Master & Disciple

TODAY AND DESTINY: Excerpts from Spengler's The Decline of the West--Edited by Edwin Franden Dakin--Knopf ($2.75).

During all the dark years of World War I, Oswald Spengler in a dank Munich tenement suffered from endless headache while he composed Der Untergang des Abendlandes. During the '20s, readers in seven languages suffered likewise in the effort to follow its vast erudition, cosmic vision, Teutonic mysticism. Americans read it as The Decline of the West. Because its title suggests doom & disintegration, and because it was the gospel of the Nazi intellectuals, The Decline of the West is perhaps the most misunderstood of the influential books of the 20th Century. Last week a U. S. disciple of Spengler, Edwin Franden Dakin, selected and expounded the most currently relevant 15% of Spengler's text. Today and Destiny ap peals to the U. S.'s weakness for digests. It also appeals to the U. S.'s apprehension for its national future on a quaking planet. Far more than the shrill, prolix nonsense of Mein Kampf (U. S. sales: 197,500), Spengler makes profitable U. S. reading in 1940.

Born among the Harz Mountains in 1880, Oswald Spengler loved peasants, lonely landscapes, flowers. He revered Goethe, adapted his philosophy of destiny-inspired evolution to mankind's history. Through Halle, Munich, Berlin he pursued a Ph.D. in mathematics and philosophy. In later years Spengler's contempt for Communism, forecast of Caesarism, belief in ruthless action over thought made him a Nazi favorite. But he despised Hitler's racial theories, self-conscious sense of history-making--and said so boldly until his death in 1936.

The Decline of the West is a philosophy of history. Spengler boots out the Ancient-Medieval-Modern pattern of schoolbooks, the "Progress" pattern of reformers and optimists, the cause-&-effect patterns of rationalists. He sees each culture--Classical, Chinese, Arabian, etc.--as an organic entity which is born, flourishes, wanes, dies, like plants and animals. As organisms, cultures have a uniform morphology, except where accident intrudes (as in the ruin of Aztec culture by a band of adventurers). Lifetime of a culture is about 1,500 years. Western culture of 1940 is at about the same stage of its life cycle as the Egyptian of 1600 B.C., Chinese of 250 B.C., Classical of 100 B.C. For proof Spengler waved his learned pointer at such diverse phenomena as Karnak's temples, Mozart quartets, Chinese gardening, Marxism, Aztec city planning, jazz, Greek vases, Napoleon, Russian grammar.

Since cultures develop uniformly, the course of an unfinished cycle can be predicted. As early as 1911, when his great work was conceived, Spengler foresaw for Western1 culture 1) not only World War I but World War II, III. . . :) the coming Caesars, victors over Capital; 3) declining birth rates; 4) decay of art from high style to petty cult problems; 5) budgets of billions not millions; 6) suicidal crumbling of democracy, etc. He did not predict imminent collapse of Western civilization. Said solemn Prophet Spengler: "We are still many generations short of that point."

In Today and Destiny Disciple Edwin Dakin presents mainly Spengler's views on economics and politics:

> "The born statesman stands beyond true and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of systems."

> "A people is not alone in the world, and its future will be decided by its force-relationships towards other peoples and powers, and not by its mere internal ordering."

> Domestic policy is a derivative of foreign policy. Prosperity is not a goal but a byproduct.

> Politics dominates and directs economics.

Bracketing his selections from the Master with improvisations of his own, Disciple Dakin attempts to apply Spenglerian lessons to U. S. problems. Spengler's monetary theory is used to explain U. S. economic changes: money used to well from the entrepreneurial mind, now wells from government instead. Hence politics, not Business, is now the career for the power-seeker. Dakin also debates the extent to which Roosevelt II fulfills Spengler's requirements for a "Man of Destiny." Urging his countrymen to dare the strenuous life, he concludes:* "At this stage a great nation has no choice but to move forward into Imperialism. . . ."

* Similar conclusion is reached in William S. Schlamm's recent This Second War of Independence (Button, $2). Onetime editor of the Vienna Weltbuehne, Refugee Schlamm is sure the Nazis covet the Americas, warns the U. S., from his experience, against the weaknesses which softened European democracy.

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