Spengler Out of the Bush

There’s a regular writer for the Asia Times, who goes by the name Spengler, who has since the year 2000 been belching forth some of the most turgid and pompous nonsense on the internet.

People keep on foisting articles of his on me through e-mail, as if he was some prophetic oracle of a neutral third world. He publishes in the Asia Times, and assumes a rhetorical position of someone who identifies with some ambiguous post-colonial fantasyland, definitely not European or American, but someone out of the last forest, still authentic, still in touch with what it means to be human, and,—because of this,—therefore the only morally neutral commentator on America.

One suspects that his stance is a complete fraud. He is obviously so full of the standard tropes of elite intellectual culture, that it is largely impossible that his are the fresh eyes of an outsider. He is most certainly of that culture, not an outsider commentator. But it’s a good ploy, it certainly has garnered himself an audience, but a lie is a lie, and if our author is a liar, we do have a right to question why he is lying to us. But this isn’t an exposé of his biography. (Best guess: he’s an underemployed central European intellectual enjoying playing the game of alien prophet.)

His stage name is also a useful key for understanding our author. He named himself after the German Oswald Spengler, the famous author of The Decline of the West. (Actually, it’s one of the seams in his manufactured persona that someone supposedly just crawling out from under the oppressive weight of post-colonialism, has supposedly chosen one of the landmark works of 1960’s Euro-American intellectualism for a nom de guerre;—there’s no critique of the West by Fanon, Kenyatta, or Geuvara he could dedicate himself to? Why an out of date European author?) Our Spengler has repudiated the more memorable one for his racism, to “have no sympathy for cyclical or ‘biological’ theories of history of the sort that Oswald Spengler promulgated,” and not to share the Oswald Spengler’s historical pessimism. That’s his claim, but historical pessimism is exactly what our Spengler regurgitates each week.

Our Spengler is strangely un-self-conscious of his own affected pose. Laughably, he wrote in his latest essay, “there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.” And there he is revelling in the role of the embittered outsider, manipulating the system from within.

So this “authentic” ponderous voice of millions of dispossessed, billions of brown and trillions of dead, —what is he saying?

Here is our Spengler on America from his most recent piece where he eats the head of Barak Obama. (For the record, as far as I personally am concerned, Spengler and any other author in the world can abuse the character of Obama all they want. I am not reacting in defense of Obama’s character;—I assume Obama does not have one.)

But sample his broad-brush,—his irresponsible broad brush,—as he tries to fumble up a puppet-show America for his readers. “Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion’s Seed. Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.” This is all hot air and clumsy manipulation of straw men. First, on the plain facts of the case, this is not the first time there has been economic trouble since Reagan. Spengler must have been asleep during the fiscal crisis of 2001-02. Why wasn’t that event the eye-opening event that disabused a silly and childish America?

But note two things about the above quote, one is that dig at America that “Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.” That’s actually classic Leftism, straight out of a European university seminar,—Americans as lazy and gluttonous; stupid and clumsy. Europeans never can understand how Americans are so successful when the Europeans have all the culture and Americans are all stupid rednecks. But of course, the stupid rednecks work harder, for more hours, more productively, with better economic sense, with more self-reliance, than any European can even imagine. But of course, Europe’s Socialist intellectual elite can’t imagine capable Americans.

The other thing of note is this ridiculous view of history that pervades every sorry, pathetic, editorial that our miserable Spngler has ever written; that of a dour fatalism. “Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present...” Let’s think clearly. How are those two elements still present? The founders in Massachusetts and those in Virginia, how have they survived? Is Massachusetts still governed by a tight-knit coterie of English-descended ascetic fundamentalist Protestants, the descendants of the Puritans? None of that is true. Have the Puritans passed on their torch to some different group of descendants? No. (In fact, the Puritans were outnumbered and out of political control of Massachusetts Bay by the 1650’s, and they were not able to pass on their views, their church, or anything else to anyone else.) How about Virginia, is Virginia still the hunting grounds of a get-rich-quick class, freebooters and pirates of the high seas of commerce? Or is Virginia rather different than that, and, if anything, the preserve of old money?

The real point is not whether Virginia is freebooting or old money. The point is that it is ridiculously childish to make these kinds of statements about any large political entity. To do so is not analysis, it’s stereotyping; it’s not comprehension, it’s cartoonish caricature.

What’s wrong, (aside from his complete inattention to factual detail), is Spengler’s utterly fatalistic view of history. Event Y happens in year X, and that marks the subject forever. (It is true that this isn’t the worst form of fatalism where that original event would necessarily foreordain the final doom.) But nevertheless, melodrama is melodrama, and this childish worldview is not saved from being fatalistic because of some pretense that there is a way to avoid the inevitable. Because, as will always prove to be the case, whatever the final outcome of any historical question may prove to be, it will always be attributable—after the fact—to ‘original causes’ in a not-inevitable-final-result-fatalism as much as it would be in an inevitable-final-result-fatalism. And it’s this dreary fatalism that truly marks Spengler as a less than truly intellectual giant that he likes to see himself as.

Fatalism, of whatever strength, is always a sign of a person who does not or can not think in terms of real events, factual situations, the multiple effects of causes, and developments over time. It’s actually a species of magical thinking. It makes the world into however many melodramas that just have to play themselves out. It banishes cause and effect, (the bones and flesh of rational thinking), and substitutes narratives, operatic schemas, fictional devices, a whole dream world of stories. Things happen, not because of cause and effect, but because of the working out of original causes. As if to say in this example—as so many have already done and as Spengler probably has—that America is a Puritan nation because its original essence was in its founding by Puritans, and that fact of its origin explains everything that has ever happened there since 1620,—aside from the fact that America is also the home of jazz, Hollywood, internet porn, out-of-wedlock birth, 70’s drug culture, women’s rights, gay rights, and all of that. Those were all just ellipses in American Puritanism.

The history of the world is NOT the working out of storylines. Nations do not rise and fall because of fatal flaws, (despite Oswald Spengler or our Spengler). Rome didn’t fall because of some tiny original flaw in the Roman state that necessitated that it eventually must fall. Things just don’t work this way.

But this is how many people think. People who can’t think in term of cause and effect and actual events because that involves thinking in terms of complexity. It’s how people think when they are trained in it in post-Marxist graduate seminars. It’s how people think when they are superstitious peasants trapped in little villages and can’t see the world beyond their own valley. It’s how people think when their minds are trapped in stale, stupid Socialism.

And it’s also very big in Europe. It’s a great tell of French thought. For some reason, French culture is in love with the epic, with the melodramatic, and would rather see it’s own role in the world, and those of its neighbors as a heroic epic than as the massive interplay of so many people living real lives. It is one reason one might think our Spengler is actually French—but it is inconceivable that a Frenchman would name himself after a German, and this turgid melodramatic view of history is not solely French, its epidemic across Europe as well.

So our Spengler, who either claims to be a Conservative, or others make the claim for him, is a through and through Socialist. Whatever his conclusions, whatever causes his whim decides to alight upon, is a Socialist. He is a Socialist because he thinks like a Socialist: in long epic struggles, and grand narratives of undefined personages in some predestined conflict.

Our Spengler, the Homer of the new internet post-colonial journalism, continues on about America, saying that the home mortgage collapse, (which represents some 0.0002% of the American economy), “has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm—‘Great Awakenings’—every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy.” This, of course, is utter nonsense. There is simply no mood of existential crisis in America,—things are going rather nicely. There is no national religion that has twenty year waves of enthuisiasm. That’s just wrong. Perhaps it’s true of Bolivia, or Nepal, or Azerbaijan, but not America. Our Spengler might be mistaking the chatter of the American newsmedia for the sentiments of the American people, but if so, then he’s wildly out of touch. Americans no more care about MSNBC’s economic expert’s hyped broadcast about the mortgage crisis anymore than they really care about Entertainment Tonight’s hyped broadcast about Hannah Montana.

Our Spengler also manages to sneak in another condescending attack in the above with his quip that “Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on.” Which plays on the tired European trope that Americans have no culture. As if endowing a national opera at Washington, or maybe a national theatre, would suddenly make America a cultured place. The truth is, America not only has culture, it is one of the few nations in the world with such an excess culture it is pumping the surplus over the internet to every other country in the world. There is no French cinema independent of American cinema, there is no German cinema independent of American cinema, nor Russian cinema, or Bulgarian. Just as there is no French music, German literature, Bosnian journalism, Polish brewing, or Korean engineering design, that exists as a separate entity immune from the influence of the American counterpart. America have no culture? America is the source of culture par excellence.

Europeans, of course, HAVE to believe that America has no culture. Having lost their power, their drive to rebuild what they once had, Europeans have to clutch the gunshot-riddled remnants of the culture they once had, and say that what they hold is real culture, and deny that America has any at all.

“Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself.” It is? I don’t have to argue that Spengler is out of touch with America to show how ridiculous this statement is, all I have to do is ask, how does America feel sorry for itself? What organ in America does the feeling? If a human feels sorry for itself, you can say that feeling is in the head, (clinical) or in the heart, (poetic). But how does a nation of 300,000,000 people feel sorry for itself? Where does that feeling reside? In New Jersey? In Nebraska? A community of sensitives deeply emoting to themselves in a farming town in Wisconsin? Why then does our Spengler write with such childish personifications? Is he that naive, or is he simply that manipulative?

America is not at a low point in its fortunes, the main economic indicators are all solid, the basics of the economy are all sound, the country is winning a war that no other nation in the world could even dream of executing in Iraq. The general offensive against radical Islam is working and regularly scores defeats of the leaders without them being able to organize another attack against the American people. Note in this comment, I did not have to say that America is feeling good, bad or anything else.

“The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America’s standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America’s standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.” America has NOT made an enemy out of Russia, Russia has made itself what it is, and whatever the state of relations between the two countries, (obviously not that of enemies), Russia has as much of a hand in it as Bush has. “Americans question the premise of America’s standing as a global superpower...” Who does? Where? The American left? Who the hell is he talking about?

“Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.” Perhaps our Spengler can gather up the war-torn fragments of a collapsed European culture and retreat into his own self-pitying shell. This is nothing but the self-loathing rant of a defeated old man, bellowing at the one thing he must accept is greater than he is,—America. Our Spengler is fascinated by America, obsessed by it, but he all he has to offer in comment about it is the jealous grumblings of a failed old fool.

The sad thing is, for the semi-educated, the people who in all walks of life around the world who do not strive to think clearly about things, who do not have enough background in raw information to be able to analyse cause and effect, or who have lazy habits of thought, this little wave of Spenglerism is going to handicap their minds for years to come. Instead of learning about the real world, Spengler is telling impressionable minds that the world is part comedy, part tragedy, all melodrama. That no person can do anything, affect anything, given the powerful narratives that must play themselves out. Spengler is trying to alleviate his own impotence by trying to talk his readers into declaring themselves just as impotent. Impotent before the vast anthropomorphized shadows that darken the stage of his own brain.

And the susceptible and gullible readers of the Asia Times will sacrifice any chance they might have had to develop their own rational analysis and instead will accept this pathetic puppet show of Spengler’s. The grim and depressing dreams and phantasms of a washed out, bitter old man.