Sphinx

In 1924, the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža was travelling on a night train from Riga to Moscow, and fell into conversation with a Lithuanian schoolteacher of German heritage who was reading Oswald Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism. She had, she said, become interested in him when he held a lecture in Riga the previous year at the invitation of the Courlandic German Bund.

“But everyone was disappointed with the gentleman. He is a boring, elderly professor with illusions of grandeur, who earned a pretty fee with his lecture. The Courlandic German Bund had to pay for his trip in a sleeping car, first class, all the way from Munich to Riga and back, and on top of that even the door receipts, and then he came, read from his papers for half an hour, and at the banquet did not speak a single word with anyone the whole evening. A disagreeable, opinionated fool!”

I don’t know if this is a remotely representative anecdote – ‘elderly’ is rather unfair, for a start, since Spengler had just turned forty at this date – but I treasure it nevertheless. The publication of the first volume of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, his sprawling and idiosyncratic overview of world history in terms of the natural organic development of different cultures, had made Spengler a celebrity, especially in German communities across Europe, and so able to command substantial speaking fees without feeling the need to offer more than the bare minimum in return.

Or perhaps he had other things on his mind; Spengler was just about to embark on a brief and entirely unsuccessful career in politics, seeking to put into practice the ideas he had developed in Prussianism and Socialism – a highly nationalistic vision of society without trade unions, strikes, unemployment benefit, progressive taxation or days off work, united in harmony under a dictatorship who would conduct the people like an orchestra. True socialism is about the innately Prussian qualities of discipline, self-sacrifice, productivity and working for the greater good (“the greater good”), and Frederick William I of Prussia had been the first conscious socialist, whereas Marxism, tainted with the spirit of Englishness and Jewishness, was “the capitalism of the working classes”, setting poor against rich rather than uniting everyone in the service of the nation. We have the origins of recent silly Twitter “the Nazis were socialists therefore all socialists are Nazis” debates right here…

This is quite entertainingly mad, and deserves to be as well known as the ragbag of misappropriated scientific concepts he applied to human history in Der Untergang. Spengler is a fascinating figure, with ideas that merit consideration, and not solely as a ‘what the hell were people thinking in the mid-20th century?’ cultural artefact. But it’s less obvious that he offers a good model for contemporary research, as opposed to an object of contemporary research – let alone that he’s the sort of person you want to dedicate a society to and still expect to be taken seriously.

The Oswald Spengler Society engages in the understanding of the principles underlying Human Evolution and World History and its perspectives. It is dedicated to the comparative study of cultures and civilizations, including pre-history, the evolution of humanity as a whole and extrapolations regarding the possible future of man.

Uh huh. That could be unexceptionable boilerplate; loose references to ‘evolution’, potential reification of “cultures and civilizations” and vague portentous aspirations to futurology notwithstanding. It’s the Spengler name that initially rings alarm bells – an informal poll of acquaintances in politics and history found precisely nobody who thought this was a name you’d choose for a purely academic exercise – but maybe, if you’re a researcher interested in comparative history and you meet a wealthy potential supporter with a Spengler obsession, maybe you’d go along with it as a means of funding some worthwhile conferences…

…and establish a Spengler Prize, to be awarded at the conference, and award the first one to the French novelist Michel Houllebecq. As the Society’s president described him:

…an author who has given expression like no one else to the deep feeling of loss and frustration that is at the heart of The Decline of the West—and who has sounded the alarm of the potential take-over of what remains of Europe by Islam.

Yes, I think the subtext is rapidly becoming text. Amusingly, Houllebecq’s acceptance speech seems to have disappointed his hosts by being insufficiently gloomy about the imminent doom of the West, even suggesting optimistically that history might not be wholly predetermined.

Still, plenty of opportunity for discussing the impact of immigration on European culture and society, a theme on which many of the Society’s officers have expressed their views, with or without dubious classical analogies. And the publication of the relevant speeches as Volume 2 of the Journal of the Oswald Spengler Society found its perfect home in Edition Sonderwege (no, nothing dubious about that name), described even by its parent company (publisher of various luminaries of the AfD) as “ein Tummelplatz für Konsensstörer, Schimpfer, Spötter, Polterer, Misanthropen und ähnlich antiquarisch gewordene Temperamente.”

I imagine that you don’t submit a proposal to a conference celebrating the centenary of Der Untergang des Abendlandes without some idea of what you’re getting into, even if one might have hoped for a bit more subtlety. This year’s event was much more interesting; explicit emphasis on comparative global history (‘from Herodotus to Spengler’), a number of papers that look from the titles to be perfectly sensible discussions of pre-modern historiography, alongside the ones asking questions about whether Western culture has chosen mass immigration as its suicidal end stage (yes, obviously any credible academic conference would let that one through, if the abstract was good enough), and the necessity of a hybrid approach whereby online participants might remain happily oblivious to what’s going on around their papers (which obviously underlined the acuteness of Spengler’s prophecies about the doom of western civilisation).

And the second recipient of the Prize, following Michel Houllebecq? The eminently credible and distinguished Walter Scheidel. One assumes he accepted it; there’s been an odd silence about this on his social media, but YouTube has a video of the Society’s President offering the ‘ceremony speech’. Alas, no sign of Walter’s acceptance speech, as it would be interesting to know how he responded to the, erm, interesting account of contemporary historiography and the role of comparative approaches. One might also imagine that an award speech would spend more than one minute out of sixteen and a half talking about the recipient and his work – but in the circumstances, perhaps it is better not to receive too many compliments from some sorts of people. Being praised for “clean methodology”, that is to say the absence of any consideration of class or race, would be bad enough…

Let he who is without embarrassing past associations cast the first aspersion? That’s me out, then. A limited amount of internet research, if anyone was bothered, would reveal that I once spoke at a summer workshop organised by the Institute of Ideas, part of the sprawling hard-right libertarian network established by former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party that includes such luminaries as Baroness Fox of the Brexit Party, Spiked magazine and Boris Johnson’s political adviser Munira Mirza, and organises debates about the damaging effects of immigration on British society and the like. (But at least I just went there, gave my talk and left. I’ll spare the blushes of the friend who spoke at the same event, stayed for lunch and said afterwards that they were “really interesting people”…). And just this autumn I gave a talk as part of a private online seminar organised by an organisation that promotes ‘classical wisdom’ as the foundation of Western Civilization, where another speaker was from the Ayn Rand Institute, promoter of hard-right libertarian dogma on the other side of the Atlantic.

Okay, two data points in ten years isn’t exactly a pattern, but it undoubtedly sounds the death-knell for any hope of a career in left-wing politics – I guess there’s still the option of getting a life peerage by renewing acquaintance with the ex-Living Marxism crowd – and undercuts any moral authority I might claim to criticise those who have signed up for the Spengler Revival Campaign. But the point of this blog is not to claim ideological purity and denounce others, but to reflect on the situation from my own solipsistic perspective: how does this sort of thing happen, and how do I stop it happening to me again?

Why do we accept invitations to speak? Easy: an over-determined combination of the fact that we are fascinated by our topic and would happily lecture the rest of the train carriage or restaurant about it given half a chance, the importance of such engagements for employment/promotion, the endorphin hit that someone has heard of us and actually wants to hear what we have to say (I can only imagine how much more of an ego boost it is to be given a prize), the imposter syndrome making us think that if we turn this one down there may never be another one.

Okay, why do we accept invitations that might be considered a bit iffy? The obvious answer is: obliviousness – the iffiness may be a matter of opinion or political conviction (is giving talks to fee-paying schools ‘iffy’?), or it may not be completely obvious (I mean, the Institute of Ideas looks like it’s just about people interested in ideas), or we may just not have done any research because it didn’t occur to us that we should (naïveté is a not uncommon academic trait). I’ll be quite honest, with the recent online seminar I was so pleased with myself that I’d asked about the gender balance of speakers before accepting the invitation that it didn’t occur to me to ask any other questions until too late.

And then there is the issue that might, wholly unhelpfully, be characterised as the difficulty of identifying the dividing line between ‘iffy’ and ‘dodgy’, where iffiness might be mitigated by a strong enough imperative but dodginess probably can’t be. In concrete terms: even if one regards giving talks to students in fee-paying schools as a matter of enhancing a pernicious institution without even getting paid for it, this iffiness might still be outweighed by the wish to encourage the study of classical antiquity regardless of the context.

The fact that the study of classical antiquity and its legacy has traditionally been elitist, and carries hefty cultural baggage, means that many of the invitations we receive to speak outside universities are likely to be associated with one or other of these. People who retain an interest in these topics are likely to be convinced of the wonders and continuing relevance of classical culture, because that’s how they feel about it – which means that distinguishing them from people who go on about the wonders and continuing relevance of classical culture as part of a right-wing racist agenda is not completely straightforward.

Yes, when an organisation invites someone from the Ayn Rand Institute to speak (albeit not about Rand but about Greek philosophy), and then responds to pushback with a blog post that suggests Rand was a genius whose ideas need to be taken seriously, then it becomes ever harder to justify associating with them – but I still think it is the case that a profit-making enterprise focused on teaching people about classical antiquity is more or less bound to start talking about the glorious legacy of antiquity, without this being a deliberate right-wing dog whistle (after all, look at how university classics departments continue to market their courses…). Even if this does involve the most remarkable contortions in explaining how my book really supports their agenda.

That’s the closest we got to any idea that my opinions needed to be modified to fit with the agenda of the enterprise, and at least they didn’t ask me to do it… But of course that isn’t exactly the point. We do need to consider, in trying to decide whether or not to participate in a given event, that our ideas may be less important than our simple participation. It isn’t that the Institute of Ideas was seeking to recruit me; on the contrary, the basic aim was simply to offer their paying punters a wide range of lectures on different topics, and the possible additional aim – this would be more important, I suspect, if they’d invited me to participate in one of their debates – is precisely to be able to say, Look, we have a range of serious people with different views, this is not a cult or an ideological enterprise but a serious academic debate!

That is to say: we cannot ignore the possibility, however faint, that we are being invited to play the role of the useful idiot – someone whose commitment to the ostensible aims of the enterprise (intellectual exchange and debate) can be used to offer cover for the underlying agenda, not least by making the whole thing appear completely legitimate. To put it bluntly: if an organisation were to hand out awards consistently to racists, islamophobes, right-wing culture warriors and the like, people might start suspecting their good faith; give it to the occasional eminent scholar who cannot be suspected of any such views, and that elevates the whole thing and endorses their claims to be a proper scholarly enterprise.

It’s rarely going to be clear-cut. Most of us academics – by which of course I mean ‘I’ – tend to take people on trust, believe that everyone is involved in honest enquiry, fall instantly for the flattery of simply being noticed, and are far too polite and nervous to cause anyone any trouble by pulling out at a later stage. It is therefore a very good thing that no one is likely to offer me any awards. But I am resolved to be a lot more cautious about accepting invitations in future…

One might, provocatively, suggest that Spengler himself is actually being used in a similar manner by his eponymous Society. Engaging with his ideas offers an opportunity and excuse to talk about the absolute incompatibility of different cultures, the impossibility of cultural influence and mixing, the whole panoply of claims about the decay of Western culture and a whole load of other dog whistles, always with the potential excuse that this is an exercise in the history of ideas rather than the speaker’s own intellectual commitments – analysis not endorsement.

Even more crucially, it represents a cast-iron argument that discussion of such ideas can be easily disassociated from Nazism. Far-right as Spengler was, he didn’t think much of Hitler and his followers (much too proletarian, and too obsessed with race rather than culture). This explains the choice of quotations on the Society’s front page: endorsements of Spengler’s importance from Henry Kissinger (but of course) and Joseph Campbell, wacky mythologist who inspired Star Wars (I assume members of the Society were prominent participants in the storm of criticism of The Last Jedi), and a warning to take Spengler seriously from Theodor Adorno.

There is also – and this is the significant bit – a quote from the author (oddly, described also as a physician, whereas I thought he did that only for a year or so) Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, who died in Dachau concentration camp (for the crime of “insulting the German currency”, perhaps because he’d complained about the effect of inflation on his royalties) – claiming that no one was hated by the Nazis more than Spengler. Now, that seems prima facie implausible as a claim – but who could gainsay the words of someone whose books were banned by the Nazi regime, and who was eventually executed by them? Clearly ideas like Spengler’s are not a slippery slope towards genocidal authoritarianism, but precisely their opposite! And honouring Spengler’s work is a sign that we are the true anti-Nazis! You should be honoured to be honoured by us…