Man and Technics

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a cultural historian most famous for his 1917 book, The Decline of the West, which shocked the public with its pessimistic forecast of the inevitable ultimate demise of Western culture. I first read the abridged edition of this work nearly 50 years ago, and it aroused my interest in the rise and fall of civilisations. Arnold Toynbee was deeply influenced by the book in formulating his own Study of History but did not, like Spengler, see cultures as organisms subject to the cycles of life. The decisive influence on Spengler's thought was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, with his ideas of Will to Power, life as a battle, and the ultimate tragedy of human beings and high cultures alike, both subject to a pitiless destiny of mortality. He writes that 'impermanence, birth and passing, is the form of all that is actual…. The life of the individual is as perishable as that of peoples of cultures. (p. 29) All around us are the melancholy ruins of previous civilisations – so why we should we assume that our own culture is not subject to the same laws? Sir John Glubb took a similar view, characterising the lifespan of cultures as around 250 years, which means the US reaches its expiry date next year.

Spengler's rather one-sided view of the human being is as a beast of prey, a predator – a highly masculine and patriarchal stance reflecting what Riane Eisler calls a dominator rather than a partnership society. The feminine polarity is essentially absent – as is love – from Spengler's worldview. Indeed, he characterises feelings of sympathy, reconciliation, and yearning for quiet as toothless – in other words alien to what he regards as the noble (Nordic-Faustian) warrior mentality. The ethos of Europe in the early 1930s, when this book was first published, is not dissimilar to our own with the return of authoritarianism underpinned by mechanistic technocratic ideas of control of the masses. The five chapters first introduce technics as the tactics of living, moving on to contrast herbivores with beast of prey; then human origins in terms of hand and tool, which he explains corresponds to speech and enterprise; finally, the last act is the rise and end of the machine culture – interestingly, here he also forecasts the loss of wage labour to Third World countries.

Spengler is prescient about the dynamic of ruthless industrial exploitation of nature, whereby we ultimately destroy our habitat and ourselves. Again, this relationship is based on the warfare metaphor, this time against nature – which must ultimately prove self-defeating, as EF Schumacher also forecast. Cities encourage an artificial life removed from nature, and the development of technology enslaves us, despite our aspiration to master nature. The city also creates surplus wealth and therefore luxury and fine art as elite expressions of culture. Spengler sees how humans replace God with their own image. The 19th century saw the rise of rationalism, utilitarianism, socialism, communism and liberalism that provided a new polarity to the tension between secular Empire and religious Papacy. It is interesting that these are represented by the French revolution liberty and equality, so one could postulate fraternity as the reconciliation between the two. This was the view of Peter Deunov.

In traditional societies, the elite has been either nobility with its practical orientation to facts and action, or the priesthood oriented towards truth and causality. As numbers increase, the significance of the individual is diminished and organisms are subsumed in organisations. This results in the rise of the (industrial) masses and collectivism demanding conformity. The individual rebels against this by asserting freedom, which is ultimately inner, as Viktor Frankl maintained. More pathologically, we see the mirror images of contempt from above, and envy from below. We also see the rise of ideologies that likewise subordinate the individual to the group, whose dynamics distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup, friends from enemies, leading to the polarisation that is all too apparent.

The naive idea of progress is now in crisis as prospects look more dystopian than utopian. We are increasingly enslaved by our own technology, which is also being used by governments for surveillance and control. Moreover, the cult of violence and war continues to predominate, as we have collectively failed, as yet, to learn the lesson that violence can only lead to more violence, as Christ pointed out 2,000 years ago, a view restated by Tolstoy, Gandhi, Sorokin and Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, war is still profitable, and macho politicians find it good for their image. Steiner agreed with Spengler that human evolution was cyclical, but he was ultimately more optimistic in his understanding of death and subsequent rebirth. Spengler is right, I think, to say that we will be eaten up from within, like all great forms of any culture (p. 77), but our situation is more paradoxical in combining technical progress with moral decay – however, the seeds of renewal are also coming up.