Death Of The West

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Buchanan was right about a heck of a lot - not everything, no, but a lot - and it is growing rather tiresome watching 99% of conservative leaders refuse to learn lessons he laid out in this easy to read, entertaining book. The transition is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, classes, or peoples that decides. In the following entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe, he said that Russia was forced into an artificial history before its culture was ready or capable of understanding its burden. Spengler differed from others in not seeing the final civilization stage as necessarily "better" than the earlier stages; rather, the military expansion and self-assured confidence that accompanied the beginning of such a phase was a sign that the civilization had arrogantly decided it had already understood the world and would stop creating bold new ideas, which would eventually lead to a decline.

Spengler's conception of Culture was organic: primitive Culture is simply the sum of its constituent and incoherent parts ( individuals, tribes, clans, etc. Buchanan laments the federal imposition of progressive values on the entire country, but then turns around and seems to want federally funded public schools to impose his set of values instead. Spengler had a low opinion of Civilizations, even those that engaged in significant expansion, because he said that expansion was not actual growth.A few years back, a wag described America's universities as "island of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom. The Death of the West is a solid, gripping read, although it is depressing and melancholy in only the way that a eulogy to a once vital civilization can be. Spengler divided the concepts of Culture and Civilization, the former focused inward and growing, the latter outward and merely expanding. It is a tome not just on politics but also on history, sociology, ethnic development, cultural evolution and contrastives, and religion to name just a few. But despite an ardent Republican wish that this culture war would just pass away, it will not pass away.

Demographic collapse and massive Third World immigration are the most obvious threats but Buchanan also takes aim at the climate of political correctness and the self-hatred of liberal elites. Similarly, the industrial revolutions that have followed on the heels of increased food production were also driven by the human desire for material comfort. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. The difficulty with this dichotomy is that comfort has been the primary pursuit of Christianity for centuries. Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument, and he said the "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

He distinguishes this from the sort of pseudo-anthropological notions commonly held when the book was written, and he dismisses the idea of "an Aryan skull and a Semitic skull". He describes these peoples as products of the spiritual "race" of the great Cultures, and "people under a spell of a Culture are its products and not its authors.

Did these ideologies arise as the natural consequences of pervasive, antecedent hedonism, or were they the cause of it? However, Adorno also criticized Spengler for an overly deterministic view of history, which ignored the unpredictable role that human initiative plays at all times. But it was really just a bunch of statistics and the author claiming that our culture is dying and the only way to save it is to keep the goddamn Mexicans out and outlaw abortion so the USA will stay good and white with more and more unwanted white babies. Spengler described blood as the only power strong enough to overthrow money, which he saw as the dominant power of his age.I've already surrendered my reputation, peace with family and friends, and now thanks to the vaccine mandates in my country that impact my husband's field, we are giving up our financial stability and dreams of owning a house. As conservative scholar Robert Nisbet reminds us, boredom "is one of the most insistent and universal (of the) forces that have shaped human behavior," and the "range of cures or termination of boredom is a wide one. Buchanan brings out with pinpoint clarity the problems that America and the Western nations face within the next 5 - 40 years, given present population and cultural trends.