Whose Decline?

IT IS GENERALLY KNOWN, or it ought to be, that Arnold Toynbee’s few original ideas are Oswald Spengler’s. Yet Toynbee, for rather inexplicable reasons, still enjoys a viable reputation in the declining West, while Spengler remains exiled in the detention camp the Anglo-Saxon Zeitgeist so strictly keeps for intellectuals of German extraction. But the Nazis were indeed wrong—there is no race of Untermenschen, not even the Germans; in fact, the statistical probability of creative intelligence is about as high among the Germans as among the Americans, or even the British, and the racial discrimination practiced by Anglo-Saxon Liberals against the Germans seems to me one of the scandals of the age.

In the case of Spengler (1880-1936), to be honest, discrimination came easy. This first-rate mind, located very near the Olympus of timeless intellectual genius, belonged to a thoroughly repulsive man. Spengler looked exactly the way Frenchmen expect a boche to look, and there were as few traces of gracefulness in his mind as in his face. Besides, Spengler, who knew almost everything about mankind, knew almost nothing about man—a predicament he shares with most philosophers and ideologues. This intellect, trained to perceive facts with uncanny precision, was completely void of skepticism and humor. In short, if there was a German born to be disliked by Anglo-Saxons, it was Oswald Spengler.

WS

About the Author

William S. Schlamm

Featured Tags

IT IS GENERALLY KNOWN, or it ought to be, that Arnold Toynbee’s few original ideas are Oswald Spengler’s. Yet Toynbee, for rather inexplicable reasons, still enjoys a viable reputation in the declining West, while Spengler remains exiled in the detention camp the Anglo-Saxon Zeitgeist so strictly keeps for intellectuals of German extraction. But the Nazis were indeed wrong—there is no race of Untermenschen, not even the Germans; in fact, the statistical probability of creative intelligence is about as high among the Germans as among the Americans, or even the British, and the racial discrimination practiced by Anglo-Saxon Liberals against the Germans seems to me one of the scandals of the age.

In the case of Spengler (1880-1936), to be honest, discrimination came easy. This first-rate mind, located very near the Olympus of timeless intellectual genius, belonged to a thoroughly repulsive man. Spengler looked exactly the way Frenchmen expect a boche to look, and there were as few traces of gracefulness in his mind as in his face. Besides, Spengler, who knew almost everything about mankind, knew almost nothing about man—a predicament he shares with most philosophers and ideologues. This intellect, trained to perceive facts with uncanny precision, was completely void of skepticism and humor. In short, if there was a German born to be disliked by Anglo-Saxons, it was Oswald Spengler.