Must See TV: The Collapse of Western Civilization

"The Collapse of Western Civilization"--Paul Joseph Watson (13 min.)

        Watson has a very good overview of the signs of civilizational collapse in the West. Major points he brings up are our civilizational ennui and exhaustion in the arts, entertainment, and personal lives. The powers that be are no longer interested in or care about national citizens, or even nations. Increased rates of drug overdoses and suicide, as well as the failure to reproduce, are signs of a lack of interest in life or the future. Increased wealth disparity due to an oversupply of labor has increased social instability.

        While Watson characterized this as something new, many of the trends he identifies have been building for at least the last century. The decadence of the 1920s and 1930s was not an anomaly, but a preview of what was coming. It is no coincidence that the period of time that saw the spread of "free love," increased feminism (including the right to vote) and the rise of the welfare state also saw the decline of art and music. The increased religiosity in the United States post World War II was the anomaly.

       Much of this was foreseen by Oswald Spengler in his books on the decline of the West. As one commentator summed up Spengler:

        The passion for creative expression and new strains of culture knowledge runs on for centuries, generally a thousand years or more unless interrupted by external forces. But eventually it peters out. Then begins that civilizational phase, characterized by the deterioration of the folk traditions and innocent enthusiasms of the culture. Its cultural essence, once of the soil and spread throughout the “mother-region” in town, village and city, now becomes the domain of a few rich and powerful “world-cities,” which twist and distort the concepts of old and replace them with cynicism, cosmopolitanism, irony and a money culture.

       Thus, Spengler draws a sharp distinction between culture and civilization. The former is the phase of creative energy, the “soul” of the countryside; the latter is a time of material preoccupation, the “intellect” of the city. As Hughes elaborates, “So long as the culture phase lasts, the leading figures in a society manifest a sure sense of artistic ‘style’ and personal ‘form.’ Indeed, the breakdown of style and form most clearly marks the transition from culture to civilization.”

         WE PAUSE over this thinking to ponder its implications. Recall that Spengler wrote nearly a century ago, when the Western avant-garde movement was merely a tiny knot of artists bent on assaulting the conventional sensibilities of the prevailing culture. As author and critic Lionel Trilling once explained, in Spengler’s time these people weren’t interested in talking to the masses. Their art was rarefied and special, designed exclusively for the avant-garde itself, those inclined to look down on the masses and on conventional thought and culture. Few at that time predicted that this avant-garde cynicism and cultural nihilism eventually would be absorbed into the popular culture itself and be accepted, even embraced, by large numbers of people within the so-called masses—the same masses under assault by the avant-garde. But Spengler saw it coming, as merely the inevitable consequence of any civilization’s transition from its cultural to its civilizational phase.

        He also predicted the West’s coming decline in birthrates brought about largely by the advent of feminism, also a feature of Spengler’s civilizational phase. Whereas the advent and success of feminism in the West is heralded in our time as a sign of civic progress, Spengler’s study of other civilizational cycles convinced him that it was just the opposite—a reflection of cultural decline, largely because it curtailed the production of children. As he puts it:

The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” 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 an Ibsen heroine’s who “lives for herself”—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.

This phenomenon, says Spengler, is seen in every society in transition from the cultural to the civilizational phase, and in all instances it leads to what he calls “appalling depopulation.” Spengler saw a similar phenomenon in the realm of politics. Looking at Athens of 400 bc and Caesar’s Rome, he sees a progressive degradation:

As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party candidates, an area ready for the intervention of money, and . . . of ever bigger and bigger money. “The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money.”

But what most clearly marks the civilizational phase is what he considered the inevitable gravitation toward Caesarism and empire. Spengler’s historical analogies taught him that the transition from culture to civilization unleashes a kind of Will to Power, manifest internally in a drive to consolidate power within the civilization, and externally in a drive to assert dominance over other peoples. “Imperialism,” writes Spengler, “is Civilization unadulterated.”

        Watson overlooks Tainter's ideas on civilization collapse, which theorized that civilizations collapse from over-complexity. At some point, the value we obtain from each increase in complexity begins to decrease (e.g., decreasing marginal return), and it is possible that a civilization or society can reach a point of negative return. As I've discussed before, we are already in a period of negative rates of return for public dollars being spent.

       Is there any way to prevent or stop this? Watson concludes that there isn't. Like Spengler, he sees that civilizations grow and die, and our civilization is dying. This is not necessarily inevitable. Sometimes civilizations can rejuvenate. European civilization was in a similar state of despair and decline in the 15th Century ... and then Columbus discovered the new world. It is possible that a new age of exploration and colonization could revitalize our civilization. Even the hint of human space exploration seemed to have partially recharged the West during the 1960s, and its possible that a massive effort to explore and colonize the solar system could create something akin to the revitalization that followed the discovery of the new world.

       If we can't stop this, what will happen? Old is replaced by new. We must remember that Rome's expansion across Europe followed on the heals of the decline of Celtic civilization. Roman Europe later, itself, fell to the Franks, Germanic and Swedish peoples. Modern Europe is being invaded by Muslims, mostly from Africa, and the United States is being invaded from Latin America. Civil war, foreign invasion, and, eventually, the rise of a new root culture, are the future.