1. Introduction
To Oswald Spengler, civilization represents the very peak of the ‘wave-cycle’[1] followed by an evolving and maturing culture. Ironically, to Spengler, it also represents the beginning of the end.
Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.[2]
Having achieved this high point of the ‘wave-cycle’, there is little outside resistance to further expansion, but also a declining will to higher achievement. Expansion, ‘imperialism’ if you like, becomes almost incidental if not completely accidental. Spengler provided the Roman Empire as an example : (Spengler’s emphasis)
That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain ; they merely took possession of a booty that lay open to everyone. […] We must not be deluded by the appearance of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms. […] After Zama, (Second Punic War, 202 BC) the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging war against a great military Power. The conquest of Gaul was frankly a colonial, i.e. one-sided war ; and the fact that it is the highest achievement in the later military history of Rome only shows that the well of real achievement was rapidly drying up. [3]
The expansion of various European empires of western civilization pretty much followed the same model as the Roman. The rest of the world provided minimal resistance as European nations scrambled for zones of economic and strategic influence. Britain’s ‘conquest’ of India and South Africa were essentially a government driven forward by the military exploits of its private trading agents. (Clive of India, Cecil Rhodes, for example).
But from this high point, civilization can only retreat as its ‘wave-cycle’ begins to ebb.
2. Step Changes
What we are looking at in modern history then is the post-peak evolution of the great ‘wave-cycle’ that signifies the development of Western culture. This ‘wave-cycle’ is defined by multiple historical events but, as Spengler noted, what is important is not so much each historical event in itself, but what its significance is/was by occurring at that particular point in the ‘wave-cycle’ (Spengler’s emphasis).
What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing (at that particular point in time).[4]
Of greatest significance then is the identification of historical ‘step changes’, the events which are symptomatic of a unidirectional change along the path of development the European cultural ‘wave-cycle’. It is necessary to isolate out those really meaningful, meaningful though sometimes seemingly trivial, historical events which define the curve, as distinct from the general ‘noise’ of unimportant happenings.
In an earlier essay,[5] I have indicated a number of general examples of trends which define the trajectories of ‘wave-cycles’, for example, dominant male to dominant male, captured more eloquently by Spengler in:
[…] the anarchic intermezzo known today as democracy, which leads from the destruction of monarchial State supremacy by way of political, plebeian Rationalism to the Caesarism of the future.[6]
Another was immediate gratification to immediate gratification. Here I propose to present a few more of those ‘wave-cycle’-defining trajectories, and some of the step changes which I consider to be of significance as signposts to modern unidirectional change. These highlight general changes in the underlying philosophy of the culture and therefore changes in the underlying culture itself in modern Western society. The most recent step changes identified here, I suggest, highlight a continued downwards trajectory for Western Civilization.
3. Step Change 1: Productive Investment to Ego Satisfying Consumption
This step change I have essentially outlined in an earlier essay, [7] suggesting that from the peak of cultural achievement there is a tendency for civilizations to turn from productive investment to ‘investment’ in capital consuming, ego-satisfying, consumption. I have also referred this as a major step change from ‘deferred gratification’ to ‘immediate gratification’.
This was summed up previously in an extract from Samuel Huntington, reviewing Professor Quigley’s book, The Evolution of Civilization :
Civilizations grow, Quigley argued in 1961, because they have an ‘instrument of expansion’, that is, a military, religious, political, or economic organisation that accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations. Civilizations decline when they stop the ‘application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases’. This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for ‘non-productive, but ego-satisfying purposes … which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production’. People live off their accumulated capital and civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay. This is a period of acute economic depression, declining standards of living, civil wars between various vested interests, and growing illiteracy. The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of the society began to lose the allegiance of the masses of people on a large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over the society. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even support it by paying taxes. Decay then leads to the stage of invasion ‘when the civilization, no longer able to defend itself because it is no-longer willing to defend itself, lies wide open to “barbarian invaders”’ who often come from ‘another, younger, (now) more powerful civilization’.[8]
Certainly, the evidence suggests that our own civilization has passed that point between productive investment and consumption. Consider the relationship between current global debt and global output.
The global debt load has surged to a new all-time record equivalent to more than double the world’s economic output, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned Thursday. ... ‘Global debt — both public and private — has reached an all-time high of $188 trillion. This amounts to about 230 percent of world output’, Georgieva said in a speech to open a two-day conference on debt. That is up from the previous record of $164 trillion in 2016, according to IMF figures.[9]
Hoisington Investment Management had been keeping an eye out on these pre-2019 figures, [10] calculating how much GDP growth each dollar of debt has generated in investment return. As you can see in the chart below, (Figure 1) in 2017, globally, each dollar of debt generated just 42 cents of GDP growth. This is down from 47 cents 10 years ago.
Figure 1 Source: Hoisington Investment Management.
Note that the figures quoted above are early 2019 figures, that is, they pre-date the massive borrowings and collapse of global output resulting from the 2020, Covid-19, global pandemic.
The implication is that all ‘reporting countries’ are attempting to prop up their economies by expanding debt, but the investment of this money does not appear to be being channelled into the types of productive investment needed to create the surpluses required to pay off that debt. They are running down accumulated capital. In response to declining GPD growth the strategy appears to be to reduce interest rates to zero (or even further to negative interest rates!) in order to try and entice those with a declining taste for debt to borrow more, and to motivate those who still have savings to go out and spend them. This strategy appears to be the antithesis of the economic management required for Quigley’s healthy expanding civilization. If investment cannot produce a sufficient return to pay back debt then, from that point, decline appears inevitable.
This move from productive to destructive investment constitutes a major step change in the evolution of Western economies.
4. Step Change 2 : Fertility ‘burnout’? :
As the culture’s financial capital is being consumed, so is its vigour or social capital. Other empires provide examples of what to we can expect. Again, the Roman Empire for example: ‘The name “Roman” in Hannibal’s day meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.’[11]Arnold J. Toynbee put it slightly differently: ‘Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.’[12]
Of our own civilization Pascal Bruckner has said of this step change :
We have abandoned the momentum and energy of the Enlightenment. What we are left with is a reflection of a gray, chiaroscuro version of it. This is the twilight of European civilization. Something is slowly dying in our nations and, unless we wake up, we will disappear. [13]
Douglas Murray added: ‘As so often, the Germans have a word for it: Geschichtsmüde, meaning “weary of history”.’[14] - Or more simply ‘burnout’.
There are many symptoms of this ‘burnout’ of civilizations, the step change transition from thrift to debt being just one of them. The decline in fertility rates and subsequent predictable population collapse is another which is in itself another major step change. In the new ‘rational’ society, where consumption is the new driving fashion, it is no longer ‘rational’ to burden oneself with children. Neil Rogachevsky summed up Spengler’s predictions for Europe :
In The Decline of the West (1918-1923), Oswald Spengler predicted that the Western countries would depopulate and decay. The European nations had become too urbane to sustain what he called (in pop-Nietzschean fashion) the ‘organic logic’ of life. ‘Children do not happen’, he wrote, ‘because intelligence at the peak of intensity can find no longer any reason for their existence’. The West, according to Spengler, was dying of civilization.[15]
Here is how Spengler himself put it (Spengler’s emphasis), describing the ‘burnout’ of Western civilization :
Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it. This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply. God is, in the familiar words of Frederick the Great, always on the side of the big battalions, and now if ever this shows itself. The millions who fell in the World War (WWI) were the pick of all (that) the white world had in the way of race, but the test of race is the speed with which it can replace itself. A Russian once said to me: ‘The Russian woman will make good in ten years what we sacrificed in the Revolution’. That is the right instinct. Such races are irresistible.
But the decay of the white family, the inevitable outcome of megalopolitan existence (i.e. decedent urban civilization), is spreading, and it is devouring the ‘race’ of nations. The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting from his own and other lives the maximum of amusement - panem et circenses. The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties towards family, nation, and State. The whole of Liberal-Socialistic problem-literature revolves about this suicide of the white race. [16]
Perhaps, since Spengler uses terms like ‘race’, ‘white people’, ‘white family’, white world’, and ‘white race’ in the above quotations, in order to avoid any miss-understanding, it may be necessary to be completely clear about what Spengler meant by these terms. Spengler used the term ‘race’ in the sense of a single group joined together by a shared sense of cultural identity. A group who share the same ‘organic logic of life’. The audacity to define themselves as a ‘nation’. Thus, in an earlier quote featured above, Spengler talked of the Romans, as a cultural entity, as a ‘people’, but I believe he would also regard this as being synonymous with a ‘Roman race’. It would include peoples of conquered nations who had become ‘Romanised’ and who considered themselves as part of the Roman ‘project’. As a prelude to the above quote, Spengler began (Spengler’s emphasis):
But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today : Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike - that is, healthy - generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had ‘race’, to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it. [17]
Similarly, he uses the term ‘white people’, ‘white family, ‘white world’ synonymously with ‘Europeans’. In any case, if anyone believes that there is a suggestion of white racial superiority here, note that Spengler was describing the European ‘race’, or ‘white people’, as being, not the ‘strong one’, but the weak one.
Spengler based his assumptions on the future of the European Civilization from evidence from other civilizations that have been and gone before us. In both the later declining Hellenic Civilization and the Roman Empire, birth rates were also catastrophically low. It was from the writings of people like the Greek General, Polybius (220-146 BC), that Spengler drew his parallels :
In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. … For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. [18]
Polybius, here, was giving his opinion for the reason his nation’s fall to the invading Romans (in particular, 146 BC). If it all sounds rather familiar, it is little wonder that Spengler made the connections that he did. Spengler again on the childlessness of late cultures :
It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or Ibsen’s heroine’s who ‘belongs to herself’ - they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman and, most conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism, and in the nineteenth century, as in the times of Lao-tzu and the Charvaka doctrine, there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana.[19]
And again :
Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century ; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsüan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Mayan cities must have been in that condition before Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renown cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.[20]
Currently, Europe as a whole, has a fertility rate of around 1.5 children per female (2010) [21] having dropped to below replacement rates in around 1973. [22] It seems inescapable that there will be a declining and aging population with as much as 40% of the population being over the age of 60 by the end of the century. It becomes interesting to speculate on just how Europe will cope with a burgeoning debt burden and rising social welfare costs at that time.
5. Step Change 3 : TV Sitcoms?
Perhaps, looking in a completely different direction for evidence of social decline, a small window into the social changes that have been happening can be seen in something as banal as television ‘sitcoms’. It is often in small details that the big trends manifest themselves. The television programs of my childhood seemed to feature normal, middleclass, nuclear families – and often large families. ‘The Nelsons’, ‘Leave it to Beaver’, ‘My Three Sons’, … were some of the earliest that I remember. Wesley Morris, in the Australian (newspaper), noted a change :
To the extent that TV has always been an advertisement for something, it was often an advertisement for the middle class : a job, a family, a home, products to put in it. But early sitcoms engaged with matters of aspiration and failure, and they were tied to work. If employment didn’t define a character from episode to episode, it sustained him (and it was usually a him). […]
On Seinfeld, Living Single, Friends, Ellen, It’s Like, You Know, Sex and the City, Girlfriends and, much later, Happy Endings and New Girl, the commingling, childless men and women might have had jobs, but almost none had a consequential career. How many jobs did Elaine and George have on Seinfeld? And in how many fields? And Kramer — how was he paying to live across the hall from Jerry? Hangout shows placed friendship above family, obviating the typical economic ecosystem. Belonging to a family of friends probably means you only have to support yourself.
TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand ‘average’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’.
Watching Modern Family, Two Broke Girls and Girls, I often find myself asking what it even means to work. The characters on these shows, especially Girls, exist in an alternative realm — a kind of ‘whatever’ class. Neurosis, there, is a condition of identity, not of social station. The work you do is on yourself. [23]
Morris highlighted the attitude to work, but I think it is worth considering some aspects of the side issues that he points to, the somewhat ‘abnormal’ relationships, the ‘hangout’ culture, marriage (or the lack of it), childlessness, and the disengaged, self-absorbed nature of the characters. If television is an ‘advertisement’, the product it is selling and normalising is the new, childless, self-indulgent, social ‘norm’.
6. Step Change 4 : Sheol to Heaven to Sheol
Religion provides another possible example of a recent step change in Spengler’s ‘wave-cycle.’ The trajectory of the cycle is defined by what I call ‘Sheol to Heaven to Sheol’, and has recently taken the step change from ‘Heaven’ back to ‘Sheol’.
In Europe, the idea of a ‘Christendom’ appears to be almost over, with Christianity, formerly the foundation of spirituality, the arbitrator of morality, the State religion, now cowed to almost irrelevance by political correctness, and bullied into submission by ‘progressive’ thought. It is barely capable of self-preservation. I came across this quote from an Australian theologian, Prof Tracey Rowland, who also seemed to be dismayed by this desperation to stay relevant :
It is sometimes joked that the only moral principle upon which all members of the C of E can agree is that a failure to separate one’s recyclable rubbish from the food scraps bin is gravely anti-social behaviour.[24]
In Australia, Christianity appears to eke out a miserable existence as a quasi-secular delivery vehicle for the left’s social welfare policies. Rowland continued:
If the only thing uniting a community is the desire for the community to hold together regardless of the actual beliefs and values of those in the community, then that community may well hold together as a mutual social welfare support service for the weaker members who rely on social welfare, but it will lose its character as a church, as an ecclesial body, and it will hold no attraction for the stronger members of the community who don’t go to Church for the free cup of tea and opportunity to pick over the goods on offer at the second-hand clothes stall. If the provision of social welfare, kindness, care and concern, rather than a common creed, becomes the glue that holds a group together, then the sacramental participation in the life of the Trinity will be very much occluded and ecclesial communities will become hard to distinguish from gatherings of secular humanists and political moralists.
She appears to be agreeing with Spengler who famously said: ‘A religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion.’[25]
Major Barbara of the Salvation Army has forgone the ‘salvation’ part and aligned herself with her socialist, creator, George Bernard Shaw, and the venerable Saint Vincent de Paul has become simply the proprietor of ‘Vinnies Op Shop’. I can’t imagine that things are different in Europe. Under successive ‘progressive’ governments, Christianity appears to have been reduced to the same ‘dhimmi’ status as Christianity has under Islamic governments in various Muslim countries.
But again, looking deeper, there is evidence here of another layer to Spengler’s ‘wave-cycles’.
One of the most astonishing things about the Bible, in my opinion anyway, is that for the first twenty-odd books of the Old Testament there is no indication/no mention of a ‘Heaven’ where the ‘good’ might go, nor a ‘Hell’ for the ‘sinners’. [26] The best that the ‘good’ could hope for was, ‘you will father a nation’ [27] , and the worst, ‘thou shalt surely die’ [28] . The dead are simply ‘gathered to their fathers’ [29]. We are told in Genesis that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden was explicitly in order to keep Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life, and hence from gaining eternal life. [30]
But then suddenly, without warning, or fanfare, there is an unannounced, unexplained, one hundred and eighty degree, about-turn in this theological policy. This turn-around, the theological innovation establishing the dual ideas of Heaven and Hell, is found in Daniel – supposedly around the time of the Jewish captivity in Babylon. Suddenly, God announces: ‘Of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth many will awake - some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace.’[31] Daniel, therefore, represents the beginning of the theology associated with the Day of Judgement.
A Catholic priest[32] once explained to me that in early Jewish religion Jews believed that after death everyone went to ‘Sheol’. This was an underworld rather like Hades of the Greek religion. There was no sense of reward or punishment involved, it just was what it was. According to the priest, at the time of the Maccabee Rebellion against Rome, the problem was that those who fought and died for the Jewish cause against the Romans went off to Sheol, but those who didn’t bother to fight, and who stayed safe at home and died in their beds of old age also went off to Sheol as well. And, significantly, so too did the Romans they were fighting against! I mean, what’s the point of fighting! In order to find recruits to their military cause, the Maccabees needed an incentive to fight, and so, so I was told, the Maccabees found a solution by picking out a new theological idea of a reward after death and backwriting it into Daniel. These ideas were perhaps adopted from Egypt – the Isis myth? – where the living spirit and the dead flesh were rejoined in the after-world. [33]
My point here is that Western Christian theology, now, appears to have turned full circle and gone back to the very roots of Judaism. It would appear that the very aspect of ‘judgement’, as in a Day of Judgement as foreseen by Daniel, which was so fundamental to early Christianity, has once again disappeared from the Christian theology. Modern Christian thinking demands equality of outcome of everyone, believers and sinners alike. Thus, it appears that everyone will equally end up in a modern ‘Sheol’, although now this is perhaps some ‘Heavenly’ destination rather than in an ‘Underworld’. Again, this is a fundamental change, a step change, in theology, and again, without explanation or announcement. The bar for entry into the new Heaven has been set so low, the Churches no longer even bother to speak of a Day of Judgement.
Once again we see this cyclical evolution over time akin to Spengler’s ‘wave-cycles’, with Sheol evolving into Heaven and Hell before returning once again to ‘Sheol’, but now with a new name and a more desirable address.
Most importantly, I note here again the significance of the idea of Heaven as an institutional reward for deferred gratification, and the implications of a break with this reward in this new theology which certainly no longer appears to condemn immediate gratification if not actually rewarding it.
Another aspect that I find interesting is that here in Australia secularisation is considered to be a tragic event when it happens to other cultures. Any number of intellectuals will argue that the demise of the Aboriginal population, and the demise of their ‘spirit’, (their ‘organic logic of life’?) here in Australia can be directly attributed to a loss of culture due to the undermining of its ancient religious beliefs and practices by the new settlers. And yet the significance of the secularisation of Western society in Europe (and Australia), and the loss of the spirituality and religious roots in their own society is of no interest or concern to them. This, I believe, is a huge mistake. Both The West, and the Aborigines, are suffering spiritual destruction.
Goldman believes that there is a civilisational tipping point, a moment when the spiritual and cultural resources of a people or a nation are exhausted or destroyed and it is no longer possible for them to attain or retain a sense of immortality through participation in a great chain of generations stretching from the past into the future.
Human purpose is derived from a cultural covenant between the living and the unborn ; that is, that this generation honours its ancestors, and in return future generations in their turn will honour them.[34]
This is most explicit in classical Egyptian culture; the Egyptians collected a detailed chronology of past Kings and past events, but this actually represented an obsession with the future. While the living Egyptians occupied the present, life was all about the preparation for an infinite future after death. History was important because the living would soon join all the ancestors who had gone before them on the ‘other side’, and become part of history themselves, However, their mortal remains, essential in the afterlife, were left precariously vulnerable behind. Therefore, Egyptians saw themselves as part of a historical progression of which the preservation of the past was a fundamental duty for the continuation of the futures of those already on the ‘other side’. Their duty to their ancestors was done in the expectation that their antecedents of the future would in turn do their duty and preserve the mortal remains into eternity of those currently alive. Spengler wrote :
The Egyptian soul, […] perceived past and future as its whole world, and the present (which is identical to waking conscientiousness) appeared to him as simply the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable stretches.[35]
David Goldman again:
The culture of a community is what unites the dead with those that are yet to be born. The death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless generations whose lives can no longer be remembered, for no living being will sing their songs or tell their stories.[36]
Ultimately, the very idea of a ‘secular society’ is an oxymoron.
7. Step Change 5 : Magic to Religion to Magic
A symptom of a civilization’s social decay is a product of the victory of so-called ‘rational thought’ over ‘religion’; the secularisation of the society, the questioning of the culture’s foundation mythology, and the subsequent fragmentation of foundational cultural identity. We of The West are told, without irony, ‘we have no culture’.[37]
Spengler also noted that secularisation, or at least the ‘rationalisation’ of religion, was also a feature of previous civilizations in decline. Towards the end of the Greek civilization the belief in the old Greek gods was challenged by the more ‘rational’ religious forms of the Stoics and Epicureans. In India, the declining Hindu religion was challenged by the more ‘intellectual’ Buddhism. The Classical pantheon of Roman gods was challenged by the ‘invading’ religions of their conquered peoples – the more modern, ‘rational,’ monotheistic, religions of Judaism, Christianity, Mithraism, and the Isis cult. [38]
According to Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche understood the terrible danger of secularisation for Western civilization. He noted that religion represented part of a buffer system between the articulated things that we know about, and the things that we can know nothing about. He described this as the realm of the dreamer, the mystic, the artistic, who acts as a mediator, and where religion and gods provided a sufficient and satisfactory quasi-explanation of the unknown. Without an explanation linking the articulated world and the unarticulated world we exist in a ‘dissociated state’, a ‘sickness of the spirit’ that permeates the individual and society in the face of the great unknown. Nietzsche’s announcement that - ‘God is dead’ was intended as a warning:
But in the late eighteen hundreds he (Nietzsche) announced that God was dead, and you often hear of that as something triumphant, but for Nietzsche it wasn’t - because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded.[39]
It was what replaced it that worried Nietzsche (Peterson’s emphasis):
Then people turn to something like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious sub-structure, to try and organise their thinking – and that’s a catastrophe - and that’s what Nietzsche foresaw.[40]
He knew that when you knock the slats out of the base of Western Civilization by destroying this representation, this ‘God ideal’ let’s say, we would destabilise, and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let’s say, and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, and believed, and predicted this in the late eighteen hundreds, which is an absolute intellectual tour-de-force of staggering magnitude, predicted that in the twentieth century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational, rational but deeply incorrect, representation of the world. And we’ve been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since, with a good sprinkling of nihilism in there, and despair, and in some sense that’s the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general.[41]
There is, perhaps, a deeper story here, that connects this step change of secularisation more deeply back into Spengler’s idea of great ‘wave-cycles’ of civilization. Professor Frazer divided human belief systems into two grand historical phases – Magic and Religion. [42] To Frazer, there is a fundamental difference between the two. With magic, an individual has agency to use some internal power to control aspects of nature, and to affect the outcome of day to day life. Magic comes from within the individual. Religion, on the other hand, is the belief that the individual does not have the ability to influence the external world, and that the individual must entreat some external agency, a superior being, a God, to supply benefit on their behalf.
According to Frazer, the magician has so little understanding of how big natural forces are, how big the universe is, that he has no difficulty in believing that he is able to take control of nature. However, once he begins to comprehend the scale of his universe, and the power that is arraigned against him, rather than conquer natural forces by his own efforts, he seeks allies in the form of supernatural beings, that is, gods, to assist him in that quest: ‘Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest.’[43]
The transition from Magic to Religion in the Western world occurred at some point in its pre-history.[44] But note that now, with secularisation, the belief in gods, superior beings, etc., and belief in religion itself, too has declined dramatically, - to the point that Nietzsche was able to announce that God was dead. Nietzsche realised that the post-religion, godless vacuum created, where a moral system was no longer imposed by some independent, external authority, would need to be filled from within.
So, Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values essentially. […] He still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values […].[45]
Those human beings, akin to gods, were what Nietzsche called ‘overmen’ or ‘supermen,’ but who are, in reality, what I would call the new ‘magicians.’ With religion gone, these are men of the new elites who believe in their own power to control the world, and who believe in the infallibility of their ‘magical’ ideologies. Religious worship is being replaced by the ‘worship’ of the dangerous extremes of new ideologies.
A significant factor with Magic is that it is actually a variant of science, a proto-science if you will, even if actually a pseudo-science. If the magician follows the correct procedure and says the correct mantra, then he will always get the same result, as if magic, like science, was governed by overarching, scientific or natural laws. Religion, on the other hand Frazer considered to be quite different from Magic, since Devine beings are not constrained by scientific laws or laws of nature.
Thus, we saw in pre-history an evolution from magic to religion, but now, with Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ we see a return to new forms of Magic, the ‘magic’ of science itself. Daily we see the objectivity of science compromised by the ‘supermen’ in order to fulfil political agendas and satisfy ideological beliefs. There was an element of ‘magic’ in the old communist, ‘Revolutionary Spirit,’ which in itself was supposed to be able to conquer all problems. [46] More recently, we see the new ‘supermen’, ‘magicians,’ claim to be able to control the weather and prevent Global Warming – Canute-like they claim to be able to hold back the rising tides. Spengler wrote of the rise of the secular ‘expert’ as a replacement for religious authority (Spengler’s emphasis) :
With Roger Bacon begins the long line of scientists who suffer as magicians and heretics … The successor of those Gothic monks was the cultured lay inventor, the expert priest of the machine. Finally, with the coming of rationalism, the belief in technics almost becomes a materialistic religion. Technics is eternal and immortal like God the Father, it delivers mankind like God the Son, and it illuminates us like God the Holy Ghost. And its worshipper is the progress-philistine of the modern age. [47]
It seems possible to me that this represents another aspect of a great cyclical evolution over time embodied in Spengler’s idea of ‘wave-cycles’ – Magic, to Religion, and then back again - to ‘Magic’.
8. Step Change 6 : Science to Advocacy
This new aspect of ‘science’ should be examined in more detail. Here I present two modern examples which I believe demonstrate a major step change in science itself.
Since European settlement in Australia in 1788 there have been many explorers, missionaries, pastoralists, and indeed professional anthropologists, criss-crossing Australia, observing and publishing detailed information about the life and culture of the Australian Aborigines. In particular, detailed descriptions of their hunting and gathering lifestyle are ubiquitous. And then, suddenly, in 2018, a man claiming to be an Aborigine published a book claiming that Aborigines had actually been farmers. [48] His evidence’ for this is shockingly thin but, of significance, to date I am not aware of a single professional anthropologist who has stood up and denounced his theory as false. These professionals are prepared to trash, or allow the trashing by others, of 150-200 years of anthropological research in their own discipline, research which details the hunting and gathering lifestyle of Aborigines, rather than be seen to be contradicting an ‘Aborigine’. It took non professionals interested in Aboriginal affairs to point out the obvious errors, and take a lambasting for daring to do so. [49] At every turn the promoters of this new narrative double down on the inconsistencies [50] and the professional anthropologists remain silent.
In 2002, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) published a report [51] which essentially revolved around the so-called ‘Hockey Stick Graph’ - a new global temperature reconstruction based on tree rings. In this new graph the IPCC, in essence, trashed hundreds of years of climate observations, data, old eyewitness reports from old newspapers, and scientific papers etc. as the long established climate phenomena of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were airbrushed out of existence. Almost none of the professionals in the climate change industry stood up for their own research, and the history of their own discipline, in pointing out the inconsistencies. They meekly fell silent behind the new graph and were complicit in attempting to remove the Medieval Warm period (actually still warmer than the present day) out of scientific knowledge. It took outsiders to expose the graph as a fraud [52] - but even now the climate change professionals are still in complete denial of that fraud. Nearly all have doubled down behind the new graph. Below is the global temperature reconstruction graph from the IPCC’s own report in 1990 [53] (Figure 2) and the so-called Hockey stick graph (Figure 3) that replaced it in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report.
Figure 2. IPCC global temperature reconstruction, 1990.’ (IPCC Figure 7c, page 202)
Figure 3. IPCC temperature reconstruction, 2001. (IPCC Figure 2.20)
These two recent examples presented here are inextricably linked through a new philosophy of science. In the early days, anthropology was based on ‘scientific’ observation of Aborigines in their regular daily life. In the 1970s anthropology passed from being based on cultural data collection to being based on advocacy on behalf of Aborigines. Anthropologists became divorced from any requirement for ‘fact’ as they were now required to present the best possible case on behalf of their ‘clients’. Those that failed to follow the new rules quickly found themselves struggling to find work. As anthropologist, James Clifton, noted, his ‘Eleventh Commandment’ of Anthropology: ‘Thou Shall Not Say No to an Indian.’[54]
In other words, if you want to maintain your career - never contradict an Indian. It appears that the claims of Pascoe, even with only a dubious claim to Aboriginality, cannot be challenged by the modern anthropologist.
Climate research, I assert, passed through that same point, from science to advocacy, in the late 1990s. An example of how advocacy trumped science was outlined by the late Professor Stephen Schneider, a leading global warming catastrophist and academic in 1989:
We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. [55]
Australia’s preeminent science organisation, the CSIRO, through its scientific director Dr Stafford-Smith while speaking at the Planet Under Pressure conference, London, 2012, also abandons science for public theatre and political advocacy:
To unite scientists and global publics in a climate change Quest, communicators need to attend rigorously to the narrative-dramatic dynamics of stakeholder sensemaking. The depth of fear and despair when fully engaged with the tragic Downfall plot should not be underestimated… We urgently need to develop the skills of reading and leading climate change plots. In so doing, we can build understanding of the social drama of data.[56]
My point is that these two independent examples from anthropology and climate change appear to suggest that a step change has occurred in how science is now undertaken, moving from independent science as an end in itself, to science to promote a political agenda. Other examples will no doubt come to mind. Like maybe the fact that the old definition of a ‘woman’ as an ‘adult human female’ apparently now contradicts the findings of modern ‘science’.[57]
Not all women can get pregnant, and women aren’t the only people who get pregnant.
Not all women menstruate, and women aren’t the only people who menstruate.
Cisgender women aren’t the only people who need abortions. [58]
Spengler had this to say in anticipation of this new trend (Spengler’s emphasis) :
But in the Faustian, and only the Faustian mind alone, every theory from the outset is also a working hypothesis. A working hypothesis does not need to be ‘correct’ it is only required to be practical. It aims, not at embracing and unveiling the secrets of the world, but at making them serviceable to definite ends. [59]
I would argue that modern ‘science’ has discovered that making their theories serve political ends is more practical and more lucrative than being simply ‘correct.’
9. Step Change 7 : ‘World-as-nature’, to ‘World-as-history’, back to World-as-nature’.
Another possible step change that came to mind was directly inspired by a quote from Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, from his idea that there were two great subdivisions in the way man viewed the world. These are ‘world-as-nature’, a sort of ‘primitive’ world view with respect to time, and a more sophisticated ‘world-as-history’ world view. [60] It is this quote from Decline of the West, which I explore here.
Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance.[61]
Spengler defined the ‘fellaheen peoples’ as – the rootless, ‘post-culture’, ‘post-civilization’ residue left over as a civilization decays to dust:
At this level all civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This is the fellah type.[62]
Spengler seemed to be suggesting that cultures in a ‘primitive’ state had a ‘world-as-nature’ world view, which evolved as the culture matured into the more ‘sophisticated’ ‘world-as-history’ world view, but then at late-civilization times as the civilization decayed, the ‘fellah type’ would revert to a ‘world-as-nature’ world view. This suggests that this rise from ‘world-as nature’ to ‘world-as-history’, but back to ‘world-as-nature’ again somehow defined for Spengler an external visible form of his cultural ‘wave-cycle’. In that case, step changes between ‘world-as-history’ and ‘world-as-nature’ world views should perhaps be becoming more obvious in the present day.
But first, Spengler’s ideas of ‘world-as nature’ to ‘world-as-history’ need to be examined in more detail. For Spengler, ‘nature’ and ‘history’ are opposite extreme terms in man’s range of possibility.[63]
Nature is the sum of necessities imposed by (Natural) Law. The Laws of Nature imply that events can be endlessly repeated with the same outcome pre-determined by law. Outcomes are not time dependant. Natural Law is permanently and universally valid, and therefore ‘natural’. It exists inside ‘a logic of space’ but, because it is not time dependent, it is ‘timeless’ and a-historic.
Nature is the way man interacts directly with the world of his immediate surroundings, the immediate impressions of his senses. He deals with natural phenomena, the natural landscape, and the natural biosphere all ruled by Natural Law. It is from this interaction that he interprets and understands and reacts to the physical world.
Someone with a ‘world-as-nature’ world view looks at the world as an on-going series of interactions with the physical world around him, a series of incidents or accidents in which he has become involved. The timing of these incidents cannot be predicted, so the future is unknowable. He sees himself / his life as rounded off and self contained within those natural surroundings.
On the other hand, history is irreversible. Every historical event has a unique time connotation. History is how man seeks to comprehend the act of his living existence in the broader world in relation to the timing of his own life. He lives constantly aware that his life is an element in a life-course that goes on for hundreds thousands of years. The ‘world-as-history’ man is looking for some deeper meaning in the day to day riot of seemingly random incidents that make up his life. What ‘world-as-history’ people are looking for is a ‘logic of time’, a logic of ‘Destiny within nature’, a ‘philosophy of history’, not just looking at the natural physical world in isolation:
What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are per se, but what they signify … by appearing (at that particular point in time). [64]
They ask: Why this? Why now? In particular, perhaps, what do the step changes that I have identified here signify by appearing now?
Some of what I raise here has been discussed in an earlier essay [65] in a section entitled ‘The “Ascent of Man” or the “Descent of Man”?’, but is repeated here.
For example, in attempting to show this difference in world views between the ‘primitive’, ‘world-as-nature’ world view, and the more developed ‘world-as-history’ world view, I referred to the example of the Australian Aborigines. Mircea Eliade has said of these:
The aborigines do not record historical events in an irreversible chronological order. The changes and innovations, which imperceptibly but continuously transformed their existence, were telescoped into the mythical era; that is, they became part of the tribal sacred history.[66]
Anthropologist William Stanner expanded on this (Stanner’s emphasis):
I have never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract concept. And the sense of ‘history’ is wholly alien here. … Although, as I have said, The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ the Dreamtime in time; it was, and is, everywhen.[67]
Tony Swain also denied Australian Aborigines a notion of time, and hence any history. He described aspects of their culture as implying:
Lives, no matter how beloved, do not matter as lives. They are denied temporal extension ; there is no room for them to be protracted in memory, and so to stretch into history.[68]
Thus, Swain[69] quoting Bell, suggested that Aborigines did not trace genealogies far back past ‘living memory’, because a link to a human, that is a genetic ancestor in the past, was considered less relevant to them than their link to their Dreamtime/totemic ancestry in what they considered was the here-and-now/‘everywhen’. Another aspect of culture which reinforced this was the taboo on referring to a recently deceased person by name, out of fear that his spirit would be summoned upon hearing his name.
Aborigine, Dick Roughsey, concurred with this a-historicity of Aboriginal life. He spoke of the wild exploits of Warrenby, a rare tribal hero of the Lardil tribe, but then admitted:
We don’t know how long it is since Warrenby lived – it could be 100 years ago or 1,000 years – but as long as one Lardil lives he’ll never be forgotten. [70]
A small digression concerning Aborigine’s view of ‘time’, is perhaps instructive. I was watching television program recently about aeroplane crash investigations, and at one point the chief investigator commented: ‘If one plane crashes into a mountain it’s a tragedy. If two planes crash into a mountain it’s a systemic problem.’
His point was that if something happens more than once, then there is a probably an unidentified, underlying problem in aeroplane design, inadequate instrumentation or warning systems, pilot training, air traffic control, etc. It’s a system problem. I made a similar connection when looking at Australian Aborigines in the apparent different way they regarded the future. If one drives in remote areas and comes across one Aboriginal family, car broken down at the side of the road with a flat tyre and no jack or no wheel brace, one could think of this as a one off, ‘flying into the mountain’ event, but when one routinely encounters, as I have done, the same scenario in a variety of remote locations covering four different Australian States, it would appear that there is a pattern of planning failures that references a deeper under-lying systemic problem. No non-Aborigine would undertake long overland drives in remote areas without making certain provisions. It appears that there is a problem for Aborigines projecting the individual self into the future [71] and don’t seem to easily learn from their own mistakes or from the mistakes of others.
In the thought-scheme of mainstream whitefella society, individual situations are drawn together, collectivised and abstracted into categories of social problems. […] These collectivising concepts are made possible by a long-evolved ‘sociological imagination’, which groups the specific into the general and then sees the specific as local examples of the general. […] But in traditional Ngaanyatjarra culture a ‘sociological imagination’ of this sort did not develop, partly because regional populations were too low to generate perceptible patterns of deviance and partly because the traditional scheme, the tjukurrpa (The Dreamtime), provided an alternative means of understanding and dealing with individual situations.[72]
I have heard this elsewhere,[73] that Aborigines have difficulty generalising from the particular, and then using the general to inform them about what to do when encountering similar examples of the particular. As suggested in the quote, the picture is complicated by culture, by the fact that it is common for Aborigines to attribute all unusual events to the intervention of sorcerers, (i.e., an ‘alternative means of understanding’) and this creates a general weakness in the linking of ‘cause’ and ‘effect. This suggests that Aborigines would not recognise the ‘historicity’ of an event, a ‘logic of time’ that could be drawn from an event, as easily as non-Aborigine.
Of more significance to Aborigines is the sense of ‘Place’ – the eternal sacred places still occupied by their eternal Dreamtime ancestors, rather than the ‘Time’ at which events concerning them happened.
Tony Swain tells us that ‘Whites’ (his term) have a world view based on linear ‘Time’ (Spengler’s ‘world-as-history’) while the ‘Noble Savage’ (the Australian Aborigines) have a world view rooted in ‘Place’ (Spengler’s ‘world-as-nature’). Unlike Spengler though, Swain, in true Rousseau-ian fashion, regarded the transition between world views as a backward step rather than a forward step (Swain’s emphasis): ‘[…] I would suggest that linear time is a ‘fall’ from place.’[74]
To Swain then, continuing, the Aborigines’ focus on Place is ‘good’ and ‘natural’, while those who are ‘civilised’ represent a ‘fall’ from Place and a step towards imperialism (and civilization). Thus, identification with Place is good but identification with Time in contrast is ‘inherently capricious; its indolent open-handedness paving the way for Imperialism.’
Swain also quotes Vine Deloria, (a Sioux Indian, thus extending the principle to other ‘primitive’ peoples), about being rooted to sacred place :
Can it (the indigenous notion of ‘place’, when disrupted by missionaries) leave the land of its nativity and embark on a program of world conquest ... ?
One can accept that early societies saw the world as ‘just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time’. But the transition to a ‘world-as-history’ world view may be more recent than one imagines. The Celtic the long barrows of the European countryside served as markers of ‘place’ that were connected to Early Neolithic ideas about cosmology and spirituality. The Greeks had such a limited idea of ‘history’ that even the relatively recent ruins of the Mycenaean culture were simply attributed to the activities of the Gods. [75]
One window into the mind of a ‘world-as-nature’ people is to look into the writings produced by such a ‘world-as-as-nature’ culture. The text I am thinking of here is the Qur’an. Clearly it was written in the seventh century by someone who was familiar with the seventh century world view, but who appears to have assumed that the future would simply be an extension of the past ; a projection of the seventh century stretching on into infinity. It’s a kind of Fukuyama, ‘End of History’, [76] world view, which sees the future as simply an infinite continuation of the past, and cannot foresee the possibility of any alternative future.
Cultural and technical innovation occurred so slowly that it was difficult for anyone to see ‘progress’ within his or her own life time to decide what was historically relevant and what was not. Many of the Medieval mining techniques depicted by Georgius Agricola[77] had not significantly changed since Roman times, and were broadly recognisable in the techniques used underground in mines that I have worked in myself across Australia. In visiting the site of Late Neolithic flint mining at Grimes Graves in Britain I was struck by the similarity with mining techniques still in use at the Australian opal fields in the seventies when I first visited them. During a person’s life time there were only ‘events’ which were ultimately devoid of deeper significance.
The idea of ‘world-as-history’ is therefore a relatively modern feature. It requires the transition from an identity rooted in time-irrelevant ‘place’, that is, sacred sites, - the sacred grove, the sacred spring, the long barrow, to an identity rooted in time, that is, an identity rooted in historical events, and historical figures, rather than in ‘places’. Identity rooted in history gives the individual a sense of ‘destiny’ in considering ‘time’ in the future, that an individual with identity rooted in ‘place’ cannot know.
This all seems to agree with Spengler’s observation of the timeless state that pre-dates his ‘world-as-history’ world view.
Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. [78]
But what of these ‘fellaheen peoples’? What is their world view? Does civilized man really revert from a ‘world-as-history’ world view of time to a ‘world-as-nature’ world view of time as his civilization passes?
He [the ‘Late Man’] has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place. That is what he longs to forget, refute and contest. He takes flight from history into solitude […] (into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another, or into suicide.)[79]
The future offers no relief in a secular society. It is perhaps worth re-visiting what Goldman had to say about this loss of connection with the future :
Goldman believes that there is a civilisational tipping point, a moment when the spiritual and cultural resources of a people or a nation are exhausted or destroyed and it is no longer possible for them to attain or retain a sense of immortality through participation in a great chain of generations stretching from the past into the future. [80]
I believe that we can already see the beginnings of the timeless ‘world-as-nature’ thinking of the ‘fellah-type’. It appears to me that at the present time concern for the past, and for the future has become steadily telescoped into a shorter and shorter time frame of concern until only the present is left. Above, with the case studies of Australian indigenous farming and the disappearing Medieval Warm Period, I have noted how ‘science’ has sacrificed historical ‘fact’ in order to meet the needs of the present political policy. History itself is also being sacrificed for the needs of the present day :
(The statue of the) Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill – the nemesis of fascists – was defaced and is now boarded up. As his granddaughter Emma Soames lamented ‘We’ve come to this place where history is viewed only entirely through the prism of the present.’[81]
History viewed through the ‘prism of the present’ is a reversion to the ‘world-as-nature’ world view and a retreat towards a-historicity. The devaluing of history represents the undermining of an identity rooted in ‘history’, without replacing it with an identity rooted in ‘place’. Is this the origin of the rootless, fellaheen character?
There are many examples, large and small, of this telescoping of time. Here are two recent local ones that I have noted.
A television weather report (South Australia, 7/8/2020) informed us of the occurrence of ‘unprecedented’ (sic) snow in the north Mt Lofty and Flinders Ranges, north of Adelaide. We were told that we haven’t seen snow in August year since 2012. ‘Unprecedented’ these days, it seems, is only 8 years ago.
The Australian media is constantly reminding us of the ‘unprecedented’ (sic) 2019-20 bushfires that burnt parts of three States. A simple search on the Internet for ‘Bushfires in Australia’ immediately throws up :
Severe fire storms are often named according to the day on which they peaked, including the five most deadly blazes:
2019–20 bushfires It is estimated that the 2019–2020 bushfires led to the deaths of at least 33 people.
Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria (173 people killed, 2000 homes lost);
Ash Wednesday 1983 in Victoria and South Australia (75 dead, nearly 1900 homes);
Black Tuesday 1967 in Tasmania (62 people and almost 1300 homes); and the
Black Friday 1939 in Victoria (71 dead, 650 houses destroyed),
Gippsland fires and Black Sunday of 1926 in Victoria (60 people killed over a two-month period).
Other major conflagrations include:
The 2006 December bushfires, the
1974–75 fires that affected 15% of Australia, and the
Black Thursday bushfires of 1851.[82]
Thus, it appears that there were at least five even more catastrophic fires that have disappeared from media memory and even a fire five times bigger than the 2019-20 fires, only ten years before, has been disappeared from cultural ‘memory’.
And then there is also COVID 19. As pandemics go it is big, but hardly ‘unprecedented’ – we appear to have a global pandemic every twenty or thirty years back to the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’. The only thing unprecedented is the response to the pandemic – and this in itself represents a whole new historical ‘step change’ that could also be followed up. [83] But limited supplies of the most basic personal protective clothing, and a totally haphazard response, suggest a health bureaucracy completely caught by surprise in spite of its many earlier precedents.
None of the three events documented here are ‘unprecedented’ in the normal usage of the word. What is unprecedented is the use of the word ‘unprecedented’ in such a loose fashion – and this I believe is indicative of a fundamental step change in cultural memory. The two examples of the rewriting of history cited above, the end of Aboriginal hunting and gathering and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, can also be included as examples of this step change in cultural memory.
It appears that the more historical data is provided on the Internet, and the easier that it is to access, the less likely it is to be ‘found’ by the media, even in their own historical, filed reports. The manipulation of past historical events, the discounting of past historical events, and only endowing current events with any significance, appears to be motivated by the need to preclude ever learning anything from past historical events in order that each new event can fulfil the political requirements of the present day. Earlier I defined this ‘world-as-nature’ world view as:
Someone with a ‘world-as-nature’ world view looks at the world as an on-going series of interactions with the physical world around him, a series of incidents or accidents in which he has become involved. The timing of these incidents cannot be predicted, so the future is unknowable.
The devaluing of even recent past events until they disappear from historical memory and dissociating them from any cycle of earlier events ensures that the current events appear to be ‘unprecedented’, unpredictable, and that the future is again truly unknowable. The current situation is certainly more consistent with a ‘world-as-nature’ world view and represents Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’. It is a retreat from world view focussed on ‘time’.
Fukuyama’s book, ‘End of History’, [84] proposed that, in essence, world governance had reached such a height of maturity that the type of political events that previously defined history, wars for example, would no longer happen – therefore an end of history - an end of ‘world-as-history’. An Australian example of how this new faith in the ‘end of history’, and how an end to political crises plays itself out in Australia’s future planning can be seen in that Australia apparently maintains only a theoretical 90 day strategic reserve of oil. This does not seem like an appropriately long strategic time horizon to me, but, we are told, that Australia usually falls even well short of that.
10. Conclusion: Australia has only 79 Days of Petrol
Signatories to the International Energy Agency, of which Australia is one, should have a minimum of 90 days oil on tap, “in the event of a severe oil supply disruption”. According to the monthly Australia Petroleum Statistics report Australia had 79 days’ worth of fuel in April.
However, that figure includes not only fuel stored in Australia but also oil on ships heading our way and oil sitting at overseas terminals destined for Australia. Take those away and Australia only has 61 days’ worth of fuel. Indeed, we haven’t had 90 days’ worth of fuel since 2012. In terms of petrol and jet fuel, it’s worse. We have only 30 days’ worth in the national tank and a mere 20 days of diesel. [85]
A German example of a potential strategic short-sightedness might be the closure of nuclear and coal power generating plants in exchange for a reliance on Russian gas.
The report makes for uncomfortable reading in Berlin, where German politicians are trying to defend themselves from Donald Trump’s accusation last week that they are being ‘controlled’ by Moscow because of their dependence on Russian gas:
The country has an ambitious renewable energy expansion program in place called the Energiewende which is designed to replace those energy sources with solar and wind. But sceptics say it is more likely to be replaced by Russian gas – hence the economic imperative of the new Nord Stream II pipeline which Trump criticised at the NATO summit.
But the underlying economic reality is more stark. Germany may not be ‘controlled’ by a dependency on Russian gas at the moment, but if the disappearing coal and nuclear energy is replaced by Russian gas, it would quickly be in a situation where it is. And that has many in the West very concerned.[86]
There is an expectation that, to use an old Australian phrase, ‘She’ll be right.’ But we have reached a point where no one can afford to have a global political crisis and so there are few plans or measures in place to counter them.
In the future, only a-historic, natural events, natural disasters, could be expected, a snow storm here, a bushfire there, an outbreak of pestilence perhaps, all completely unforeseeable, unpredictable, ‘world-as-nature’ events which no politician could realistically be expected to have made provisions against? They are all ‘unprecedented’ now.
The only event left to be controlled then is un-natural, man-made, climate change. But even here, concern over future climate change over the long-term, which appears at first to be a contradiction to my thesis about telescoping down of future time lines of concern into the present day, is probably not what it seems. It appears to me that heightened concern over climate change in the future is more of a cynical ploy to extract money, some trillions of dollars, from the future in order to make it available right now in the present day. Money desperately needed to prop up declining economies in the here and now.
In the late Roman Empire they had ‘coin clipping’. These days we have inflation which is just the modern form of the same general principle of asset stripping of the future value of the currency.
It’s the old story : ‘We’re spending the kids’ inheritance’ in a slightly different form. Except, as we have seen, there are no kids. No one to inherit. And not much to inherit - except the multi trillion dollar debt. It’s like death duties paid by the future to those still alive, as if the living owe the future nothing.
We inherited civilization from our ancestors, but now we are consuming it, and the future can pay its own way. This is the main step change that I have seen in my lifetime.
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Spengler, O. (1934), The Hour of Decision (transl. Ch. Atkinson), New York.
Stanner, W. E. H. (1953/2009), The Dreaming (1953), in: R. Manne (ed.), W.E.H. Stanner. The Dreaming and other Essays, Melbourne.
Swain, A. (1993), A Place for Strangers, Cambridge.
The Mocker (2020), Statue of Limitations as Left Picks and Chooses its History, in: The Australian newspaper 18/6/2020 (https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-mocker-statue-of-limitations-as-left-picks-and- chooses-its-history/news-story/bbafece5f52dc4a0de2763122763e1e4).
Thomas, T. (2012), The CSIRO Sold Us a Pup, in: Quadrant Online 9/9/2012 (http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2012/09/the-csiro-sold-us-a-pup/).
[1] Spengler (1926), p. 106.
[2] Spengler (1926), p. 31. Note : ‘Doric’ here is the first stage of the Classical Greek (Spengler’s Apollinian) ‘culture’ while ‘Gothic’ is the first of the modern Western European (Spengler’s Faustian) ‘culture’, as signified in broadly similar, undecorated, simple architectural styles favoured in the early stages of a maturing culture. The second and third stages of these cultures are represented the increasingly elaborate ‘Ionic’ and ‘Corinthian’ architectural styles of Classical Greece, and the similarly increasingly elaborate ‘Baroque’ and ‘Rococo’ styles of Western Europe, Spengler correlating increasingly elaborate architectural decoration as being typical of advancing civilizations.
[3] Spengler (1926), p. 36.
[4] Spengler (1926), p. 6.
[5] Crooks (2020).
[6] Spengler (1934), p. 39-40.
[7] Crooks (2020).
[8] Huntington (1996), p. 303.
[9] The quote comes from Yahoo News, reproduced in a 2019 financial newsletter (“Rum Rebellion”: https://www.yahoo.com/author/greg-canavan-the-rum-rebellion/).
[10] From the same financial newsletter.
[11] Spengler (1928), p. 165.
[12] Attributed to Arnold J. Toynbee
[13] Bruckner (2019).
[14] Murray (2017), p. 207.
[15] Rogachevsky (2012). A review of Goldman (2011).
[16] Spengler (1934), p. 221-222.
[17] Spengler (1934), p. 219.
[18] Polybius, The Histories Vol. II (transl. E.S. Shuckburg), London, 1889, p. 511.
[19] Spengler (1928), p. 105.
[20] Spengler (1928), p. 107.
[21] Goldman, (2011), p 176. Interestingly, David Goldman blogged under the pseudonym ‘Spengler.’
[22] Goldman (2011), p. 186.
[23] Morris (2016).
[24] Rowland (2017).
[25] Spengler (1928), p.195.
[26] For example: Psalms 6: “For death there is no remembrance of You, In the grave who will give You thanks?” Job 7:1-10 “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away; so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.” Eccl. 9:5 “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”
[27] Gen. 12:1-2 “Now the Lord had said unto Abraham, … and I will make thee a great nation, …”
[28] Gen. 2: 16 – 17 “of every tree of the garden you may freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
[29] For example, Gen. 25:8, Abraham, we are told, is “gathered to his people”, and even King David simply (1Kings 2:10) “… slept with his fathers, …”
[30] Gen. 3:22 “lest they take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”
[31] Daniel 12:2.
[32] R. Crotty, pers comm..
[33] It is perhaps interesting that this point in the Bible, in effect, marks the moment in Jewish history where they pass from Spengler’s classical cultural form into his ‘Majian’ cultural form.
[34] Bendle (2012). A review of Goldman, (2011).
[35] Spengler (1926), p. 12.
[36] Goldman (2011), p. xix-xx.
[37] So I was told recently by a retired university lecturer.
[38] This will be covered in more detail in the section below entitled ‘Invasion’.
[39] Peterson (2017) At 6:19 minutes.
[40] Peterson (2017) At 8:58 minutes.
[41] Peterson (2017) At 9:10 minutes.
[42] Frazer (1890)
[43] Frazer (1890). I note that Gaster (1959) doesn’t appear to be too impressed by this argument, (see Editor’s Forward, pp. xv-xvi), but I believe it still has merit as a generalisation.
[44] Incidentally, using Frazer’s definition of’ religion’ it is arguable that the Australian Aborigines never made the transition from magic to religion, the spiritual beliefs of the Aborigines coming under the heading of ‘magic’. In Aboriginal culture, the individuals were themselves the ‘supreme beings’. They considered themselves to be the current incarnation of the creative totemic ancestors of the ‘Dreamtime’ and through the re-enactment of the same rituals, using the same sacred charms, and reciting the same magic formulae as those used by their ancestors, it was they themselves who could perform the very same acts of creation that their ancestors had done in the ‘Dreamtime’.
[45] Peterson (2017). At 14:40 minutes.
[46] For example, see Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
[47] Spengler (1932).
[48] Pascoe (2018).
[49] For example, O’Brien (2019).
[50] Pascoe has been awarded multiple book prizes and was made a ‘Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at Melbourne University in August 2020.
[51] IPCC Third Assessment Report, 2001.
[52] Montford (2010).
[53] Brown (2011).
[54] Clifton (1994) p. 13. This was written with respect to American Indians, but the same applies to Australian Aborigines as well.
[55] Curry (2011).
[56] Thomas (2012).
[57] See BBC News 26/9/2018. ‘Woman billboard removed after transphobia row.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45650462
[58] See Michael Smith News, 20/11/2020. Planned Parenthood Association. https://michaelsmithnews.typepad.com/.a/6a0177444b0c2e970d026bdea656b0200c-pi
[59] Spengler (1932). The term ‘Faustian’ is Spengler’s term for Western culture.
[60] Spengler (1926), p. 106.
[61] Spengler (1928), p. 170-1.
[62] Spengler (1928), p. 105.
[63] Spengler (1926), p. 6-8.
[64] Spengler (1926), p. 6.
[65] Crooks (in prep).
[66] Eliade (1973) p. 191.
[67] Stanner (1953/2009), p.13.
[68] Swain (1993), p. 13.
[69] Swain (1993), p. 23.
[70] Roughsey (1971/1995), p. 63.
[71] Purtill (2017), p. 100.
[72] Purtill (2017), p. 130.
[73] Anonymous informant.
[74] Swain (1993), p. 27.
[75] Spengler (1926), p. 14.
[76] Fukuyama (1992).
[77] Agricola (1561).
[78] Spengler (1928), p. 170-1.
[79] Spengler (1934), p. 7.
[80] Bendle (2012), A review of Goldman (2011).
[81] The Mocker (2020).
[82] From Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia
[83] Perhaps this response is a new phenomena that signals a deep cultural change within our society, and a re-evaluation of the individual’s assessment of personal risk with respect to society as a whole. I suggest that it may have implications on how modern societies deal with other future emergencies.
[84] Fukuyama (1992).
[85] Brook (2020).
[86] Keating (2018).