the Internal Proletariat of Britain and Europe.

Everybody knows Australia was founded as a convict colony. What is less well-known is that the establishment of the first convict colony at Sydney was directly motivated by the American Revolution. Britain had too many criminals and not enough prisons to house them. In other words, it had an Internal Proletariat that its Dominant Minority didn’t know what to do with. One of the solutions was to send them overseas and make them someone else’s problem. The practice of sending them to America started in 1718 when the British parliament passed what was called the Transportation Act.

Everybody also knows that the US engaged in chattel slavery beginning in the mid-18^th century. Fewer people know that a system of slavery was already in place beforehand. It was known as indentured servitude. The main difference between indentured servitude and chattel slavery is that the former has a time limit at which the slave/servant is given back their freedom.

The Native American population had been placed into indentured servitude by the Spanish, French and the British from the beginning of colonialism. But indentured servitude was also the main way for poor Europeans to get to America. The deal was that somebody would pay for the cost of your trip and when you arrived you had to work for them for a fixed period, usually 7 years.

Somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the Europeans who emigrated to America in the 18^th century did so by indenturing themselves. The deal was sweetened by the fact that most of them became eligible at the end of their 7 years for generous land grants of about 30 acres with a supply of provisions that would set them up to be able to till the land and make a life for themselves as free men. This system created the large pool of labour that was needed to grow the colonies.

The Transportation Act of 1718 allowed the British to send its criminals to America by placing them in indentured servitude under the normal contract conditions. This was a relatively cheap way for the British government to solve its prison overcrowding (Internal Proletariat) problem. The scheme was despised in America, including by Benjamin Franklin, and was one of the many grievances that would eventually lead to war.

(Random fun fact about Banks: he refused to travel on a later voyage with Cook because the Captain would only allow him to bring one fiddler on board to play music after dinner. Banks had demanded two).

In 1786, with America now independent and no longer willing to accept the criminals of Britain, the British decided to implement Banks’ suggestion. Preparations were made to send the first convicts to Australia. They arrived in what is now Sydney on January 20, 1788. The convicts were placed in exactly the same kind of indentured servitude that was in place in America with terms dependent on the severity of their crime. One of the early governors of Australia, Lachlan Macquarie, also copied the American system by giving land grants to emancipated convicts but this was overturned later as the British government felt it was against the spirit of a penal colony which was supposed to deter would-be criminals.

What was going on here was the Dominant Minority of Britain, which was unable to solve the problem of crime and poverty among the Internal Proletariat it had created, decided to send them elsewhere by either voluntary or compulsory means. This was not a new tactic in history. The Greeks and the Romans had followed the same path. Indentured servitude was more like the slavery of Greece while chattel slavery become predominant later in Rome and was a part of what caused the Roman Empire to fall. History seemed to be repeating.

But here is an important point to understand: the history and fall of Rome was well known at the time among the educated classes in Europe and was front and centre in the minds of the founding fathers who created the United States. It was widely acknowledged that Europe had become tyrannical and cruel and America was explicitly seen as a chance at a fresh start. Furthermore, the men of the Enlightenment had an understanding of the cyclical nature of civilisation.

The big difference between Spengler and Rollin was that Rollin saw the fall of civilisation as a moral failing that he framed in religious terminology. We can summarise him in secular terms this way: if all past civilisations were patriarchies, and if all past civilisations had gone to their doom by what amounted to an inherent flaw in patriarchy, then it followed that we should be able to prevent a similar fate by getting rid of the patriarchy, or at least fixing the flaws in it.

Even if you disagreed with Rollin’s specific analysis, what was implied by his idea was that history could be changed. We could learn what went wrong in the past and ensure we didn’t do the same thing again. This was the belief that motivated Enlightenment thinkers like Chesterfield and also the founders of the United States. For them, the Popes and Kings were just like the tyrants who led Rome to its destruction. The rebellion against the patriarchy was partly motivated by a desire to avoid the fate of Rome.

But there’s a second thread to the founding of the US and that was the Puritan invocation of Jewish history via the Bible. In this way, the US was built on the same Classical-Magian symbiosis that had founded Faustian civilisation in the first place. But it’s even more interesting than that because, as we have already seen in this series of posts, the Jews were the Internal Proletariat in the Classical civilisation. The Bible is, in large part, the story of a historical Internal Proletariat.

Thus, what we have in the founding of the United States is the Internal Proletariat of Britain invoking the lessons of the Internal Proletariat of the Roman Empire (the Jews via the Bible) and then synthesising these with a study of the Creative Minority of Rome that preceded its decadent phase (the Roman Republic). The founding of the United States was the attempt to learn from and avoid a repeat of history.  

What makes the founding fathers of the USA special is that they made such an attempt. What makes the USA tragic is that they ended up becoming the Universal State of the Faustian anyway. Part of the reason is that they misdiagnosed the problem.

Tyranny might have been the normal form of the Universal States of past civilisations and the problems of tyranny might very well have been what brought down those civilisations. But Faustian civilisation was a different beast. The rule of kings and popes was only a pseudomorphosis. It was the Classical-Magian pseudomorphosis inherited from the dying days of the Roman Empire. The real Faustian only began to show itself in the industrial revolution with the emergence of modern banking.

The USA has ended up becoming the Universal State of the Faustian after all and we can trace the pathway to that outcome through the bitter enmity between two of the founding fathers: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

I’m going to gloss over all the nitty gritty here; the personality flaws, the hypocrisies, the obvious problems in the views of each and all the others nuances. What is important here is the two different stories that have become associated with each man which represent two visions for what the USA should be.

The Jefferson Story was that America should become a self-sufficient land of yeoman farmers. This followed the sentiment that was widespread at the time that the nascent US needed to completely disconnect from the corruption of old Europe. Yeoman farmers would be just like the serfs of old, only they would get to keep more of the fruits of their labour and select their own government. Note that this vision is practically the direct opposite of a proletariat and so Jefferson, although he wouldn’t have thought about it this way, had outlined a vision to overcome the main problem of the time i.e. the existence of the Internal Proletariat.

The Hamilton Story was the America should become a nation just like Britain. By doing so, it would take its place alongside the countries of Europe by becoming a competitor (or, better yet, a victor) in the world of commerce, finance and international politics. To do this, America needed to create its own elite. It was for this reason that Hamilton recommended life terms for parliament. Only a permanent body, he said, could keep the imprudence of democracy in check.

Jefferson was the idealist who thought that all people could be raised up to be exemplars of Enlightenment through education. Hamilton was the hard-nosed realist who had a pessimistic view of human nature and thought democracy was a bad idea. In this way, Hamilton was the direct successor to the kings and popes of old.

The irony is that Hamilton was a member of the Internal Proletariat while Jefferson was from the nobility. Hamilton’s story is eerily similar to Napoleon’s and Hitler’s. He was born on the edge of Empire (in the British West Indies). He was a tenacious, passionate and ambitious outsider who raised himself up to political power through service in the army.

In Hamilton we see the pattern that was repeated in France and Germany of the Internal Proletariat rising to a position of political power and pushing for a Universal State. I have already pointed out how strange this is historically, since it amounts to the Internal Proletariat doing the work that the Dominant Minority should be doing.

In the Classical world, Julius Caesar filled this role. He was a member of the elite whose challenge to the decadent structures of Rome created the conditions by which Augustus came to power. It was Caesar who forged the new system of monarchy which marked the final phase of the Classical civilisation. Although he wasn’t acting alone, it’s nevertheless true that Caesar in large part created the Universal State of the Classical Civilisation.

If history was repeating, it should have been Jefferson who created the Universal State of Faustian civilisation since he came from the nobility and was very Caesar-like in the scope of his abilities and his political influence. But Jefferson was not pushing for the Universal State. He was arguing against it.

It was Hamilton who was pushing in the direction which led to a Universal State. What a synchronicity then that Abigail Adams, John Adams’ wife, had warned her husband that Hamilton was a dangerous man “ambitious as Julius Caesar and a subtle intriguer”. Thus, Hamilton equates to Caesar. It was his influence which led the US to become the Universal State of the Faustian.

Given the Biblical nature of the birth of the United States, it wouldn’t be too far wrong to say that Hamilton was Cain to Jefferson’s Abel. The Jeffersonian vision was informed by an Enlightenment understanding of the cyclical nature of history and an optimistic view of human nature implied by the philosophy of Rousseau. It desired a country populated by self-sufficient, full engaged and empowered citizens in a nation that would be similarly self-sufficient and independent.

The Hamiltonian vision amounted to recreating the conditions of a European nation state in America with the Internal Proletariat kept in check by a Dominant Minority. This wasn’t just theory either. Hamilton put this vision into action very early on.

In 1794, Hamilton was the Secretary of the Treasury and needed to raise revenue to pay off debts. He decided to introduce an excise on whiskey that he knew would be unpopular. The excise triggered the Whiskey Rebellion during which Hamilton personally accompanied a huge contingent of federal troops to put down the rebels. All this only two decades after the Boston Tea Party. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Naturally, Hamilton was also a banker. He founded the Bank of New York. In the decades that followed the creation of the USA, the industrial revolution and its banking system slowly but surely took over the real political power in the world. Britain had muscled out Holland and other competitors for control of the international banking system in the 19^th century. In the years that followed WW2, America took over the reins.

This was all done behind closed doors at conferences where men in suits agreed upon the rules of the new system. The US was in the box seat since the most important countries at the table owed it huge war debts. An associate representing the Bank of England said of the Bretton Woods agreement that it was the worst thing to happen to Britain except for the war itself. The keys to the British Empire had been handed to the US. With France and Germany in ruins, the Universal State of the Faustian civilisation was less created by the United States than handed to it on a silver platter.

Isn’t it ironic that the Faustian is named after a man who did a deal with the devil. The devil’s pact the USA made at the end of WW2 was to betray the foundations of its republic. Although, in fairness, all other nation states were faced with the same dilemma. Industrial capitalism simply was not compatible with the concept of the nation state. The nation state is predicated on independence. Industrial capitalism is predicated on interdependence. The tension between these still dominates our politics.

If there was a symbolic battle in the USA between Jefferson and Hamilton, it was lost at the end of WW2. The reason why that victory was not made overt was because the Jeffersonian dream in various guises is still supported by a large share of the American public. The other reason is because the Universal State of the Faustian civilisation is not an empire. It has no emperors and only minimal exoteric form at all. Its power lies in the management of systems and the control of access to those systems. Just ask the Canadian truckers (internal proletariat) and the Russians (external proletariat) who have had their bank accounts frozen in the last year or so.

Interestingly, the financial aspects of this system were exactly predicted by Spengler.

“Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of a Civilisation, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence, its opposite is the provincial economy.”

Jefferson’s vision was the provincial economy. Therefore, it was the opposite of the Faustian. His vision would have required America to completely disconnect from Europe, but that was never really possible. Thus, Hamilton won the day and, with him, the Internal Proletariat of Faustian civilisation rose to the position of Dominant Minority and did what the old Dominant Minority of Popes and Kings had been unable to do: create a Universal State.

All posts in this series:-
Re-thinking Spengler Part 1: Morphological Thinking
Re-thinking Spengler Part 2: The Psychology of Pseudomorphosis
Re-thinking Spengler Part 3: The Problem of the Magian
Re-thinking Spengler Part 4: Bourgeoisie vs Romantics
Re-thinking Spengler Part 5: On Elitism
Re-thinking Spengler Part 6: Rogue Priests and Rebel Commanders
Re-thinking Spengler Part 7: A Pop Culture Interlude
Re-thinking Spengler Part 8: Kings and Commoners
Re-thinking Spengler Part 9: Escape from the Tyrannical Father
Re-thinking Spengler Part 10: The USA (Universal State of America)
Re-thinking Spengler Final

Before he gets into the history itself, Sallust writes what amounts to an apology. He anticipates that his fellow Romans will accuse him of “idleness”. Why, Sallustius, we can imagine them saying, did you waste your time writing history when you could have been making it? The short version of Sallust’s answer was that Roman public life had become corrupted and it was no longer a domain for the virtuous. This was the time of the Roman civil wars and Sallust had been on the side of Julius Caesar before the latter’s assassination.

Having your head chopped off was probably the best way to go in those days given that other popular ways to dispatch of a political enemy included feeding them to a pack of hungry lions while a leering mob cheered on. One area that Rome continued to innovate on in its declining years was cruelty. In any case, Sallust’s “idleness” would certainly have been motivated by an instinct of self-preservation. He withdrew from public life to write histories and build magnificent gardens.

But the fact that Sallust felt the need to apologise for doing scholarship also tells us an awful lot about life in ancient Rome. This was a culture of deeds and action, not words. Rome never had any kind of public education system and private education was mostly tailored to practical pursuits. The Romans even renounced some aspects of Greek culture like music and athletics. Valour in war was the way to create one’s reputation. Anything else was “idleness”.

Paine had only been in America a couple of years when he wrote Common Sense and it’s possibly because of this that he hadn’t yet become accultured to the very provincial nature of society at that time. Most people were tightly attached to the colony they lived in and there had not yet developed a substantial American public discourse with a unifying character. That’s what Paine provided. His book become a best seller and, more importantly, it sold in all colonies. It got the public thinking about the possibilities of America as a political and cultural entity.

Although it’s a dirty word these days, we could accurately call Common Sense a work of propaganda. Propaganda had been in the control of the church right from the start of Faustian culture. It was arguably the church’s main source of power over the provincial kings of Europe. The fact that Paine, born to a working class family and a man who had not distinguished himself much in life up until that point, could become a famous propagandist tells us a huge amount about how life had changed following the Reformation and particularly how that change was manifesting in the early colonies of America. Propaganda had been democratised.

But the reason written propaganda could work at all was because so many of the colonists knew how to read and the reason they knew how to read was because learning to read the Bible for yourself had become a crucial component in Protestantism generally but specifically in Puritanism, of which there were many exponents in early America. Paine uses this fact for rhetorical purposes by cherry picking a few biblical references in Common Sense. These would have appealed mostly to men like himself, the working class. The influence of the Bible was so strong that many Puritans even considered themselves descendants of the tribes of Israel, giving rise to the idea of America as the Promised Land.

There’s much that could be said about all this and its continuation of Magian concepts that are still with us to this day like millenarianism (the notion of climate apocalypse and its use in propaganda is very Magian). The aspect I want to focus on relates to a concept I mentioned in the last post – the divine right of kings. Paine spends the first part of his book addressing this issue. The USA was, to a very large extent, founded on an explicit rejection of the divine right of kings.

We don’t need to worry about any of the details of the arguments here. The very fact that Filmer felt the need to defend the divine right of kings presupposed that it was a concept under threat. Locke had little trouble pointing out the logical problems with Filmer’s argument and then went on to outline his alternative concepts, including the one that still gets used to this day – the social contract.

The reason why the divine right of kings had been called into question was because the Pope had been a key player in the divine right of kings from the start of Faustian culture. But the Reformation had gotten rid of the Pope as an authority in protestant countries. In his absence, scholars like Filmer turned to the Bible itself to look for justification for kingship. The larger problem was that anybody was now free to read and interpret the Bible and so how could you know whose interpretation was right? Philosophers like Locke and Rousseau stepped in to try and fill the void with new concepts like states of nature, social contracts and natural rights.

Spengler differentiates the political from the religious. He calls the former nobility and the latter priesthood. In later culture, the priesthood gives way to the intellect while nobility gives way to money. We can see both of these trends in Paine’s book and in the foundation of the US in general. The rising bourgeoisie wanted to found relations between the USA and Europe on trade (money), not politics. Ideas like social contracts were understandable to the rising merchant class.

Meanwhile, after the Reformation, each person became free to use their own intellect to question old-fashioned ideas like kingship. When they did so, they could find no good reason to obey a king, especially one on the other side of the world. This caused the need to find a new justification for politics using the intellect (a job that used to belong to the priesthood).

The Reformation was in large part a reaction against exactly this kind of (mis-)behaviour by the church in Rome and the desire to split up church and state was supposed to solve the problem. But that desire brought into question the whole notion of the divine right of kings. With the Pope’s authority no longer recognised, the Bible was turned to for justification. But the problem with the Bible was that you could use it to defend any position. Filmer used it to argue for the divine right of kings. Locke and Paine used to argue against the divine right of kings.

These debates would once have taken place behind closed doors. But now they became public. In any case, the connection between politics and intellect was still maintained. What had changed was the question of obedience. Blind obedience to the Pope and the priesthood had gone. Blind obedience to the King was soon to meet the same fate.

All this was old news by the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1776. He all but assumes the divine right of kings is dead and buried. But the British still had a King and the new question for the American colonists became what is the point of a King at all? This question was made more urgent because George III was still very much involved in politics including the question which the colonists cared most about which was taxation.

Books can and have been written about the complex issues involved in these matters. For our purposes, what is important is that George III was painted as a tyrant and tyranny was still, in the mind of Paine and others like him, tied to Popery.

“And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of king-craft, as priest-craft, in withholding the scripture from the public in Popish countries. For monarchy in every instance is the Popery of government.”

The divine rights of kings had always been a kind of joint pact between the Pope and the kings of Europe. It now become a byword for tyranny. When the Reformation got rid of the Pope, it was only a matter of time before the King was next. Just as puritans had demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible independent of the Pope, now they demanded the freedom to create their own government independent of the King.

The characterising of the kings of Europe as tyrants was not just a creation of propaganda, of course. The American colonies were full of Europeans who had fled actual persecution. For them the tyranny and the injustice of Europe was not an academic matter but a lived experience. What Paine made them see was that America could become a new kind of country where all the old tyranny was left behind. He found the words that gave expression to the sentiment that was already there.

King George III, who needed money to pay for his war debts and did so by arbitrarily imposing taxes on the colonists, managed to embody the archetype which the colonists were rebelling against: the Tyrannical Father. This reading of the archetypal Father is further evidenced by the fact that familial relations were changing at the same time as the political. The father had previously been the head of the household and was to be obeyed like a king or a pope. But that was now thrown into doubt too. Things were changing at the macrocosmic and the microcosmic level.

If all this sounds familiar and uncontroversial, it’s because we still live in the world created by these Enlightenment ideas. These same ideas created the nuclear family. They also led to the practice whereby people choose their own spouse rather than have their parents choose for them and a whole host of other concepts we take for granted nowadays.

Locke’s tabula rasa and Rousseau’s state of nature meant that humans were innately good and that the fault of corruption must therefore lay with their upbringing and socialisation. Education suddenly became an issue of religious importance in a way that the Romans and Greeks could never have understood. With the role of the priest and church degraded, it was now up to the parents to provide an education for their children that, by assumption, was crucial in determining the child’s whole life. It was the birth of helicopter parenting. Our modern obsession with education flows directly from these societal changes that happened in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

All these issues were front and centre of the debate that led to the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, John Locke, Rousseau and the others were what I call Rebel Priests and they teamed up with the Rebel Commanders who led the battle against the British. And they won. That victory does seem to be genuinely unique in history. At the very least, we look in vain for a similar precedent in the Classical world. On the contrary, the Classical seemed expressly to avoid such an outcome by keeping its Rebel Priests in their place.

Everybody knows what happened to Athens’ most famous thinker (Rebel Priest). He had a run in with a cup of hemlock. Fewer people would know that Plato also got involved with politics. In Syracuse, two disciples of Plato, Dion and Callipus, both had a shot at governing that island on Platonic ideas but they failed and Plato got himself into some trouble over the matter. Alexander the Great might have been a student of Aristotle, but it would be hard to find any Aristotelian principles in his actions. We’ve already seen what happened to Cicero.

On the whole, the ancient world and Rome in particular shows little sign of “mind” playing any role in politics. This would help to explain the lack of change that is a remarkable feature of ancient politics and especially of the decadent period of the Roman Empire. Things just gradually got worse and there is no record of any attempt to change the system or any ideas about what that change might look like. Both Gibbon and Nietzsche blame the arrival of “mind” brought in by the Magian as causing the downfall of Rome. I see it the other way around. The Romans had actively suppressed “mind”. Its arrival was the symptom of a deeper problem.

By contrast, the Faustian has been incredibly dynamic and ideas have always been at the centre of that dynamism. We can see this combination of ideas and power at the birth of the United States. The divine right of kings and popes had disappeared, but the union of power and ideology remained. The USA got rid of the Tyrannical Father and replaced him with the founding fathers. These founding fathers were lawyers, doctors and scientists. They were men of the Enlightenment who wished for and attained the ideals of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence. They were a community of grown adults managing their own affairs.

I use the word “adults” on purpose here because the idea of growing up was a strong thread in the Enlightenment thought that influenced the American Revolution. Immanuel Kant wrote that “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”. The kings and popes had kept the people immature. Now was the time to become adults.

That’s what people believed at the time but it should be pretty clear to us now that something has gone wrong. Perhaps Kant had already identified the problem. Enlightenment was only for the few, he said. The majority would always prefer to be spoon-fed dogma.

If that’s true, then getting rid of kings and popes did not change much at all. It just created a new group of people who sit at the top of society. Ironically, the lawyers, doctors and scientists have ended up becoming priests, whether they wanted to or not. Just like the priests of old, they are fundamentally connected to the power structures of society; money. Thus, the old Faustian intertwining of nobility and priesthood, money and intellect is just as true today as it ever was.

What happens in a society where the Tyrannical Father has been banished but the majority of the public are unable to attain “adulthood” (enlightenment)? Within the psychology of Locke, the public is left defenceless against propaganda. Whatever can be said about Popes and Kings, their propaganda was always overt. You knew who was lying to you. Now we have propaganda that is covert. Strangely enough, this covert propaganda was foreshadowed by Rousseau’s theories on education. But that is a subject for another post.

We can sum up the situation this way: we might have got rid of the Tyrannical Father. But all we achieved was to replace him with the Devouring Mother.

All posts in this series:-
Re-thinking Spengler Part 1: Morphological Thinking
Re-thinking Spengler Part 2: The Psychology of Pseudomorphosis
Re-thinking Spengler Part 3: The Problem of the Magian
Re-thinking Spengler Part 4: Bourgeoisie vs Romantics
Re-thinking Spengler Part 5: On Elitism
Re-thinking Spengler Part 6: Rogue Priests and Rebel Commanders
Re-thinking Spengler Part 7: A Pop Culture Interlude
Re-thinking Spengler Part 8: Kings and Commoners
Re-thinking Spengler Part 9: Escape from the Tyrannical Father
Re-thinking Spengler Part 10: The USA (Universal State of America)
Re-thinking Spengler Final

As Spengler notes in the Decline of the West, the ancient Romans did not so much build an empire as one was given to them. Now, of course, this statement is problematic for reasons I’ve mentioned before on this blog; namely, how can you tell the difference between wanting something and getting it anyway due to circumstances. No doubt, there were some Romans who wanted an empire and yet, if we look at the history, there is evidence that Spengler is right and the empire was handed to Rome, if not forced upon it.

Perhaps the best bit of evidence is the Roman relations with the Greeks. On several occasions, the Romans allied with the Greeks, usually to fight the Macedonians. Each time the Romans withdrew after the fighting in the hope that Greece would provide a buffer between Rome and its enemies in the east. Each time this proved not to be the case. Eventually, the Romans realised that they would have to directly administer Greece in order to prevent endless conflict. And that’s what they did in the 2^nd century BC by splitting the area into two protectorates.

Does that story sound familiar? The Romans were the cultural heirs to the Greeks (educated Romans learned Greek as part of their education). Modern day Americans are the cultural heirs to Europe. And just like the Romans got dragged into Greek military conflict in ancient times, so too did the Americans get dragged into conflagrations in Europe in modern times. The US intervened in WW1 with big dreams of spreading democracy around the world and putting the continent on a secure footing. But those dreams fell apart with the Treaty of Versailles which all but guaranteed a second war. Much like the ancient Romans, the Americans had to resign themselves to taking control.

No doubt there were many in positions of power in the US who wanted to pursue imperialism. But there was also significant dissent within America both to involvement in the wars and to imperialism in general. Wasn’t the whole point of America to escape the troubles of the old world? Why not leave the Europeans to sort out their own mess?

The US might not have wanted to become the universal state of Faustian civilisation, but it had little choice in the matter. Letting Europe fail after WW2 would have driven it into the hands of the communists at the same time as significantly weakening the American economy which had become dependent on Europe as a market for its goods and services. The Americans had to save the Europeans just the same way the Romans had to save the Greeks.

In the cycle of civilisation as described by Toynbee and Spengler, both of these events amount to the creation of a universal state. The Roman was the universal state of the Classical culture and was complete at the time when Rome reverted away from a republic and back to a monarchy. The US became the universal state of the Faustian culture when it took control of the international banking system and set the rules of the global economy in the aftermath of WW2.

We can see in the difference between these universal states some differences in the underlying culture. Rome’s universal state was a geographical fact. It was tangibly marked by the presence of Roman legions on its borders which looked outward towards the barbarian wastelands. The US empire might have army bases all around the world, but its power is not localised by geography. It is found in the intangible realm of finance, the flows of resources and goods and the management and control of systems. The Classical world of Rome was extroverted and exoteric. The Faustian world of the US empire is introverted and esoteric.

We can draw out some more distinctions between the Classical and the Faustian by comparing the history of each leading up to the creation of its universal state.

It seems that most of Europe had a tradition of monarchy based on tribal kinship groupings going back millennia before Christ. It is likely that this tradition was shared by both the ancient Romans and Greeks as well as their northern counterparts. However, in the comparison between the Roman monarchy and the early Faustian monarchies which emerged in the aftermath of the Roman empire, we can see a big and important difference between the two cultures.

The Roman, and the Classical in general, was “democratic” by nature. Although the King was a king for life, he was nominated and elected to that role by the people. The plebs did not get to vote, but they were allowed to take part in the proceedings where the patrician class nominated the candidates and cast votes. That’s how it worked in the early days of Rome before what’s called the republican era.

Things were much different in the early days of Faustian culture which was elitist from the start. The Pope in Rome would nominate kings throughout Europe. This practice was justified by the concept of the divine right of kings but here is a key point which differs between the Classical and the Faustian and which grounds my analysis that the Faustian was founded upon a Classical-Magian symbiosis. The concept of the divine rights of kings is originally from the Magian culture. The fact that it got tied up with the cult of Caesar in the decadent phase of the Roman empire is not surprising since that was the time when the Magian religious practices took hold among the Roman proletariat and gradually worked their way throughout the culture.

We talk as if the Roman empire collapsed and disappeared from the face of the earth but that is not true. Its forms continued on for centuries in the eastern Roman empire. But the ideas of late Rome, which included Magian concepts like the divine right of kings, were propagated throughout the empire including the north of Europe. These ideas were then used to found the new Faustian culture.

The reason why Popes were so heavily involved in politics in the early days of the Faustian culture was because of the Magian influence. We see this also in another Magian idea, the notion that the church could levy taxes on the public, which gave the church political and economic clout. Thus, the early church of western Christendom was as much as secular power as a sacred one. It’s for these reasons that I think early western Christendom can rightfully be called a Christian caliphate.

By contrast, the original Roman monarchy was far more egalitarian and democratic than any European monarchy ever was. The details by which that monarchy gave way to the Roman republic are sketchy but the best guess is that it was an aristocratic rebellion to remove a corrupt King which then did away with the idea of a monarch altogether. It seems that this caused little change in the actual structure of the political system. The concept of an elected monarch was replaced by the idea of elected consuls. Perhaps the most important difference was that consuls only held power for one year after which they were not able to serve again for another ten, thereby ensuring that a dodgy leader could not hang around and cause trouble over a long period of time.

We see a similar aristocratic rebellion in Faustian culture with the writing of the Magna Carta which coincided with a baronial rebellion against the English king that also took the form of two military campaigns, both of which were lost by the barons. It’s noteworthy that the Pope took the side of the King in these matters which makes sense as any watering down of the monarchical role would have also reduced the power of the church. The divine rights of the barons doesn’t quite have the same ring to it and the divine right of kings.

The Papal authority was tied up with the divine right of kings but it’s also very important to understand that the church and state were intertwined at all levels in early Faustian culture. Later demands for a separation of church and state only made sense as an opposition to the status quo where church and state were identical. The truth was that in the early days the church played a fundamental role in the exoteric organisation of Faustian society.

Consider that the church was the record keeper of births, deaths and marriages right up til the 19^th century in Britain. The church also provided what was essentially a public relations function for the state in the era prior to the printing press. If an official message needed to be promulgated throughout the land, it was sent to the local priest who would read it out with the Sunday sermon. Churches also provided food and shelter to the needy and so were a precursor to the modern welfare state.

The ambiguous nature of this shared power between church and state was the cause of endless conflict between the nobility and the church. But there was another side to the argument which was abstract and intellectual. Thus, alongside the baronial rebellions of aristocrats, there were various rebellions by religious leaders, most of whom wanted the Church to get out of politics. Martin Luther’s 95 theses was just the most famous of a centuries-long series of intellectual challenges to the secular role of the church. Such ideas had a long religious tradition before Enlightenment atheists got hold of them.

In addition to the aristocratic and theological revolts, there were also peasant rebellions and these were motivated by grievances against both church and nobility. Thus, the demands of the peasants in the German Peasant’s War of 1525 included being able to elect and dismiss their own clergy while also stopping the nobility from stealing common land and resources. A peasant revolt in the north of England in 1536 was motivated by the fact that Henry VIII had shut down a number of catholic monasteries which had provided important services to the commoners including food and shelter.

Ultimately, the revolts by the peasantry in Europe achieved little more than getting their ringleaders executed. The church and the state were not in the slightest bit interested in listening to peasants. None other than Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet called Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants wherein he stated that the peasants were doing the devil’s work and anybody who killed them would be assured of God’s good favour. Change “peasant” to “anti-vaxxer” and we can see Luther’s attitude to the general public is still shared by our modern “elites”, however much they might reject the religious terminology.

All this is in stark contrast to the plebeian rebellions in the Roman republic. The foundation of the republic had favoured the patrician class and there followed a long period of centuries where the plebs rebelled for a greater share of the decision making power. As far as we know, and the historical sources on these matters are not thorough enough to know for sure, these rebellions did not take the form of pillaging and looting as they would later in feudal Europe. Rather, the plebs simply went on strike.

The first so-called secession involved the plebs of Rome walking out of the city on mass and taking up camp at the nearby Mons Sacer. As none of the patrician class could possibly be expected to cook their own food or clean the dishes for a couple of days, they were forced to negotiate. This tactic was used numerous times over a period of centuries and each time the plebs won a little more power for themselves.  

The apparent lack of violence during the various pleb revolts in ancient Rome has led some scholars to question the veracity of what happened. But, again, this reflects an underlying cultural difference where Classical society was already more egalitarian and had what appears to be a complete absence of dogma.

Unlike the early Faustian debates, the disputes of the Romans did not appear to have any religious element meaning there was no ideological bickering about abstract principles but demands for practical and tangible results. It’s also true that many Roman plebs were experienced in the arts of war and would have known how to organise themselves for a fight. This, no doubt, gave the patrician class a strong incentive to negotiate rather than try to put down any rebellion.

The Classical presents a challenge to Spengler’s assertion that there is a separate path of nobility and priesthood in any culture. There is no doubt that this has been true for Faustian culture right from the start. But it seems invalid when applied to the Classical world where the priesthood only became relevant during the decadence of the Empire when it was imported from the Magian.

The Roman system was not without its flaws, of course. Carpe diem was how the Romans lived; what Spengler identified as the Classical focus on the present. Having consuls only serve one-year terms fits with this cultural trait. But it also means that the leaders of Roman society were unable to make any long-term plans. By contrast, the early Faustian church-state system did allow for longer term planning and this strength was often cited by those in favour of monarchy as a system of government which was uninfluenced by the fleeting passions of the day.

But maybe the murderous, thieving hordes wouldn’t have been so murderous if the elites had condescended to give them some of what they wanted. The unwillingness to consider the interests of commoners led to a build-up of pressure that needed to find an outlet. That outlet was violent revolution which usually provoked equally violent counter-revolution. The revolutions of the Faustian have always had a strong ideological element. Initially, this was religious ideology. These days its secular ideology. We look back at the religious arguments of early Europe and wonder what all the fuss was about but are the ideological debates of our time any less wacky?

The Romans seemed to lack this altogether and one can’t help but think this is tied in with their absence of dogmatic religion. The Roman system was practical. It was tinkered with over centuries but never overthrown. Even when it transitioned back into monarchy with the elevation of Octavian to Augustus, the change was minor. All the old institutions and roles were still there and everything seemed to work as before.

The transition to Caesarism and then to barbarism also happened gradually over centuries and there appears to have been no effort to overhaul the system no matter how dysfunctional it became. It’s probably true that the average Roman simply didn’t know the difference. They lived in the present and if the present meant that new emperors massacred their rivals in cold blood then that was the way it was and probably always had been.

Looking back from our vantage point, we can see that when Rome took on the role of universal state of the Classical civilisation, this was the death knell for Rome as a body politic. The demands of the universal state were not compatible with the demands of the Roman state.

Looking at the current state of the USA, it’s not hard to see similar pressures at play. The tension between the USA as a republic supposed to represent its own citizens and the requirements of the now global Faustian civilisation is a daily fact of politics. But in order to understand these tensions better we need to map out the rest of the journey that Faustian civilisation took from the Reformation to the end of WW2. We’ll do that in the next post.

All posts in this series:-
Re-thinking Spengler Part 1: Morphological Thinking
Re-thinking Spengler Part 2: The Psychology of Pseudomorphosis
Re-thinking Spengler Part 3: The Problem of the Magian
Re-thinking Spengler Part 4: Bourgeoisie vs Romantics
Re-thinking Spengler Part 5: On Elitism
Re-thinking Spengler Part 6: Rogue Priests and Rebel Commanders
Re-thinking Spengler Part 7: A Pop Culture Interlude
Re-thinking Spengler Part 8: Kings and Commoners
Re-thinking Spengler Part 9: Escape from the Tyrannical Father
Re-thinking Spengler Part 10: The USA (Universal State of America)
Re-thinking Spengler Final