An Examination of a Tendency in World Affairs
By S. M. Melamed, in the “Reflex”
The age old barbardom, which for centuries lay fettered and hidden beneath the rigorous forms of an old culture, is now awakening again, at a time when the cultural process has been completed and that of civilisation begun—that bellicose, virile joy of one’s own strength which only holds in contempt the rationalistic thinking of the epoch which is satiated with literature—that unbroken instinct of the race which wishes to live differently than under the pressure of studied books and theoretical ideals.—Oswald Spengler, “Hours of Decision,” p. 12.
No other generation in the western world has witnessed as many transvaluations as our own. They are of world historic significance not because they jeopardise economic, political and social systems or theological concepts, but because they affect man’s very soul. The startling political events of our time are but the accompanying phenomena of deep spiritual transformations. Many of our most ingrained convictions and deep-rooted beliefs, which grew out of a long and slow evolutionary process, are being destroyed before our very eyes. The speed with which these startling developments have taken place has so anesthetised the Occidental that but few people understand their historical significance. Neither the rise of Christianity, the destruction of the Roman Empire, nor the French Revolution can be compared in significance with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.
The change in the form of government of a great nation is not necessarily a world historic event. Even a new spiritual allegiance of a people need not change the rhythm of the world historic process. But when the conception of man as a spiritual being and as the central figure of life is ruthlessly attacked and he is reduced to a purely economic atom, as in Marxist Russia, or to a purely zoological creature, as in Racial Germany, humanity is faced with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.
For thousands of years the foremost representative of Occidental culture ought to impress upon man that he is the meaning and goal of all life. Religion pictured him as the crown of creation and as the highest peak in the cosmic process. In the making of man, so the religious myth of the Bible goes, God almost exhausted His creativeness. Although fashioned out of dust, man is not a part of nature only but partakes of the divine spirit. In the figure of the Redeemer, the idea of man’s close relationship to God finds its most powerful expression.
While religion placed man above brute nature by emphasising his relationship to God, philosophy stressed his spirituality. In foregoing his desire, in modifying his urge and in overcoming his instincts, in order to help his fellow man, man rises above nature and attains true humaneness. This doctrine of man was most impressively pronounced by Socrates and Plato. Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was given new life by the Renaissance and Reformation and held sway until the World War.
In the plastic arts, too, the appreciation of man’s position in life found its expression in the glorification and idealisation of his figure. The great artists of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance were captivated and inspired not by the phenomena of brute nature but by suffering, aspiring and thinking man. This tendency only reflected the spirit of these respective periods.
It was this concept of man as the central figure of life, and as the crown of creation, which made modern culture possible. He created science in order to free himself from nature; he formulated jurisprudence in order to free himself from the natural instincts and urges of his fellow man; he invented ethics in order to free himself from evil; he conceived politics in order to safeguard his liberty and happiness, and he developed economic and social forms in order to free himself from want. In all his efforts, endeavours, and struggles, he was primarily animated by one desire—to preserve his spiritual individuality. Whether believer or heretic, he was inspired by the thought that he was the crown of creation.
II
“Man is a beast. I will repeat it again and again. All the moralists and social ethicists who seek to escape . . . are only beasts with broken teeth.” Such is the ethical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, the greatest German intellectual figure since the days of Nietzsche, as formulated in his latest book. “Hours of Decision” (p. 14). This conception of the beast-man is an extension of Schopenhauer’s will-man and Nietzsche’s blonde beast. That man is not a creature made in the Image of God but only a part of brute nature has become the basic conviction of Marxist Russia, Caesaric Italy, and Racial Germany.
Birth, marriage, and death, the most solemn moments in man’s career, have become of trivial significance in Soviet Russia. Burial is a profane and prosaic act as unsentimental as the disposal of any other worn out mechanism. Marriage is a matter of mere registration and birth a purely animal process. In Fascist Italy, the Government seeks to increase the population so that the cannon fodder of the country be increased. The quantity producing rabbit and the quality developing horse are the symbols and sources of inspiration of this policy. The Italian is taught to think in purely zoological terms upon the most important phenomenon of life. In Nazi Germany the new formula for the birth of a child is “Das Weib Gebirt das Tier" (“The woman gives birth to the animal”). Marriage and birth have not been profaned and secularised in Italy and Germany for reasons of political expediency, but the general tendency is no different than that of Russia.
It is no mere coincidence that in these three countries in which man has been deposed from his pedestal and reduced either to an economic atom or to a zoological creature that the sciences of man, with jurisprudence as their focal point, have been practically abolished and eliminated. The old systems of jurisprudence have been done away with and the new “systems” are merely expressions of the changing moods of arbitrary despots. Not basic laws and juridic principles, but arbitrary decrees prompted by expediency, caprice or ambition or malice are the corpus juris from which justice is drawn. The reintroduction of the torture chambers in Italy, Germany and Russia, as well as the summary executions of mere suspects of political opposition or resentment, testify best to the complete abrogation of the rights of man in these countries. Animals and mechanisms have no right. Since in these countries man is only considered to be beast or machine he cannot be the subject of rights, but like all other things he can only be an object of law.
III.
The most striking feature of the neo-barbaric world concept is its vehement rejection of reason and intellect. The social, political and economical degradation of the scholar and savant in Russia, Italy and Germany is only an expression of a powerful anti-intellectual tendency which originates in emotional mysticism. Even in Russia, with its artificial rationalisation of life and its adoration of applied science, only the Marxist scientist is tolerated. In all three countries the freedom of the mind and its accompanying attributes, such as intellectual honesty, sincerity, and idealism, are considered to be the contemptible legacies of decadent liberalistic and rationalistic regimes which must be uprooted. The position of men of the spirit, such as poets, artists, scientists, religionists, philosophers and scholars, is almost comparable to that of the lower castes of India. Not intellect, but will, not mind, but physical energy, not spiritual, but robust virility, is the standard of cultural life.
In Russia all professional men with the exception of engineers are most exploited by and receive less consideration from the State than any other group. It is almost unknown for working men not to be paid on time, whereas physicians, teachers, and laboratory workers often must wait months for their meagre wages. And when they do receive their wages they cannot buy nearly as much with them as can other groups. But worst of all they are regarded as potential political heretics and are treated accordingly. In Italy, the hotbed of intellectual individualism since the days of the Renaissance, every teacher from the grade school to the university is expected to teach a minimum and preach a maximum. He must constantly bring the message of Mussolini the Redeemer to his pupils. In Germany the granting of academic diplomas is predicated upon at least six months service in a labour camp. When Max Planck, the dean of German science, came to Hitler to plead for his colleagues who were deprived of their positions, he was told that ‘‘scientists being fools should not interfere in matters of the State but should mind their own affairs." As late as May 1934, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Enlightenment, in an article in his paper, "Der Angriff,” said:—
“. . . the intellectuals are an idle and generally worthless lot and in our age which demands real men they are merely in the way,”
"The intellectuals are failures and have fallen down at all decisive moments. And now when a simple labourer, an ordinary front soldier, has succeeded in making himself the leader of Germany, they are simply dying of envy and wounded self-conceit.”
It was therefore entirely consistent when some two weeks later Herr Zander, director of schools in the Berlin-Brandenburg province, proposed that the time devoted to the three R's in grammar school be reduced one-third, and that the time thus saved be devoted to physical training.
This contempt for intellectuality and its representatives finds its justification and explanation in the denial of man and in the deification of the State. Only the State has reason and it is omniscient. Consequently the mind of the individual must be subservient to that of the State, and its refusal to do so may forfeit the individual’s right to exist. Such was also the guiding principle of the Inquisition—believe or be killed!
IV.
The profound contempt for human reason so characteristic of the neo-despotism is the cultural legacy of the German Romantic School of Philosophy. Oswald Spengler is the latest powerful tremor of this tendency in German cultural life. His major opus, “The Decline of the West,” is not so much a new philosophy of history as a panegyric to the irrational, emotional, and mystic side of human life. Rationalism to him is akin to original sin. It is the source of all human aberration, the embodiment of all decadence, the clearest symptom of cultural degeneration and the agent which spells ruin to the virility of life. Rationalism to Spengler includes every manifestation of the Western mind of the past 300 years—Puritanism, Idealism, Materialism, and Romanticism. He rejects Rousseau as well as Kant, Voltaire as well as Holbach, Owen as well as Marx. They are all guilty of the crime of attempting to introduce a definite order into life and seeking to divert world history into a definite channel. All the great mottoes of modern times, such as freedom, equality, historical progress, the happiness of the greatest number, and the like, are sheer demagoguery, for human history is only war history. Hence the doctrine of and the will to international peace is an attempt to violate the . . historical process.
The unadulterated historical process manifests itself with elemental force and sweeps aside the artificialities created by the various rationalistic schools. The highest spiritual reality is not knowledge, but the religious myth. The ancient motto, “I believe because it is absurd," testifies to realistic understanding of the world. The highest political reality is the power of the great conqueror who heralds the coming of a new culture. Hence liberalism and democracy are signs of degeneration. Whenever the masses raise their heads culture is doomed, for only the great individual, privileged with unrestricted freedom, is the source of all culture. The highest social reality is the lord of the manor, the nobleman. It is he who gives life its form and colour. The domination of the myth, conqueror and nobleman form the higher order, and that of reason, masses and peace form the lower order. At present, the lower order prevails, and its continuance spells the inevitable destruction of our present culture and civilisation, says Spengler.
This deep-seated attraction to the mythical and repulsion from the rational expressed itself in Spengler's construction of the philosophy of history. All cultures are distinguished from one another by definite border lines which cannot be crossed. The ancient Babylonian culture had nothing in common with the Hindu or Chinese and the Arab had nothing in common with the Germanic. All these cultures arise within a certain landscape upon which they flourish, decay, and die like living organisms. Occidental culture, having been weakened and undermined by rationalistic rust, is about to collapse. The only culture visible on the horizon, capable of replacing the dying culture of the West, is the Russian. That the latter is overwhelmed with Marxistic rationalism which he elsewhere pronounces to be the embodiment of decadence, does not deter him from visualising a glorious coming Russian culture. For not that he hates rationalism less, but that he loves the mailed fist more. The complete suppression of democratic rule in Russia, the permanent degradation of reason, the absolute domination of the subjugator, and the idealisation and worship of might, appeal powerfully to Spengler’s romantic senses.
There is something sadistic in Spengler's conception of political history just as there is something fatalistic and arbitrary in his conception of the philosophy of history. When the masses are chained, oppressed, maltreated, tortured, and whipped by the rod of the despot, it is the normal order of things, but when they are free and happy and masters of their own destiny, history is moving with seven league boots towards catastrophe. When reason prevails, science flourishes, and life moves along an even keel, decadence is already to be seen on the horizon. But when the mind is enveloped in myth, and culture is only the privilege of the few, life attains its highest peak. If this Spenglerian doctrine is valid, Occidental history of the past three centuries is only an uninterrupted, typographical error of destiny.
There is nothing universal in man’s culture, says Spengler. All the great cultures have their own truths, logic, science, art, etc., which have no meaning or value to any other culture. A great culture is a spiritual individuality which absolutely excludes and denies any other personality. Modern man would be no worse off if the civilsations of classical and Oriental antiquity had never existed, for the languages and symbols of each culture can be understood only by its own period and people.
This cultural determinism bordering on fatalism is no less theology than is the economic determinism of Marxism. The great cultures of history, far from being encased in Chinese walls, actually empty into one another. Thus modern man derived his geometry from ancient Egypt, his foundations of algebra from the Arabs, his philosophy and art from ancient Greece, his jurisprudence from ancient Rome, his religious world picture from ancient Palestine, etc.
This theory of isolated cultures has many implications. Its presumptions are first a denial of one humanity, second, a division of the human race into aristocratic and non-aristocratic peoples, and third the supremacy of blood over mind. These presumptions have no foundation in fact. As a matter of fact all men are governed by the same laws of the mind. The history of science, philosophy and religion are replete with instances of simultaneous but independent discoveries by men of different cultures. Thus the atomic theory was discovered contemporaneously in ancient India and in ancient Greece. The conception of one God was also evolved simultaneously in ancient Egypt, Judea, and China. Gunpowder and glass were developed in China and in Europe independently of one another. Nothing, however, testifies more powerfully to the oneness of the human consciousness than the history of numerals which were developed independently of one another in all the ancient centres of civilisation.
Nor is the second presumption of aristocratic and plebeian peoples and cultures to be accepted without qualifications. Spengler’s own countryman, Felix von Luseban, one of the greatest anthropologists of modern times, completely denies the existence of superior and inferior peoples. So do those savants such as Montesquieu, Taine, Buckle, Darwin, and Lamarck, who maintain that the environment primarily gives a people its character and creativeness. Thus far, Spengler as a scientist has not discovered any concrete facts which may make the theories of his adversaries obsolete.
The same may be said of Spengler’s third presumption of the supremacy of blood over mind. Here again another great countryman of Spengler, Goethe, who was also a great scientist in his own right, maintained that the human mind cannot lay bare the innermost secrets of nature. Whether and how blood influences mind ethnically man has no means of discovering. All that man can detect is that the environment influences the mind, especially in art, religion, and science.
The cultural clannishness with its absolute lines of demarcation of Spengler is only a glorified form of barbarism. Every barbarian considers the members of every other tribe to be the enemy which must be annihilated. The barbarian delights in the gleaming sword and the mailed fist and worships the conqueror. He surrenders to his instincts and is guided by his emotions, and when in quest of food, shelter, etc., his conduct is indistinguishable from that of the beast. But it is in these very manifestations of man's urges, instinct and emotions that Spengler sees the height of life and the source of all creativeness. His entire philosophy thus becomes a pæan to barbarism.
V.
The history of Western Europe coincides and is interlinked with the history of Christianity. Since the destruction of the Roman Empire, the great spiritual and artistic movement of Europe, whether mystical or rationalistic in form, was deeply anchored in the Christian world picture. It is only since the middle of the 18th century that the representatives of the natural and social sciences began to disregard Christian thought, although many of them continued their adherence to the church. By the beginning of the 20th century the representatives of the science were sharply divided into two camps —religious and anti-religious. This is especially true of Germany, where the Monistic Society represented the anti-Religious and the Kepler Society the religious groups. This division, although it stirred the educated groups, did not affect the masses. Not the onslaughts of science upon religion but those of Marxism estranged a great part of the city populace from the church, which now became not anti-religious but simply non-religious. Even in the Marxist camps defenders of religion were not lacking.
It was only with the rise of Nazidom that an anti-Christian wave swept the country. As early as 1921 the life of the priests in the villages of Catholic Bavaria began to become uncomfortable. In the large cities the representatives of Christianity became objects of attack and derision. Even the figure of Christ was subjected to scorn and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands of vociferous Nazis, jingoists, extreme nationalists, racialists, and neo-pagans suddenly discovered that Christianity is a foreign plant which has been sown upon German soil, and that Jesus was only a son of a foreign people which can never fathom the German mind. This anti-Christian movement won such adherents as General von Ludendorff, who served to legitimate this tendency in the eyes of the populace. It gained in strength in proportion to the success of National Socialism. When the latter finally triumphed, a bold attempt was made not only to dechristianise the church, but to introduce in its stead Germanic paganism of old. The figure of Jesus, symbolising meekness, piety, charity, and goodness was considered to be suitable only for slaves. A powerful and dominating people like the Germans require the inspiration of Wotan, who radiates might, energy, bellicosity, and severity.
This anti-Christian, pagan movement which assumed such ugly forms was fathered by Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. Nietzsche was the first to teach the Germans that Christianity is slave morality, which was born out of a rebellion of slaves against lords. His ideals of the blonde beast and of the superman were incompatible with the basic concepts of Christianity. “The Christian God Concept,” he says in his “Anti-Christ,” “God as the God of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit, is one of the most corrupt God concepts that has ever come upon this earth.” In thus declaring war against Christianity, Nietzsche called into being those latent heretic forces which began to spread with the industrialisation of Germany.
But Oswald Spengler, even more than Nietzsche, has contributed to the development of the anti-Christian movement in Germany. In describing Christianity as a phenomenon of the so-called Magian or Arabic culture, which died with the rise of the German culture, Spengler impressed upon his country men that Christianity is not only a strange plant upon German soil, but actually belongs to a lost and petrified world. Preferring the world of action to the world of the spirit, Spengler sides with Pilatus and not with Jesus. World history is a realm of action and not of dreams, of facts and not of sentiments. "Since Christianity represents the second it must be rejected.
Spengler’s “Decline of the West” was read and accepted by millions of his countrymen in the Fatherland. Coincident with the spread of Spenglerism, such anti-Christian publicists of previous generations as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, experienced great revivals. So charged was the German air with anti-religious sentiments that Fritz Mauthner’s monumental “Atheism and its History in the West,” in four large volumes totalling 2,200 pages, ran through five editions in five years. So was the ground prepared in German literature, philosophy, theology, and historiography for the growth of pagan tendencies culminating in Nazi religious profaneness and barbarism.
In the cities of the English speaking world one very seldom finds such streets as Hume Street, Beacon Street, Milton or Shakespeare Avenue. But in Germany every city and town has its Goethe Strasse, Schiller Strasse, Kant Strasse, Hegel Strasse, Fichte Strasse and Schopenhauer Strasse. The memory of almost every German poet, scientist, philosopher and artist of note is perpetuated for the populace by streets named after him. No other country in the West has as many statues in bronze and marble erected to its great representatives of the spirit. The people considered the men of the spirit to be the true heroes of the nation, holding them in greater esteem than conquerors, warriors and statesmen. Every German took pride in his being associated with the "people of poets and thinkers." The respect for intellectual achievement or even for mere intellectual occupation is traceable to the influence of Immanuel Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher, who made reason the source of all reality. His philosophical theories created social values in Germany by making the intellectual the centre of social life. Just as no popular meeting in England can be successful unless graced by the presence of a prince of the blood, so could no popular meeting in Germany be of importance unless addressed by an outstanding intellectual. For over a hundred year the intellectual was the axis of social life in Germany, until the Nazis rose to power and decreed that the intellectual was a superfluous being who contributed nothing to German strength and might. From the present hostile attitude towards the intellectual in Germany, one can readily appreciate the great position he must have held in former days. The startling anti-intellectual movement culminating in the worship of ignorance and vulgarity is the product of a slow historical process which has but recently come to a head. One need only page the major works of German poetry and philosophy of the last generation to appreciate that the German attitude towards life was undergoing a radical change. Since Nietzsche's battle cry of the transvaluation of values, even his adversaries began to adopt a critical attitude towards the old order and old concepts. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was already visible in German thought a growing enmity towards the values of the nineteenth century, viz., intellectualism, mechanism, historicism, and all those life concepts which spring from a rationalistic understanding of the world. By 1930 German poetry and German philosophy reflected an ever growing irrationalism and mysticism. In the 19th century the motto of cultured Germany was reason—in the 20th century it was life. Not concepts but instincts, not ideas but urges, not definitions but sentiments are now considered to be the sources of truth. In modern German philosophy figures like Wilhelm Dilthey, Nicolai Hartmann, Friedrich Grave, Mueller Freienfels, and Oswald Spengler give powerful expression to this tendency. This forte chord in German contemporary spiritual life became fortissimo at the end of the war, when the Germans realised that great world historic decisions are made not by superior thought but by superior deeds. The cult of reason was transformed into the cult of instinct.
This anti-intellectual tendency was not confined to Germany alone. In Russia, where intellectual life was less developed than it was in Germany, but where, nevertheless, the representatives of the spirit were held in high esteem, a new attitude towards the old values became noticeable at the conclusion of the abortive revolution of 1905-06. This revolution was engineered in large measures by the intellectuals and academic youth. Some of them, like Gorki, Audrieff and Trotsky were notable figures in Russian letters. The entire Socialist Revolutionary party deduced its programme of action from purely intellectual theories. The failure of their revolution compromised the faith of the Russian youth in intellectualism. Almost overnight a swing from intellectualism to mysticism, and from rationalism to sensualism took place. The hitherto esteemed Russian classics of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy were relegated to the background, and Artzibaskeff, the author of the highly pornographic novel “Sanine,” became the literary hero of the day. Not spiritual depth or intellectual truth but urges and instincts became the ideal.
From 1906-14 one of the main tasks of the Russian Minister of Education was to suppress sexual orgies in the secondary schools of the country. Within a very short time the idealistic clan of the Russian youth vanished and paganism became the order of the day. Might became the greatest object of adoration, and the great man was identified with the powerful man.
This demoralisation of Russian life, culminating in the figure of Rasputin, enabled a determined group of Bolshevists to ride into power and to maintain it ever since. So did the manifestation of purely psychological forces pave the way for paganism and barbarism in important European centres.
That this neo-paganism in central and eastern Europe which has degenerated into economic and political barbarism is not a mere caprice of history can best be seen from the reception which Spengler’s “Decline of the West” has received in these countries. In Germany alone over 300.000 copies of this work were sold during the first six years after publication. In Austria it received the greatest popular reception since Weininger's “Sex and Character” appeared in 1906. It was read with equally great gusto in Hungary, Russia and Italy. Only in France, England and America did it fail to impress the reading public, and was politely rejected in all these countries.
Oswald Spengler, the apostle of the new Caesarism, has impressed himself upon peoples who were vanquished either politically or psychologically. Their defeat developed in them a veritable hunger for might. In power they saw their only salvation. To attain it, it was necessary to transvaluate life from reason to will, from intellect to instinct, from idea to urge. Guided by these forces, the order of the jungle settled upon the major part of the European continent. Barbarism became the ideal.
Australian Jewish Herald (Melbourne, Vic.), Thursday 17 December 1936, page 5
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/260975975/29158516#
