The decline and eventual fall of the USA as world superpower?

[ralis]

Prove what, and to whom?

 

I have read Reveille and Rules so I understand that only the radical is capable of logical thought...

 

I have opposed every debt ceiling increase, ralis, and I think those on "the far-right" are just as misguided and nearly as destructive as those on "the far-left." I think the real problem in this thread, though, is that some still honestly believe the struggle is between left and right. Until one sees beyond that false dichotomy, it is difficult,to,have a meaningful discussion.

 

Are you insuating that I am not capable of logical thought? Are you also positing that the radical right is rational/reasonable in their list of demands. Furthermore, radical has nothing to do with being logical but in general is an extreme position, a reactionary position etc.

 

I am stating in terms of what is happening now, with the far right making absurd demands. At least I post links to back up my arguments, as opposed to some here that post personal opinion and hyperbole.

 

From what I have observed since Obama took office, is that the radical right wing racists are wanting to destroy his Presidency.

 

Consider the effect of the shutdown on states such as Nevada. Nutrition programs for poor children, infants and pregnant women will be cut along with other cuts.

 

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/sandoval-told-federal-shutdown-could-hurt-nevadans-economy

Edited October 9, 2013 by ralis

[Brian]

No, I am stating that Alinskyites believe they are the only ones capable of logical thought, and I am providing the source for that statement.

 

Did you even read the last paragraph in the post you quoted? Perhaps the accidental extra commas made it hard to follow so I have corrected the post above.

 

The problem is not "right vs. left" and anyone who accepts that fallacious binarism cannot see beyond it.

[ralis]

No, I am stating that Alinskyites believe they are the only ones capable of logical thought, and I am providing the source for that statement.

 

Did you even read the last paragraph in the post you quoted? Perhaps the accidental extra commas made it hard to follow so I have corrected the post above.

 

The problem is not "right vs. left" and anyone who accepts that fallacious binarism cannot see beyond it.

 

I understood what you meant. However, the problem remains with the radical right making extreme demands that are causing myriad problems such as what some here have stated.

Edited October 9, 2013 by ralis

[Brian]

OK, ignoring for a moment that you are using ThinkProgress to back up your arguments, which of those 21 listed items would you say are outside of Congress's purview? (Pretending that the federal government actually has authority in those areas, which it doesn't for most of them...) There are several I disagree with in principle but if we assume for the sake of argument that they are within the scope of the federal government then they are within scope for Congress.

 

Fortunately, the American people are increasingly seeing through the smokescreen and recognizing this (in growing numbers) as Obama's shutdown, unconscionably crafted to have severe adverse impact on the public. The President is the one (or his executive branch designees) who chooses which positions and services remain in operation and which ones are "non-essential," you know. That is part of the role of the chief executive officer. (BTW, did you notice how quickly the talking point shifted from "essential vs non-essential" to "non-furloughed vs furloughed?" Of course, it is no longer even a furlough but a forced vacation but that's a whole different discussion!)

 

As a case in point, there is a restaurant/inn near me, located on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Parkway itself remains open but the inn (which uses no federal funds, employs no federal workers and actually PAYS the federal government) has been forcibly closed by armed Park Rangers during the peak of leaf season. There is no monetary justification for shutting down the Pisgah Inn and it actually COST taxpayers money but the executive branch ordered it anyhow...

The fact that these kabuki shutdowns predominantly happen around issues aimed at slowing the expansion of the size and scope of the federal government rather than around issues aimed at accelerating that expansion is in itself an interesting thing, and it actually points to the real problem. Whether a person is pouring gas on a house fire or delaying firemen who are trying to put it out, that person is contributing to the home burning down.

 

The presence of some items on that list of yours related to issues other than slowing said expansion simply shows that there are fools on both sides of the aisle...

Try this link:

 

 

We've added about another trillion since this was made last year but it is still worth watching, I think. So what's another trillion, right?

 

How about this link?

 

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Did my linked evidence persuade you to change your position??? Yeah, well... That's why I prefer to use discourse rather then "proof."

 

I am honestly not trying to convince YOU of anything, ralis -- my posts are intended more for the disinterested reader who might stumble across this thread and think a global oligarchy sounds reasonable.

[ralis]

I recently posted about the right wing's anti-intellectual agenda to cut education in the U.S. This young women understands the value of education and why everyone has a fundamental right to a superior education. BTW Malala is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfLlm0b0Es

[Brian]

Dating back to Woodrow Wilson, there has been a "progressive" push to nationalize and "governmentalize" education, sometimes with the openly stated objective of producing good workers. For the last 40 years, there has been a concentrated effort and the US government wants more than $70,000,000,000 (way more if you look beyond just the US Education Department) in the 2014 budget year on public education. That's a 4% increase from last year, BTW.

 

During that period, results have plummeted, either in comparison to other countries or to our own historical proficiencies. The answer is clearly not more money and more centralized control.

 

Unless, perhaps, the intended result is really just producing a compliant and malleable labor population -- in which case we are doing a fine job, I guess, except for the fact that we no longer have a labor-based economy (for the time being...)

 

Again, I agree with you on the symptoms, ralis, but think you are stuck on "the cause." I encourage you to think beyond the "conservative == stupid/bad/troglodytic & progressive == smart/good/enlightened" mindset. You are clearly very intelligent and well-read but you are stuck in a box and don't see it. (That's what frustrates me, my friend!)

[joeblast]

I dont think you're going to get that tea to un-steep, Brian.

[JustARandomPanda]

Thought everyone would enjoy this post. The author reminds me a lot of the ecological Druid John Michael Greer and (now deceased) ecologist Garett Harding. Also there's some similarities that bring to my mind the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

 

 

 

***********

 

What is an American Conservative?

 

 

 

Earlier this week I began a series of lectures in one of my classes on the thought of the Anti-Federalists. I began by echoing some of the conclusions of the great compiler and interpreter of the Anti-Federalist writings, Herbert Storing, whose summation of their thought is found in his compact introductory volume, What the Anti-Federalists Were For. I began with the first main conclusion of that book, that in the context of the debate over the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were the original American conservatives. I then related a series of positions that were held by the Anti-Federalist opponents of the proposed Constitution.

 

To wit:

They insisted on the importance of a small political scale, particularly because a large expanse of diverse citizens makes it difficult to arrive at a shared conception of the common good and an overly large scale makes direct participation in political rule entirely impracticable if not impossible. They believed that laws were and ought to be educative, and insisted upon the centrality of virtue in a citizenry. Among the virtues most prized was frugality, and they opposed an expansive, commercial economy that would draw various parts of the Union into overly close relations, thereby encouraging avarice, and particularly opposed trade with foreign nations, which they believed would lead the nation to compromise its independence for lucre. They were strongly in favor of “diversity,” particularly relatively bounded communities of relatively homogeneous people, whose views could then be represented (that is, whose views could be “re-presented”) at the national scale in very numerous (and presumably boisterous) assemblies.

 

They believed that laws were only likely to be followed when more or less directly assented to by the citizenry, and feared that as distance between legislators and the citizenry increased, that laws would require increased force of arms to achieve compliance. For that reason, along with their fears of the attractions of international commerce and of imperial expansion, they strongly opposed the creation of a standing army and insisted instead upon state-based civilian militias. They demanded inclusion of a Bill of Rights, among which was the Second Amendment, the stress of which was not on individual rights of gun ownership, but collective rights of civilian self-defense born of fear of a standing army and the temptations to “outsource” civic virtue to paid mercenaries.

 

 

As I disclosed the positions of the Anti-Federalists, I could see puzzlement growing on the faces of a number of students, until one finally exclaimed—”this doesn’t sound like conservatism at all!” Conservatism, for these 18-to-22-year-olds, has always been associated with George W. Bush: a combination of cowboy, crony capitalism, and foreign adventurism in search of eradicating evil from the world. To hear the views of the Anti-Federalists described as “conservative” was the source of severe cognitive dissonance, a deep confusion about what, exactly, is meant by conservatism.

 

 

So I took a step back and discussed several ways by which we might understand what is meant by conservatism—first, as a set of dispositions, then as a response to the perceived threats emanating from a revolutionary (or even merely reformist) left, and then as a set of contested substantive positions. And, I suggested, only by connecting the first and third, and understanding the instability of the second, could one properly arrive at a conclusion such as that of Storing, who would describe the positions of the Anti-Federalists as “conservative.”

 

 

First, there is the conservative disposition, one articulated perhaps most brilliantly by Russell Kirk, who described conservatism above all not as a set of policy positions, but as a general view toward the world. That disposition especially finds expression in a “piety toward the wisdom of one’s ancestors,” a respect for the ancestral that only with great caution, hesitancy, and forbearance seeks to introduce or accept change into society. It is supremely wary of the only iron law of politics—the law of unintended consequences (e.g., a few conservatives predicted that the introduction of the direct primary in the early 1900′s would lead to increasingly extreme ideological divides and the increased influence of money in politics. In the zeal for reform, no one listened). It also tends toward a pessimistic view of history, more concerned to prevent the introduction of corruption in a decent regime than driven to pursue change out a belief in progress toward a better future.

 

Conservatism—as a conscious political philosophy, rather than simply as a way of being in the world—begins as a reaction to the revolutionary movements arising from the Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. Its “founder,” of course, was Edmund Burke, whose opposition to the French Revolution was the embodiment of this conservative disposition, displaying, with rhetorical brilliance, a prophetic vision of the tendencies of this revolutionary ideology toward barbaric inhumanity in the name of progress.

 

 

Conservatism also takes a more problematic form—one of simple reaction to the opposition. As a reaction to the left, conservatism has always been prone to drift—it will tend to articulate its position in opposition to the current stances of progressives. Thus, today it is far from the positions once held by the likes of the Anti-Federalists: rather, it has assumed a series of positions that can only be described as closer to the vision of Hamilton—the most nationalist and commercial-minded of the Federalists—now aligned in opposition to a left that has since embraced the historicist philosophy of Progressivism. Where once American conservatives opposed an expansive commercial economy, today they are its champions. Where they once decried identification with the nation over localities, states, and regions, today they are the most vociferous nationalists. (Long forgotten is the fact that the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, cousin of the utopian novelist, Edward Bellamy, during the high-water mark of the Progressive era.) Where they once deeply mistrusted “foreign entanglements” and insisted upon a citizen militia, fearing that a standing army would become subservient to the ambitions of a distant elite political class, today they are the close allies of the “military-industrial complex.” In each instance, they have moved to occupy the positions once occupied by the left. No wonder my students were puzzled.

 

 

Only by linking a conservative disposition with relevant substance can we avoid the tendency of conservatism simply to march a step behind the left, of becoming a ship buffeted by historicist winds with a permanently leftward drift. The Anti-Federalists were conservatives not only because they were wary of the introduction of political innovation in the form of the Constitution; they saw its basic “tendency” as one of “consolidation,” a solution born of a purported political emergency that called for the scuttling of the then-inadequate political document, the Articles of Confederation. They believed especially that emergency powers would be constantly invoked by the executive, and that these powers would never stand down—that accumulation of power to the center would increase steadily, irreversibly, and with gathering strength. They predicted that the Supreme Court would eventually invalidate laws of the states, becoming a powerful unelected star chamber that would advance the liberal agenda on a national scale. The very argument that “times” would demand a fundamental change would be used later by the Progressives to discover a “living Constitution,” an eventuality predicted by the Anti-Federalists. Like Burke, their conservatism gave them a special gift of prescience, an awareness of both unintended—but also intended—consequences.

 

 

Today’s conservatives are liberals—they favor an economy that wreaks “creative destruction,” especially on the mass of “non-winners,” increasingly controlled by a few powerful actors who secure special benefits for themselves and their heirs; a military that is constructed to be only loyal to the central authority in the capital, frequently moved about to avoid any rooted loyalty, and increasingly isolated from most fellow citizens; an increasingly utilitarian view of education aimed at creating individuals who will become able cogs in a globalized industrial system, largely without allegiance or loyalty; proponents of an increasingly homogenized society whose allegiance is to a set of ideas, especially a “more perfect union,” which Francis Bellamy expressed, was inspired by the example of the French Revolution.

 

 

One reaction to my previous article, denouncing an economic system creating a two-class society, suspected me of not being conservative at all, even of harboring Marxist inclinations. This constitutes a logical error—just because Marx was a critic of capitalism, that does not make all critics of capitalism Marxist. To such criticisms, I can only reply—if what you seek to conserve is liberalism, then you’re right, I’m no conservative. And by today’s definition, who, except a few discredited neo-conservatives (a.k.a., paleo-liberals) trying to reignite the good old days of the Cold War, would want to be so defined?

 

 

If conservatism is broken today, we need only blame liberalism. There is only one party in America—your choice is liberalism with deliberate speed, or liberalism in a hurry. What is needed is a new, doubtless very different, American conservatism.

Edited October 13, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[Brian]

FWIW, I have long identified myself politically as an anti-federalist which generally only garners blank stares...

 

[Thunder_Gooch]

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcn7sw-4dpk

[zerostao]

this thread stays all over the place, i like it. canadians,ex-pats, and britts chiming in, its great.

i even wonder what sree would add to the conversation?

lyndsay graham may be voted out next time around, so that ticking sound you hear , may not be the

nuke stashed in charleston harbour afterall.

i wanna get back to the 'tea-bagger' label for a moment. becoz tea party goers refer to themself as "jacksonian"

(referencing andrew not jesse) and if they really were jacksonian, then maybe that is what we need ?

but i will keep them in the 'little j' category, becoz i am not convinced they could be 'big J"

i would dare say that no one would ever call big J a tea bagger, but i digress. (big J never digressed,,)

big J put it to the banks, big J put it to everybody really, big J was a democrat.

imagine that, but they dont make em like that anymore, we get these little j's instead.

big J, if i had to define him> alpha Bad Ass hombre with the resolve that could not be denied,

and he was the champion of the common man and he was the victor over everyone else>the elite and the banks.

there are no such current type of strong character such as big J to be found anymore in america.

 

little j's are a type of anathema and can be called tea baggers,,one big J is(rightfully) feared and gets the Job done.

and if anyone called big J (old hickory) a tea bagger, i would like to be in attendance for that, front row ticket please

 

the decline of america is due to its lack of strong personalities of the order of an 'old hickory'

nowadays we get some little j's running around trying to make some noise. and the elite, the big central banks,

the military industrial complex, the multinational corporations, and the medical industrial complex just snicker at the little j's

and the rest of us too

there is no fear from them of the common man becoz there is no big J

[JustARandomPanda]

It's not just America that's in decline. Check it out.

 

 

************

 

by John Michael Greer

 

 

 

 

 

There's a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it. Partly, to be sure, that difficulty unfolds from the sheer speed of social and technological change in the age of cheap abundant energy that’s now coming to an end, but there’s more to it than that.

In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a great many of them found what they wanted in one or another civil religion that projected some version of utopia onto the future.

It’s crucial not to underestimate the emotional force of the resulting beliefs. The future of perpetual betterment promised by the faith in progress, and the utopia on the far side of cataclysm promised with equal fervor by the faith in apocalypse, are no less important to their believers than heaven is to the ordinary Christian, and for exactly the same reason. Every human society has its own conception of the order of the cosmos; the distinctive concept of cosmic order that became central to the societies of Europe and the European diaspora envisioned a moral order that could be understood, down to the fine details, by human beings. Since everyday life pretty clearly fails to follow such an order, there had to be some offstage location where everything would balance out, whether that location took the form of heaven, humanity’s future among the stars, a future society of equality and justice, or what have you. Discard that imagined place and, for a great many people in the Western world, the cosmos ceases to have any order or meaning at all.

It was precisely against this sense of moral order, though, that Nietzsche declared war. Like any good general, he sent his forces into action along several routes at once; the assault relevant to our theme was aimed at the belief that the arithmetic of morality would finally add up in some other place or time. He rejected the idea of a utopian world of past or future just as forcefully as he did the concept of heaven itself. That’s one of the things his doctrine of eternal return was intended to do: by revisioning the past and the future as endless repetition, Nietzsche did his level best to block any attempt to make the past or the future fill the role once filled by heaven.

Here, though, he overplayed his hand. Strictly speaking, a cycle of eternal return is just as imaginary as any golden age in the distant past, or for that matter the glorious future come the Revolution when we will all eat strawberries and cream. In a philosophy that presents itself as a Yes-saying to life exactly as it is, his reliance on a theory of time just as unprovable as those he assaulted was a massive problem. Nietzsche’s madness, and the resolute effort on the part of most European intellectuals of the time not to think about any of the issues he tried to raise, left this point among many others hanging in the air. Decades passed before another German thinker tackled the same challenge with better results. His name, as I think most of my regular readers have guessed by now, was Oswald Spengler.

Spengler was in his own way as eccentric a figure as Nietzsche, though it was a more stereotypically German eccentricity than Nietzsche’s fey Dionysian aestheticism. A cold, methodical, solitary man, he spent his entire working life as a schoolteacher, and all his spare time—he never married—with his nose in a polymath’s banquet of books from every corner of scholarship. Old Kingdom Egyptian theology, traditional Chinese landscape design, the history of the medieval Russian church, the philosophical schools of ancient India, the latest discoveries in early twentieth century physics: all these and more were grist for his highly adaptable mill. In 1914, as the impending fall of the British empire was sweeping Europe into a vortex of war, he started work on the first volume of The Decline of the West; it appeared in 1918, and the second volume followed it in 1922.

The books became immediate bestsellers in German and several other languages—this despite a world-class collective temper tantrum on the part of professional historians. Logos, one of the most prestigious German scholarly journals of the time, ran an entire special issue on him, in which historians engaged in a frenzy of nitpicking about Spengler’s historical claims. (Spengler, unperturbed, read the issue, doublechecked his facts, released a new edition of his book with corrections, and pointed out that none of the nitpicking addressed any of the major points of his book; he was right, too.) One study of the furore around Spengler noted more than 400 publications, most of them hostile, discussing The Decline of the West in the decade of the 1920s alone.

Interest in Spengler’s work peaked in the 1920s and 1930s and faded out after the Second World War; some of the leading figures of the "Beat generation" used to sit around a table reading The Decline of the West out loud, and a few other figures of the 1950s drew on his ideas, but thereafter silence closed in. There’s an ironic contrast here to Nietzsche, who provided Spengler with so many of his basic insights; Nietzsche’s work was almost completely unknown during his life and became a massive cultural presence after his death; with Spengler, the sequence ran the other way around.

The central reason why Spengler was so fiercely if inconclusively attacked by historians in his own time, and so comprehensively ignored since then, is the same reason why he’s relevant to the present theme. At the core of his work stood the same habit of morphological thinking I discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who launched the study of comparative morphology in the life sciences in the eighteenth century, remained a massive cultural presence in the Germany of Spengler’s time, and so it came naturally to Spengler to line up the great civilizations of history side by side and compare their histories, in the same way that a biologist might compare a dolphin’s flipper to a bat’s wing, to see the common patterns of deep structure that underlie the surface differences.

Such comparisons are surprisingly unfashionable in modern historical studies. Most other fields of study rely on comparisons as a matter of course: the astronomer compares one nebula to another, just as the literary critic compares one experimental novel to another, and in both fields it’s widely accepted that such comparisons are the most important way to get past irrelevancies to an understanding of what’s really going on. There are historical works that compare, say, one revolution to others, or one feudal system to another, but these days they’re in the minority. More often, historians consider the events of some period in the past by themselves, without placing them in the context of comparable periods or events, and either restrict themselves to storytelling or propose assorted theories about the causes of those events—theories that can never be put to the test, because it’s all but impossible to test a hypothesis when you’re limited to a sample size of one.

The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.

Meanwhile, in the political sphere, feudal aristocrats become subject to kings, who are displaced by oligarchies of the urban rich, and these latter eventually fall before what Spengler calls Caesarism, the emergence of charismatic leaders who attract a following from the urban masses and use that strength to seize power from the corrupt institutions of an oligarchic state. Traditional religions rich in myth give way to rationalist philosophies as each society settles on the intellectual projects that will define its legacy to the future—for example, logical method in the classical world, and natural science in ours. Out of the diverse background of folk crafts and performances, each culture selects the set of art forms that will become the focus of its creative life, and these evolve in ever more distinctive ways; Gilgamesh and Beowulf could just as well have swapped swords and fought each other’s monsters, for example, but the briefest glance at plays from ancient Greece, India, China, and the Western world shows a wholly different dramatic and aesthetic language at work in each.

All this might have been forgiven Spengler, but the next step in the comparison passes into territory that makes most people in the modern West acutely uncomfortable. Spengler argued that the creative potential of every culture is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything worth bothering with that can be done with Greek sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Western oil painting, or any other creative art has been done; sooner or later, the same exhaustion occurs in every other dimension of a culture’s life—its philosophies, its political forms, you name it. At that point, in the terms that Spengler used, a culture turns into a civilization, and its focus shifts from creating new forms to sorting through the products of its creative centuries, choosing a selection of political, intellectual, religious, artistic, and social patterns that will be sustainable over the long term, and repeating those thereafter in much the same way that a classical orchestra in the modern West picks and chooses out of the same repertoire of standard composers and works.

As that last example suggests, furthermore, Spengler didn’t place the transition from Western culture to its subsequent civilization at some conveniently far point in the future. According to his chronology, that transition began in the nineteenth century and would be complete by 2100 or so. The traditional art forms of the Western world would reach the end of the line, devolving into empty formalism or staying on in mummified form, the way classical music is preserved today; political ideologies would turn into empty slogans providing an increasingly sparse wardrobe to cover the naked quest for power; Western science, having long since exhausted the low-hanging fruit in every field, would wind down into a repetition of existing knowledge, and most forms of technology would stagnate, while a few technological fields capable of yielding grandiose prestige projects would continue to be developed for a while; rationalism would be preserved in intellectual circles, while popular religious movements riddled with superstition would rule the mental life of the bulk of the population. Progress in any Western sense of the word would be over forever, for future cultures would choose their own directions in which to develop, as different from ours as ours is from the traditional Chinese or the Mayans.

Spengler didn’t leave these projections of the future in abstract form; he turned them into detailed predictions about the near future, and those predictions have by and large turned out to be correct. He was wrong in thinking that Germany would become an imperial state that would unite the Western world the way Rome united the classical world, the kingdom of Qin united China, and so on, though it’s fair to say that Germany’s two efforts to fill that role came uncomfortably close to succeeding. Other than that, his aim has proved remarkably good.

He argued, for example, that the only artistic forms that could have any vitality in 20th century Europe and America would take their inspiration from other, non-Western cultures. Popular music, which was dominated by African-derived jazz in the first half of the century and African-derived rock thereafter, is only one of many examples. As for politics, he suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis.

All these events took place in other times and places, and will take place in future societies, each in its own way. What distinguishes contemporary Western society from earlier urban civilizations, according to Spengler’s view, is not that it’s "more advanced," "more progressive"—every society goes in a different direction, and proceeds along that route until the same law of diminishing returns cuts in—but simply that it happened to take mastery of physical matter and energy as its special project, and in the process stumbled across the buried carbon we’re burning so extravagantly just now. It’s hard to think of any historical vision less flattering to the inherited egotism of the modern industrial West; it deprives us of our imagined role as the cutting edge of humanity in its grand upward march toward the stars, and plops us back down to earth as just one civilization among many, rising and falling along with the rest.

It’s in this way that Spengler proved to be Nietzsche’s heir. Where Nietzsche tried to challenge the imaginary utopia at the end of history with an equally imaginary vision of eternal return, Spengler offered a vision that was not imaginary, but rather rested on a foundation of historical fact. Where Nietzsche’s abandonment of a moral order to the cosmos left him staring into an abyss in which order and meaning vanished once and for all, Spengler presented an alternative vision of cosmic order in which morality is not a guiding principle, but simply a cultural form, human-invented, that came and went with the tides of history. Life was as much Spengler’s banner as it was Nietzsche’s, life in the full biological sense of the word, unreasoning, demanding, and resistant to change over less than geological time scales; the difference was that Nietzsche saw life as the abyss, while Spengler used it to found his sense of an ordered universe and ultimately his values as well.

It’s among the richest ironies of Spengler’s project that among the things that he relativized and set in a historic context was Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche liked to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, poised at the turning point of the ages—this was admittedly a common occupational disease of nineteenth-century philosophers. Spengler noted his debts to Nietzsche repeatedly in The Decline of the West, but kept a sense of perspective the older man lacked; in the table of historical parallels that finishes the first volume of Spengler’s book, Nietzsche has become one more symptom of the late, "Winter" phase of Western culture, one of many figures participating in the final disintegration of traditional religious thought at the hands of skeptical intellectuals proposing new systems of philosophical ethics.

When Nietzsche announced the death of God, in other words, he was filling a role familiar in other ages, announcing an event that occurs on schedule in the life of each culture. The Greek historian Plutarch had announced the death of Pan some eighteen centuries earlier, around the time that the classical world was settling firmly into the end-state of civilization; the people of ancient Crete, perhaps recalling some similar event even further back, used to scandalize Greek tourists by showing them the grave of Zeus. Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.

It’s a stark vision, especially painful to those who have been raised to see the most recent phases of that process in our own culture as the heralds of the bright new era of history presupposed by the Joachimist shape of time, or the initial shockwaves of the imminent apocalypse presupposed by its Augustinian rival. Defenders of these latter viewpoints have accordingly developed standard ways of countering Spengler’s challenge—or, more precisely, defenders of both have settled on the same way of doing so. We’ll discuss their argument, and place it in its own wider context, in next week’s post.

Edited October 17, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[zerostao]

 

beware the golden arrow

[Brian]

Beware anything funded by The Tides Foundation...

 

[JustARandomPanda]

This next article I'm posting is so depressing. What's worse is much of it is "legal". Many of these charities officially abide by the law but break it's spirit (intent).

 

 

No wonder Master Nan Huai-Chin always advised his students to be very careful with how, where and what one donates to.

 

 

 

Above the Law: America's Worst Charities

[Brian]

This is part of the reason why we generally either help individuals directly or through local & well-understood organizations (like a local soup kitchen, for instance).

[ralis]

edit

Edited October 18, 2013 by ralis

[joeblast]

[zerostao]

This is part of the reason why we generally either help individuals directly or through local & well-understood organizations (like a local soup kitchen, for instance).

i agree that it can be more beneficial to give and/or offer help this way. especially on the local level. i think more important than seeing that your money was used properly, is that you as an individual put your own energy into it. and connection is made on a very human to human level.

of course events can happen far from home, that should compell us to some action of helping. it could happen to anyone anywhere and anytime. calamity does not discriminate. it is easy for me to sit at some relaxed atmosphere, drinking my beer casually and amongsts friends and think, gee, what i lucky ol' cat , that i am,,,and reality should be that we use the resources of our military to assist those in times of severe need instead of expanding our imperialistic follies,,,,,eventually chickens do come home to roost,,,

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/2011-ruling-found-an-nsa-program-unconstitutional.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/329391-court-reauthorizes-surveillance-program-citing-congressional-approval

 

as far as who funded any message, i care more about the accuracy and content of the message , rather than who is delivering it or funding it. americans have lost their balls, imo, it is like someone or something has been fattening us up for a kill, slowing us down in our passion, our agility, our sense of, sense of anything-especially reality.

where is the sense of urgency? where is that word that used to circulate (militant)? where is the passion? where is the life? are we all just zombies staggering along mindlessly? or is that what we are very close to transforming into? where is our hearts?

this is no time or place for the feint of heart. isnt the path clearly laid out before us?

 

http://rt.com/usa/scalia-nsa-surveillance-threats-362/

 

[silent thunder]

The high price of low cost.

 

 

 

 

[Wells]

POLICE STATE USA!

Drunk Off-Duty Cop tries to arrest female soldier because she didn't want to go home with him!

Disgusting!

[zerostao]

us-985d

where will it end?

it wont, and what is that ancient saying?

spy on your enemies, spy on your allies more, spy on your own incessantly

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.thelocal.fr/20131021/us-snooped-on-70-million-phone-calls-in-france


70 million phone calls in France recorded in one month by NSA, new report claims. French government demands immediate explanation to "shocking" revelations

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://universalfreepress.com/watch-the-regime-of-the-long-knives-obama-fires-2-more-military-leaders-whats-he-up-to/

 

 

Obama Fires 2 More Military Leaders

Edited October 21, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy