Lux Lucet

Summary:

Clark examines the ideas of two famous and influential 20th Century historians, Arnold Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Spengler likened civilizations to biological organisms. Just as living creatures are born, grow mature, decline and die, so too do civilizations. He believed that events in the history of one civilization could be seen as contemporaneous to events in another civilization due to their occurring at the same point the their respective societies’ lifecycles. Further, Spengler was a determinist. He held that the West – as with all civilizations – would decline and die. Nothing can be done to prevent this.

Arnold Toynbee attempted to sound a more optimistic tone. He rejected Spengler’s biological analogy and claimed that, while, yes, 25 of 26 civilizations have collapsed, this does not imply that the West is fated to follow their fate.

Did either one of these noted scholars prove his point, or is the jury still out? Given their methods, could either one of them have managed to prove his point? These are questions to ask while reading Clark’s analysis of their writings.

Finally, Clark offers his opinion on the state of the West today. Although he expresses disagreement with Spengler and Toynbee on several points, he is in agreement with them in this: the West is in the midst of a decline.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine,” or so went the refrain of a popular 80’s song by R.E.M. Armageddon, at least in my experience, is, and has been for some time, big business. In fact, I don’t ever recall a time when I’ve not been regaled with some end-of-the-world scenario or another. As a boy, I recall watching The Late Grate Planet Earth in a darkened church basement. The mushroom cloud at the end tends to leave a big impression on a 10 year old. The Planet of the Apes featured a famous scene with the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand. Mel Gibson first gained international fame as an actor in Mad Max where he played a lawman in post-nuclear holocaust Australia. More recently, the financial crisis of 2008 has spawned a “prepper” movement, whose members, believing that society is on the verge of a major breakdown, seek to mitigate the effects of the coming collapse by making ready ahead of time. Dystopian films and TV shows enjoy great popularity with audiences.

But if anyone supposes that the end-of-the-world became a cultural phenomena only in the last few decades, he should be disabused of this notion after reading Clark’s review of Spengler and Toynbee. Both authors wrote large volumes dealing with civilizational collapse and both found a large and willing audience for their work in the early and middle 20th century. Oswald Spengler, a German historian who lived from 1880 – 1936, published his popular Decline of the West in 1918 and 1922.

Spengler believed that the decline of the West was inevitable. He based this view on the notion that civilizations are analogous to living organisms. They are born, grow strong, decline and finally die. For Spengler, the sure sign of a civilization’s approaching death was the development of large cities. According to Clark, Spengler held that people in large cities, “are traditionless, matter of fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, and contemptuous of the gentlemen, especially of the country gentleman. Civilization [Spengler distinguished between civilization and culture, the former being a sclerotic, degenerate version of the latter] must expand. It drains the countryside of the people, tearing them up by the roots to produce the megapolis” (p.45).

Arnold Toynbee was an English historian who lived from 1889-1975. Toynbee was a prolific writer, whose most famous work is his 12 volume A Study in History, published between 1934-1961. Toynbee, Clark tells us, was a more systematic scholar than Spengler and disagreed with much of what Spengler wrote. Toynbee did not find Spengler’s analogies convincing, neither did he take so pessimistic a view of Western Civilization. Where Spengler saw inevitable collapse, Toynbee believed the end of the West could be avoided.

In his discussion of the methods of the two historians, both of whom amassed a great number of facts to support their positions, Clark writes,

“The facts [Clark is referring to Toynbee’s facts], however, are not the facts that Spengler uses. While a few may be found in both authors, it is surprising that works of such ample proportions overlap so little. but of course history itself is rather ample. From the innumerable events that constitute history, each has selected the facts that suit him and discovers in them the law of history. But is it discovery?…[E]mpirical history is inherently impossible. If a person with a completely unbiased mind should try to study history, the thousand and one events that happen every minute the world over would foredoom him to speedy failure. To make any progress at all, he would have to select some of these events and pay no attention to others…Toynbee or any other student of history must select his facts and in the selection begin to impose his interpretation upon them” (p. 46).

This is a key paragraph. Not only for understanding one of the major problems with secular historical methodology, whether found in Spengler, Toynbee or some other writer, but also for grasping one of the most important themes in Clark’s work: experience does not furnish us with knowledge. The notion that truth can be discovered by observation is called empiricism. Empiricism, which comes from the Greek word for experience, is how most people, including those in academic disciplines, answer the question, “How do you know? “Seeing is believing” is a common way of stating the empiricist’s creed.

In the above paragraph, Clark highlights one of the major problems with the empirical approach to history: historians must select their facts the need for subjective selectivity. For despite what some Empiricists would like to believe, there are no objective facts of history or science. What makes a historical fact important or unimportant is not determined by something inherent in the event itself, but rather by the historian’s interpretation of that event. One could push this discussion a step further and ask if empiricism can establish whether there is even such a thing as an empirical fact, historical or otherwise, but that is a discussion for another time. For those who would like to read more of Clark’s views on Empiricism, please see his chapter on Empiricism in Christian Philosophy, a compilation of three of Clark’s philosophical works available from The Trinity Foundation.

Clark rounds out his critique of Spengler and Toynbee by rejecting the conclusions of both. He writes, “Analogies are not to be trusted [recall Spengler liked to compare civilizations to living organisms] and empirical evidence [as discussed above] is not decisive” (p. 52).

In what is amounts to a foreshadowing of his comments later in this chapter, Clark writes, “Particularly interested in physical deterioration, he [Toynbee] seems to have overlooked or minimized the possibility that civilizations are predestined to die because of moral deterioration” (p. 52). Without anticipating his argument too much, in the next section of Chapter 2, Clark cites some interesting statistics current in 1948, the year he wrote A Christian View of Men and Things (CVMT). Those statistics clearly show the moral rot existing in the US during a time many contemporary conservatives would view as a high point in American civilization. And if Clark was concerned about the public morals of 1948, one wonders what he might say about the state of affairs today.

Clark concludes this section of Chapter 2 with a few comments on civilizational collapse. A mentioned at the start of this post, this is just as hot a topic now in 2014 as it was in 1948, perhaps even more so. Although he disagrees with much that Spengler and Toynbee wrote, Clark clearly had in common with them the opinion that Western civilization was in a state of collapse. Clark observed,

“[B]ecause of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities. People want to shut their eyes to collapse, but the signs have so multiplied that, inevitable or not, there is a growing belief that collapse is a fact. Perhaps some of the blindness to the fact of collapse is due to the picturesque quality of our language. When a building collapses, it falls down, altogether, suddenly, in one grand crash, and its dust soars upward and slowly settles. Society is not so spectacular. As long as there is food in the grocery store, as long as the utilities function, as long as the police keep a semblance of order, the society has not evidently collapsed. But if t his is what is meant by collapse, no society has ever collapsed…The human race has always survived – so far; but the integrated society, in the sense that there have been several different societies [Clark has intentionally left “society” undefined, he discusses this issue on p. 47 toward the end of the first paragraph; here, Clark seems to be adopting Toynbee’s use of the term] in history, has not always survived” (p. 53).

“The unwillingness to face unpleasant realities,” is clearly a serious problem in our own day. Without belaboring the point, a simple look at US federal government’s finances shows this to be the case. For even as the federal government runs peacetime deficits of over $1 Trillion annually, not only is there no serious opposition to the mounting debts and deficits, but the American people and their elected officials call for more of the same. To make matters worse, the new spending is enabled, not by increased federal taxes, that would be unpleasant. No, the massive deficits are financed by the Treasury Department issuing new debt and the Federal Reserve buying it through a process called Quantitative Easing (QE), which in plain language is simply counterfeiting, or, what is even more to the point, theft. This model is clearly delusional and unsustainable, but pity the poor soul who tries to address the issue honestly. As the government “shutdown” of October 2013 demonstrated, those who seek to point out the financial problems of the US and attempt to take even the most limited steps toward a solution will be vilified for their efforts. Americans by and large refuse to face the reality that government cannot provide for all their needs at other people’s expense indefinitely. They prefer to live in a fantasyland, thank you very much. This refusal to face the truth is evidence of severe moral rot, and is by no means limited to the US. It abounds throughout the Western world.

A second point worth noting in Clark’s statement is his definition of “collapse”. If people think of the term at all, they tend to suppose that civilizations collapse in the same way the Twin Towers did on 911, in a great crash and a cloud of smoke. But, as Clark points out, societal collapse is not so sudden or spectacular. Somewhere, John Robbins pointed out that Western civilization, the civilization born of the Reformation, has been in collapse for over 100 years. Should that civilization finally come to an end – and from the look of things, this seems very likely – a new society will take its place. But one very different from what we in the West as accustomed to.