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“Spengler”: the thinking man’s Mark Steyn
Someone sent me a “Spengler” column from 2003 which is Spengler at his worst, a deadly combination of superficiality and pretentiousness. In the first half of the article, anticipating Mark Steyn’s recent slew of similar pronouncements, he argues that Europe is committing suicide through its low birth rates. I call this superficial because, while the low birthrates certainly are a very serious problem, they do not in themselves indicate that a society is committing suicide. Thus Spengler compares the current situation to the Black Plague of the 14th century when a third of Europeans died, noting that by the mid 21st century the population of Europe will have declined by one fifth. As ought to be evident, the argument contains its own refutation. Europe did not die in the Black Plague but recovered. In the same way, Europe’s population may decrease, but then, as part of the natural oscillations of such phenomena as population fertility, it could well start increasing again. One of the marks of the modern intellectual is that, with his worship of secular theories of history, he assumes that some present secular trend, of which he is the revealer and prophet, must continue as is. The reality is that trends and behaviors change. In human species as in animal species, periods of lower fertility regularly alternate with periods of higher fertility. Second, to discuss the lower birthrate as though this alone represented the suicide of Europe, without mentioning immigration and the increasing Muslim population, which really is the suicide, shows a superficiality and slickness on the order of Mark Steyn. To talk about non-European immigration as the suicide would not be rewarding for Spengler, because, instead of speaking from his superior perch as the voice of wisdom about a world gone wrong, who is himself completely above it all and not affected by any of it (again like Steyn), he would be putting himself in the arena and exposing himself to attack as an Islamophobe. Far better and more pleasing to the ego is it to talk knowingly about a safe subject like birthrates, as though they explain everything. We could probably fill a small conference hall with the writers who have portentously declared that Europe’s low birth rate spells its doom, while they remain silent about immigration. In the second half of the article Spengler regurgitates the half-baked historical theory of Christianity proposed by Franz Rosenzweig, a German Jewish philosopher who died in the early 20th century. Rosenzweig’s idea was that the nations of antiquity, realizing their own mortality as nations in the midst of war and empire, were attracted to Christianity as a way of overcoming the pain of the prospect of collective national death, which is a much more painful prospect than individual death, when the individual has the assurance that his nation will carry on. The theory is a perfect example of how secular intellectuals use some theory of secular causation (e.g., ancient pagan peoples worried about national extinction) to explain a spiritual phenomenon (e.g. why people believe in Jesus Christ). I’m not dismissing Rosenzweig’s idea entirely; a fear of collective extinction could certainly be among the mortal crises that bring men to God. His mistake, again in keeping with the mindset of modern intellectuals, is in taking this one idea as the complete explanation of why Europe became Christian. It’s also not clear how the Rosenzweig thesis backs up Spengler’s thesis that Europe is committing suicide. Since, according to Rosenzweig, people fear collective death more than anything else, and since they embrace Christianity in order to overcome that fear, why would the peoples of Europe give up Christianity and then proceed to commit collective suicide?
I don’t think Spengler himself thought this through. Too often, he comes across as someone who thinks he’s being profound by merely tossing around some big-sounding idea, whether or not it makes sense or is even coherent. Spengler has written better columns since this one, but the closed, smug mindset shown in this column is still dominant among Western intelligentsia and is one of the factors that threaten our existence. Email entry |