Well, ultimately western civilization is based on military and economic conquest. It was always about money, from 1492 onwards, ever since the end of the crusades, the west has been about getting money by any means necessary. This is a somewhat soul destroying activity as the human cost of endless economic advancement is high, so in the west there is a well established cultural phenomenon that can only be described as "hand wringing" (also "pearl clutching" for the ladies) where we as a society bemoan the loss of spiritual wellbeing, the destruction of this or that ethnic group or rainforest or way of life, but it is always in retrospect, and does not ultimately change the society's behavior. This hand-wringing is where hagiographies about the terrible things done to native Americans, Africans or Arabs gets written and occasionally academics will bring up how horrible western civilization has been.
Those who are more sensitive are always on the look out for something that will end our society's soulless destruction of the earth and her peoples, whether it be yoga or buddhism or organic food, but those who actually control our society have no interest in slowing anything down, full steam ahead they say.
james, you made a profound statement without you being aware of it.
I have been great fan of Herr Oswald spengler and nobody has explained to me better then him about western civilisation and the “thing” that drives it.
Karl marx explanation of capitalism is correct but his socialist antidote is wrong, and with Spengler his analysis of the Faustian
civilisation is correct but his solutions is wrong.
I detect some element of spenglerism in your analytics’.
Let me intro introduce you to spengler and give me your take on him.
The West's Method of Overcoming Its Fear of Death
The lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself.
This is the tragic situation -the inversion of the Hamlet motive- that produced Nietzsche's strained conception of a "return," which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life's lie is the foundation of Bayreuth -which would be something whereas Pergamum was something- and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.
~Oswald Spengler Decline of The West Vol1 pg. 365
Faust's Modern Ideals
Let's fast forward to the last scenes of Part II. The Emperor rewards Faust for services rendered, including the introduction of paper currency, with its inflationary proclivity and hence with its propensity for making the money-brokers even richer. Faust obtains the privilege of reclaiming land from the sea.
The money economy facilitated by Faust makes possible an economic growth which promises ever-greater prosperity: "Many a meadow, field and garden, wood and town" are foreseen as spreading over the area Faust has reclaimed from the waves. Goethe understands the fascination the promise of economic growth exerts. He does not say where the limits to growth might lie, but he does suggest that mankind will soon no longer even be capable of recognizing limits. Like Faust, who becomes blind at the end of the play, man is becoming blind to the problems that surface with the submerging of constraints on growth.
To Goethe this breaking of constraints is due to the economy's change in form, as the subsistence economy in which labour dominates gives way to the industrial economy, in which capital plays the decisive role. The subsistence economy is adapted to satisfying physical needs, which are satiable. Its goals are therefore finite. On the other hand, the industrial economy is adapted to imaginary needs, which can be constantly expanded, and are insatiable. Inherent in the industrial economy is an infinite striving. It follows from the striving for money, since money can be increased more quickly than goods, which must be laboriously obtained. The tendency is, therefore, first to produce money, and then, tempted by profit, to grant this money additional value, as capital, through a corresponding imaginative expansion of demand, and the production of goods this entails.
By removing these inner limits to its progress, the economy increasingly gains the upper hand and casts the whole world under its spell. Economy, capital and money markets know no boundaries. The logical conclusion of this development, as Goethe so clearly foresaw, is globalization: the whole known world transformed into a kind of panopticon -- and a Hobbesian one at that -- with its centrally placed watchtower keeping an eye on everyone and ensuring that everybody conforms to its ideals.
The ideal of an ever-improving future is a vital ingredient in the economy of finance and industry. It could be a market-type economy (which since Marx, has been known as 'capitalism') or a collectivist economy and society, such as that of the former Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Whichever alternative, whatever stands in its way or suggests limitation must be eliminated. The process of elimination is harsh and ruthless, although the methods applied in societies based on market economies are more subtle and less overtly bloody compared with the coercion, repression and genocide practiced on such a large scale by totalitarian regimes. All these aspects are prefigured in Faust.
That Shine of Heavenly Light
George Ross
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
