B. U. G. S.

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Bob,

I hate to say this, but I suspect you are unconsciously confusing Spengler with Toynbee. Toynbee was a fine historian, but his metahistory was poor. Also it was Toynbee who admired Khaldoun. Professional historians, relying on summaries, often confuse the two, but Spengler and Toynbee are very different. Spengler and Khaldoun are even more different.

For example, Toynbee continues the ex oriente lux nonsense because he believes in the inevitability of ineffable Progress. This belief started with Macaulay, who developed a philosophy of history to combat Tories in Parliament who insisted that things had been going terribly down hill since the Middle Ages. Macaulay, a Whig MP, ably proved them wrong. However, like any politician, he overstated his case: many things had gone terribly wrong, and Progress is not ineffably inevitable.

This overstatement is the assumption that Toynbee worked under. He was committed to ex oriente lux because his faith in Progress produced a linear view of history with discrete origins: predictably, he found them in the Middle East.

Toynbee’s second error was in failing to understand Spengler. Or perhaps it was a resistance, since Spengler’s organic view of history begged Race. And indeed Spengler spoke about race, and race is a theme underlying and uniting his theoretical work. In particular, Spengler talks about soul in a way that defines culture as its product.

This is the principle difference between Spengler and Toynbee. Spengler uses culture as a way to delve into soul; Toynbee uses culture deterministically. For Spengler, a people produces its culture. For Toynbee, the culture controls its peoples.

Further, to Spengler, observing changes in the culture maps out the changes in an organic people’s soul. But to Toynbee, culture is transferred from people to people. This was inevitable under Toynbee’s framework of ineffable Progress, since he tracked cultural dissemination across the globe. He had to, since to him, culture was just technology, which in the tradition of Macaulay’s Whiggery made life better and better: ineffable Progress.

This is why Toynbee historians track the distribution of the plough from the MIddle East. This is why Lynn White made his notorious gaffe by attributing the rise of Chivalry exclusively to the stirrup. To each of these historians, culture was not the product of people, but something that had a life of its own.

The damage this creates is that it assumes that all people are the same. According to Toynbee historians, the Chinese have become us now that they drive cars and own computers.

Spengler, however makes it quite clear that the Chinese remain Chinese, but that they have been conquered by the West. He might say that this was almost inevitable because of the West’s extending all things through perpetual activity to infinity. Because of our drive to infinity, the whole world has fallen to us. And now we reach for the stars themselves, in the infinity of space.

Spengler is the theoretical work upon which Yockey built his brilliant treatise. Yockey updates Spengler, expands his theory, applies it to the world, and most importantly rescues Spengler’s vagueness on Race.

There are perhaps four great works on Western man that seem to carry on a single tradition of prophecy(?) for us: Chamberlain’s Foundations of the 19th Century, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Rosenberg’s Mythos of the 20th Century (this was translated and published under the direction of Carto, but often I think Rosenberg’s almost hysterical anti-Christianity disqualifies it), and Yockey’s Imperium.

What is missing in this tradition is a racial taxonomy from up to date genetics, and a proper understanding of Christianity and the Old Testament. Bob seems to be the only one who points in the right direction on that issue of religion.

But comparing Spengler to Khaldoun is off the mark.

Toynbee does use Khaldoun’s descriptions of the rise and falls of dynasties. Toynbee does so since he believes that culture, like governments, is imposed on peoples and therefore peoples are unimportant. Spengler however uses culture — a people’s way of life — as a gauge on a people’s inner life.

This is because a people produces a culture and not (as Toynbee suggests) the other way around.

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I should have said that “convert to a new inner life” is an analogy to religious conversion, but it really means a cultural conversion. The race survives, but produces a new way of life (=culture), based on the old just as the West is based on, yet distinct from, ancient Greece and Rome.

Rome fell because it had been invaded by millions of non-white Arabs. Yet whites survived and converted to a new type of civilization that was able to repel the Islamic hordes.

We are at the conversion point again.