Weakness, Strength, and the Decline and Fall of Civilization
The paradoxes of the modern Right's Spenglerism
An interesting article came across my desk the other day, a sort of gloss of the early 20th century German historian Oswald Spengler, specifically his thoughts on the relationship between the advanced, cosmopolitan societies of antiquity and the relatively more barbaric ones that usurped them. The prototypical example given is 1401 sack of Baghdad by Tamerlane.
As a man of antimodern dispositions, I have always found Spengler’s analysis (or at least the received wisdom on it) fairly obvious. Societies are founded by strong men, men of courage and willingness to face peril, they are inherited by successive generations of men less and less tested in the crucible of conflict and thus lacking the virtues that their fathers had. These men, in turn, mismanage what their forefathers have created, leading it into ruin. The generations left in the ruins must return to the virtues of the original founders or perish. A new generation of strong men emerges, and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. Not always, but more often than not, the destruction of the society of the weak men is brought about by another adjacent civilization in the “strong man” phase of the cycle. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history knows that empires do not last forever, and so it is fairly easy to map this schema onto any empire, antique or modern.
I will forgive the article for playing fast and loose with the case study, and I’m not sure whether Spengler actually meant to refer to the 1401 siege of Baghdad by Tamerlane or the slightly less destructive 1258 siege by the Mongol prince Hulegu since all he says about it is the Mongols carried it out and there is a sense in which the Timurids are “Mongols.” The exact quote from Spengler is:
When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and for ever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed world-peace never diminishes that alter nothing. Decline of the West (vol II p.185-186)
The details are unimportant, as this is vibes-based history. I also have no problem with vibes-based historical analysis, so long as we do not get too caried away with the evidential weight given to those vibes. It is also worth noting that in neither case did the inhabitants of Baghdad simply “not defend” themselves. In the case of the 1401 siege, the Jalayarids fought a succesful skirmish against the first Timurid attempt on the city, and it was only when Tamerlane himself arrived to oversee a 40-day siege and assault on the city that total destruction was visited on Baghdad.
Rather than quibble over details, my primary point is this: the world picture that Spenglerites paint is so stupid, grotesque, and bleak that even if we grant it descriptively (which bears a large asterisk) using it in a prescriptive way is absurd. The thesis of the article, which I found profoundly disagreeable, could be summed up in:
…every culture, by way of its move towards increased intellectualism, will inevitably reject violence. These movements are describably anti-nation because nations are built upon violence, right or wrong, whilst intellectuals prefer the comfort of causes and certain truths. This deference to intellectualism weakens these peoples and opens them up to be conquered by other groups which have not been inflicted with such a mindset.
This is statement is true because it is false. What do I mean?
Intellectualism does not lead people to reject violence. On the contrary, as the modern age shows, what intellectualism does is desensitize people to violence. The more sophisticated you make your mental schemes of control, the more and more terrifying types of violence you can inflict. Spengler is confused if he thinks that the Mongols or Alexander the Great prosecuted greater violence than all the systems of ancient thought that had existed prior to. Relative to, say, the practice of human sacrifice which was widespread in the ancient world and promoted by the “intellectual” priestly castes, the flash-in-the-pan violence of the Mongol Empire pales in comparison. This is the error of equating violence with simply “killing people in war.” Rome, at the height of its “intellectual vigor,” shall we say, was a true slave society that was built on the back of the suffering of untold millions. This was not the case simply because the Romans were brutal people, but because they had a well-developed cultural logic of mass enslavement that other peoples could not approximate.
Nations are built upon violence primarily because nations are ideological entities. Spengler’s own nation of Germany is the textbook example. Germany does not exist primarily because Bismarck was a man of violence or some other such thing, but because the creation of Germany was an ideologically forgone conclusion for those within the Prussian state apparatus. Without the intellectual imperative for a German Reich, it simply would not have come to pass. And so it is not the case that violence begets the nation and from thence births intellectualism. Rather it is the opposite.
Another error in this assessment is the identification of the “strong man,” with unrestrained conquest and violence. The fellaheen, the peasant, is weak because he is primarily concerned with the earth. Artistotle might say his soul is made of baser materials. But this is false, for surely we must admit that it takes more fortitude, dare I say virtue, to labor for your bread than to simply steal it from others. Under the Spenglerian view, bandits are stronger than peasants, but this is only superficially the case.
The aristocrat, then, can either be of this national or anti-national type. This is false. Aristocrats are not in service either to nations or to inconcrete ideals, but primarily to themselves. The strong aristocrat is simply one who prefers bloodshed, or is too mentally unsophisticated to realize his will another way. The “weak” aristocrat is one who cloaks his violence and treachery in the garb of the greater good, piety, and other such high-minded things. In either case, they are the same actor wearing different masks.
There is an anxiety that a society that does not exercise its martial virtues will not survive, and this is true. There is a place in every society for men of courage and strong right arms, but they are best used in the service of peace and not in the cultivation of violence for the sake of some nebulous concept of “civilizational vigor.” After all, peace is such a precious commodity in this world, surely the strongest civilizations are those able to grasp it the longest? If the concept of the nation is irreperably tied up in the necessity to inflict wanton violence, so much the worse for the nation. People can and have lived without them. And if the success stories are people like Genghis Khan and Alexander, notice how fleeting their victories.
And there is an even more interesting aspect to this question, a paradox if you will. I see so many people on the Right, who sometimes fulthroatedly endorse Spenglerism, and yet marry this with belief in traditional Christianity which is antithetical to it. How many times have I heard or read the phrase “Faustian man” or “Faustian spirit” and thought to myself: “Wait, wasn’t Faust damned in the end?”
The radical way in which Christ preached peace as a fruit of the Spirit is greatly diminished in such people. After all, have all the wasteful, cruel, stupid brother wars of Christendom, or the wanton cruelty that the Christian empires enacted in Africa and the Americas hurt or helped the cause of Christ? Must we be pacifists, always “turning the other cheek,” never willing to defend ourselves? By no means. But we must know that the capacity to inflict violence is not a good in and of itself. Strength is always in service of some end, namely peace and the protection of the innocent. There are enough cruel men who worship violence in this world, men Spengler idealizes as the paragons of civilizational vigor, we need not force peaceloving men to fight one another to “maintain our national spirit” so we do not fall into “decadence.” That, in and of itself, is a kind of decadence.
The double paradox is, of course, that the progressives who are lamented as these violence-forbearing degenerates are, in actual fact, at almost all times in history, foaming at the mouth for the prospect of inflicting pain on other human beings. The formation and administration of the early Soviet Union is the only test case I need for this phenomenon (seeing as we are still engaged in vibes-based history I cite myself as a source). The progessives of today love violence, just ask them what should be done with those “deplorables,” or “settler colonialists,” or any other such boogeyman group when they are being candid.
I propose a new, more helpful category, for dividing strong men and weak men. Strong men are those that rule their passions, that use their talents for service of neighbor and deity and not for themselves, who welcome peace and plenty when it lasts, but will bear up under hard times if they must. Weak men are those who childishly seize everything they want through sheer will and outbursts of uncontrolled violence. They are incapable of building anything, incapable of hard work, and so must take what others have built for themselves. Perhaps it is the case that one society of peace-loving men is overrun by another? What of it? All that live by the sword will perish by the sword, and the crank of the wheel of history will inevitably grind the usurping empire to dust. This line of demarcation runs through societies, through civilizations. We may speak of civilizations as strong or weak only insofar as one tendency or another dominates, and I would argue that strong men rarely lead nations. All falls to dust anyways. But the strong man, the virtuous man, builds up treasures of gold and silver, while the weak works only in straw. At the end of the age, when the fire of the eschaton burns away the wheel of history, only the strong man will have anything of value left.