If ever there was a figure to be taken seriously but not literally, it’s Oswald Spengler. The catty remark of A.L. Rowse, that “because the Germans were defeated, Western civilisation is to be regarded as coming to an end”, is unfair but not completely untrue. There’s a lot more to Spengler’s ideas than that characterisation (not least because much of his framework of thought predated WWI), but they are pervaded with the masochistic joys of apocalyptic expectation, and a sense of superiority over everyone else who hasn’t yet realised that they’re living in decadent and pathetic times. Spengler represents a fascinating offshoot of C19 critiques of modernity, throwing biological analogies and the second law of thermodynamics into the mix as explanations and justifications of feelings of Weltschmerz and cultural malaise.
It’s therefore entirely reasonable that there should be a conference to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Der Untergang des Abendlandes; it’s a complex work, frequently coming across as entirely mad if you read it as an account of the actual world in historical or social-scientific terms, but never less than a window into its cultural epoch, a key moment in the development of the literature of cultural decline whose influence persists. It’s a more open question whether a newly-founded society named after and dedicated to the principles and intellectual project of Oswald Spengler is necessarily going to welcome the critical voices needed for a proper evaluation of the work, and one hopes they will also try to something about the extreme maleness of their activities so far.
Much as I would like to eavesdrop – not least as an opportunity to break out my collection of black, doom-related t-shirts (Bohren und der Club of Gore’s Black Earth, Questionable Content’s Coffee of Doom, Girls With Slingshots’ Ghost Kitty etc.) – I am too over-committed to contemplate it, even if I thought they’d have me. But this does seem an opportune moment to get round to making another of my past publications available to those without JSTOR access: Decadence as a Theory of History, from 2004, which is still one of my favourites…
Update: Having been reading Stephen Pinker on the Enlightenment, and various pieces on Jordan Peterson, I’m starting to feel much more positive about the inherent interest and depth of Spengler’s thought…
Sphinx 
Actually, I think Spengler was a very optimistic thinker. He expected some new cultural theme to emerge – necessarily unpredictable – to blossom in the place of the old tired themes. “Cities and thrones and powers stand in time’s eye almost as long as flowers, which daily die. But as new buds put forth to glad new men out of the spent and unconsidered earth the cities rise again.”
That’s very interesting – it’s not my sense of it, but it’s a long time since I’ve read it. Compared with Toynbee’s account of the inexorable rise and fall of civilisations, Spengler feels to me dark and glorying in imminent destruction – which I suppose can be optimistic, in a rather Steve Bannon manner.
I think that is a misreading! What is imminent (or worse) is that the theme of Western Culture (for obvious example) is entering its last phase (authoritarian, scholastic, moving toward caste divisions), but that some other adventurous theme will appear and blossom. He does give the impression that each culture passes through the same phases – but he is also aware that cultures intermingle: they aren’t geographically isolated. His great intuition is that there is more than one history of the world, and that the notion that we here-now are the peak of a single human civilization neglects the other worlds and histories, both past and yet to come.
I remember wading through Spengler’s Decline of the West, years ago, for an honours dissertation in the philosophy of history. Pre-First World War but a very specific summation of a mind-set that outlasted that conflict and persisted for some time afterwards. What I thought intriguing was the explicit use of a plant-in-seasons metaphor to frame a very deterministic approach, but of course that was typical of thinking at that time.
Thank you. I agree about the “of its time” aspect – which makes it interesting that this conference is explicitly *not* “let’s explore the historical interest of this intellectual development” but “let’s explore how Spengler’s ideas are completely of the now and the still to come”.