The legendary German historian, Oswald Spengler, was born in the German Empire on the 29th of May, 1880 AD. He is best known for his two-volume book The Decline of the West, published after the First World War, and his “pessimistic” and “deterministic” views on History – or so the liberal academia claims. In truth, Oswald Spengler postulates that Cultures play the central role of world history, and are analogous to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable and predetermined lifespan which he would define as Destiny. He proposes a Copernican revolution of historical science, substituting the progressive linear course with the conservative cyclical model of history. Although one could find a few obvious mistakes in Spengler’s entire narrative, which were upgraded by other authors such as Arnold J. Toynbee and Amaury de Riencourt, many of his theses are on point. He has indeed discovered the hidden rhythm of History, the ebbs and flows of Cultures and Civilizations – which are completely different terms in Spengler’s model.
Cultures are the original spiritual organisms, born from rural areas, characterized by a unique and deep spirituality, manifested through the Culture’s art and architecture. They are young and vigorous, representing the Spring and Summer seasons of a High Culture’s life-cycle. A Culture’s values are aesthetic, religious and, usually, aristocratic. Civilizations are overripe Cultures, mechanized spiritual organisms bound by ethics – secular and democratic in nature. Civilizations are born in the Autumn Stage of a High Culture’s lifespan, lasting out until the very end of its Winter Stage. By the coming of Winter, a series of powerful figures rise to tame the chaotic waves of Democracy as Civilization crumbles. These figures are, out of convenience, named as “Caesars”. Caesarism is will-to-order personified, a century-long process of societal militarization under the watchful gaze of absolutist dictators. Spengler believed that Western Civilization would bow itself before its Caesars somewhere between 2000 AD and 2200 AD, just like its predecessor, the Civilization of Rome, which was overtaken by its Caesars between 100 BC and 100 AD.
In Hitler’s National Socialism, or Mussolini’s Fascism, Oswald Spengler saw no Caesars – just reckless adventurers who would go on to destroy their countries. In 1933 AD, Spengler accurately predicted that the Third Reich would collapse by 1945 AD. Thus he was, and remained, a stark critic of Nazism and Fascism. However, in the appearance of Benito Mussolini, Spengler saw the shadow of the future Caesars. He saw their shadow in the person of the legendary British colonial entrepreneur and adventurer Cecil Rhodes as well. Spengler predicted that by the year 2000 AD, Western creativity will cease. Any observer of modern cultural trends can see the devolution of music, film, video games and art in the last three decades – in different rhythms, of course. He also believed that a Second Religiousness will follow the footsteps of the future Western Caesars. The seeds of this future Second Religiousness could be seen in the de-secularization of society, either by New Age cults or the impulses of more traditional religious forms across the West.
All of these predictions he made are just the beginning…
The mind of Oswald Spengler provides future historians (and historiosophers!) with far deeper insight than mere predictions about the future. An often forgotten fact is Henry Kissinger’s senior undergraduate thesis, titled The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, which was over 400 pages long. And the role of Henry Kissinger in international affairs, as well as his relationship with the American political or business establishments, needs no introduction. Thus, an objective analyst of international relations should ask himself – what role did the ideas of this now-forgotten German historian play in the shaping of the modern world as we know it. Other important discussions started by Spengler are concerned about themes quite relevant to our time: the relationship between Man and Technics, the need for a Conservative Revolution across the West, the role of Socialism in the coming centuries, and many others – each a topic for itself.
What was sparked by Ibn Khaldun in the Islamic Civilization, carried by the Italian and Russian historians – Giambattista Vico and Nikolay Danilevsky, respectively – was finally delivered by Oswald Spengler, whose mind forged a new perspective on History. This torch was then carried by Arnold J. Toynbee – whose erudition and classifications reached unseen heights, Amaury de Riencourt – whose insight discovered even deeper currents of History, or Carroll Quigley – whose purely scientific method of analysis broadens some of the arguments proposed by Spengler, and especially Toynbee.
His ideas have been influential among right-wing and left-wing thinkers alike. Socialist figures such as the German intellectual, Theodor Adorno, or the Afro-American revolutionary, Malcolm X, saw merit in the theories and models of Oswald Spengler. Conservatives, such as the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Ernest Junger or Leo Strauss, were influenced by Spengler’s ideas. The American policy maker, George F. Kennan, as well as the famous American horror writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, were also interested in Spengler’s view of History. Joseph Campbell, an American analyst of comparative religion, claimed that his view on religious history would be impossible without the ideas proposed by Oswald Spengler. Fascists, like Francis Parker Yockey, Karl Haushofer, Oswald Mosley and Julius Evola, were quite impressed by Spengler’s revolutionary theses. Even the notorious Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, quotes Oswald Spengler quite extensively. Islamic radicals are well-acquainted with his ideas as well. Various, often opposing parts of the political spectrum have shown support or praise for the insights offered to us by this, often ignored and easily dismissed, German historian.
It should be noted that Oswald Spengler deals in quite interesting terms – such as Destiny, Will, God, Blood and others – while remaining neither a religious nor a secular historian. Thus, from his quite objective standpoint in the dispute between the faithful and secularists, he more often than not affirms the important role religion plays in the development of a Culture’s Soul. Some of Spengler’s ideals are derived from Goethean science, sparked by the German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and later popularized, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, by the works of the Austrian occultist, Rudolf Steiner.
But another important question must be asked before this essay about the great German historian ends…
The importance of Spengler’s ideas for the philosopher and the social scientist are quite obvious by now. However, of what importance are his ideas for the common man?
In his book, Man and Technics, Spengler paints a very bleak future for the West in the coming centuries. But at the same time, he offers a very simplistic solution. Spengler advises the Western Man to behave like the Roman soldiers stationed at Pompeii during the eruption of Vesuvius – a stoic resistance to the inevitable currents of History which will be remembered by future generations until the End of Days. A last stand, if you will, against the inescapable Doom which eventually awaits the West, whose sheer willpower will stand the test of time as one of the most tragic, yet the most epic tales of all time. In the end of all things Western, against the encroaching Darkness, Oswald Spengler offers a manly solution – worthy of the old Germanic warrior sagas whose motifs still inspire the last aristocrats of the soul across the modern West.
As the cult-classic American fantasy novel written by George Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire declares: “Winter is Coming.”
And Western Man should brace for it…
For this Winter may prove to be the harshest one of them all…
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Putin’s War: A Tale of Soviet Romanticism and Western Ignorance | Daniel Hawker
With Russian troops having begun a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, President Joe Biden was recently asked by a journalist “Do you think you may have underestimated Putin?” In response to the question, the supposed ‘most powerful man in the world’ offered merely a smirk and proceeded to sit in silence whilst his team rushed to stop the video recording. This was inevitably due to the honest answer being yes – the warning signs have been evident for decades. Let us first consider the historical basis for the invasion.
Vladimir Putin’s position as a Soviet romantic has come to be a defining aspect of his political image. In his 2005 state of the nation address, he notably referred to the 1991 collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, an event which left “tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen … beyond the fringes of Russian territory”. It is this Slavophilic perspective that is paramount in understanding the motives and aims of Russian foreign policy in Eastern Europe. With the fall of the USSR came, according to Russian nationalists, the mass displacement of Soviet citizens outside of the Motherland. Millions of Slavic people, all of whom shared a rich cultural history, now living within the borders of independent states, stripped of their collective identity. At this time, young Vladimir Putin was working for the Mayor of Leningrad, and this moment came to shape his ideology and vision for Russia’s future (and the future of former-Soviet satellite states).
Ukraine however, has always occupied a special place within Russian romantic nationalism. The Russian Federation actually has its origins in modern-day Ukraine – specifically the Kievan Rus’ federation (consisting of East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples), which existed from the 9th to the 13th century. Linguistic and cultural roots remain strong, with most Ukrainians also speaking Russian, especially in the eastern and southern parts of the country. Whilst a region of the Russian Empire (and later the USSR), Ukraine was a crucial region for agriculture due to its soil, which is exceptionally well-suited to the farming of crops.
Given this intertwined history, a key tenant of Putin’s romantic mindset is the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and must therefore exist within the same state. This view was most recently revealed in a 2021 article written by the president, titled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, in which he affirmed that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”. Stella Ghervas, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University, has explained that “the borders of the Russian Empire in 1914 remain a point of reference from the Kremlin up to this day”.
However, it seems that the West has chosen not only to ignore how ideologically desperate Putin is to reclaim Ukraine, but also how brutally willing he has been to utilise hard power to achieve his expansionist aims. 2008 saw artillery attacks by pro-Russian separatists (backed by Putin) in the South Ossetia region of Georgia; 2014 brought us the infamous annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, and 2021 saw a mass-movement of Russian troops and military equipment to the Ukrainian border, raising concerns over a potential invasion. These examples should have clearly demonstrated to Western powers the lack of respect Vladimir Putin has for national sovereignty, and that once his mind becomes fixated on regaining lost Soviet territory, he can’t be easily dissuaded. With this in mind, the invasion of Ukraine should be viewed as the inevitable and long-awaited finale to Putin’s expansionist concerto.
The response to the latest developments is hardly surprising: economic sanctions appear to be a firm favourite amongst Western leaders; Boris Johnson has sanctioned five Kremlin-friendly oligarchs and aims to target “all the major manufacturers that support Putin’s war machine”, whilst Joe Biden has levied penalties against major Russian industries and frozen the bank assets of the regime’s major figures. An international effort has also been undertaken, with the UK, US, EU and Canada agreeing to cut off a number of Russian banks from SWIFT, the international payment system. However, such sanctions, especially those against individuals, have received pushback. Following Crimea in 2014, the late and greatly-missed philosopher Sir Roger Scruton published a piece in which laid out how believing that sanctions against oligarchs “will make the faintest difference to Russia’s expansionist foreign policy is an illusion of staggering naivety” – having faced the threat of increased sanctions since then, Russia has built up foreign currency reserves of $630bn (akin to ⅓ of their economy).
In terms of military responses, the general consensus is that Western troops won’t be deployed, and there is a simple logic to it – Western populations have no real hankering for a war: two recent YouGov polls revealed 55% of Britons and 55% of Americans oppose sending their own troops to fight in Ukraine (for the United States, last year’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan undoubtedly turned the public off of war for a while). However, NATO troops have been deployed to Eastern Europe, and we’ve also sent 1,000 soldiers to Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Poland, in preparation for the inevitable outpouring of innocent and scared Ukrainian families.
Whilst the objectives of the Putin regime and the long-term naivety of the Western order are the two primary factors, the West’s role in bringing this situation about must also be acknowledged, for the sake of honest discussion. In the early 1990s, Boris Yeltsin expressed his desire for Russia to one day join NATO; Putin echoed this in 2000 when Bill Clinton visited Moscow. Despite Russia at these times being a fledgling democracy, they were turned down by the alliance – provided the opportunity to start anew and help the Russian people, the West refused to bring Russia into the international fold.
Further evidence of the West’s culpability is the expansion of NATO’s borders. Although an arrangement with murky origins, the generally-understood version is that the US Secretary of State James Baker, told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO expansion was ‘not on the agenda’. Regardless, the welcoming of former Eastern Bloc states into the alliance (Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, and Albania and Croatia in 2009) has only served to worsen relations between Putin and the West – despite the availability of open dialogue for decades, we’ve consistently chosen mistrust when dealing with Russia.
Whilst the West may be shocked that Putin actually went ahead with a military invasion, it can’t seriously claim to have been surprised; the president’s intentions regarding Eastern Europe and Ukraine especially have been nefariously evident for at least a decade, in which time we’ve fooled ourselves, downplaying the risk Russia posed. We must endeavour to remember however, the most tragic consequences of this entire situation: the many thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians who’ve lost their lives, their homes and their feeling of safety within their own borders. For Russia, sanctions will hurt their citizens, all whilst their understanding of the situation is distorted through propagandistic state media. This really is a horrific situation, and one that has occurred because of Putin’s worldview and Western leaders’ inability to take Russia seriously as a threat.
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Ukraine is the origin of Europe’s next refugee crisis
As Russia is poised to invade Ukraine, with a build-up of as many as 100,000 troops on the border and a concurrent supply of blood banks, commentators are concerned with what this might mean for the rest of the European continent. It may seem selfish to consider the impacts on Western Europe of a ground war in Ukraine, but an inability to think clearly about such ramifications led to a series of ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East, a refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, and the precipitation of homegrown terrorism.
A recent Spectator article, from Owen Matthews, considered that economic sanctions on Russia would likely be enough to deter any invasion, as Putin does not want or need ‘more chunks of Ukraine – there’s no strategic, political or economic upside in fighting an attritional war over open country’. Perhaps not, and the cost of war would certainly be prohibitive, but this presumes that the gas lines to Europe will be turned off, at any point; Russia would not want that, as it would help to cover any military spending, and Europe cannot even consider it, as Germany closes down her nuclear plants and British energy bills are set to soar.
But Russia can destabilise Europe in other ways; and the easiest way is to cause a refugee crisis.
There are three main reasons why this is a likely possibility at this point. First, the Russian style of warfare is one that easily displaces populations: their typical attack plan is to besiege and pummel cities into submission, either with artillery or air support, and concurrently blockade ports until the population submits. The experiences of Russian tactics in Chechnya and Syria are evidence of this: in 2000, before nine years of attritional warfare would see Chechnya reincorporated into the Russian Federation, the Siege of Grozny decimated the city to an extent not seen since the Second World War. An estimated half a million people lived in Grozny by the time of the siege; today, there is just over half that number.
Syria is the same story, with a few details changed. Rather than commit a ground presence, Russia engaged itself in the Syrian Civil War mostly in the air, with what was ultimately a five-year campaign that targeted anti-government positions, but killed as many as 2,000 civilians within the first six months. The refugee fallout of the Syrian Civil War cannot be laid solely at Putin’s door, but it is undeniable that the Russian style of warfare played a significant role in its creation.
Then there is the actual population of Ukraine. Any ground war will not be a repeat of 2014, for a number of reasons, but the most important is the lack of support Russia and Putin experience amongst the Ukrainian population. The Annexation of Crimea was justified somewhat on the historical basis of Russia’s connections to the population and the resurgent separatism in the region; in Western Ukraine, there is no such support, and only 17% of the population hold any warm feelings towards Russia.
Whilst it is never a certainty that a Russian invasion would displace the near-60% of Ukrainians who hold negative attitudes towards Russia, the rules of migration have drastically changed, and populations across the world are much more prepared to leave their homelands if forced to. Moreover, of the 25 million Ukrainians who hold negative attitudes, if only 1% of that number – 250,000 – decided to head West, Eastern European nations would be facing a series of very difficult questions indeed.
Which brings us to the third reason why a refugee crisis is likely; Ukrainians are already heading West, and have done for some time. Economic trends across Europe have seen improved national economies in the Eastern European nations, the Visegrad Group, to the extent that they are actually facing a labour shortage. Consequently, worker flows to Western Europe have slowed, and itinerant workers from Romania and Ukraine have increased in number; so much so, that there are over 300,000 Ukrainians in Poland alone.
This figure has been manageable because of its gradual growth. The same number turning up on the Polish border would not be met with the same warmth; indeed, we already see this with the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. Accusations that the Belarusian government has been engineering the crisis are credible, but not the whole picture: Lukashenko stands by Putin very closely, and has accused the West of trying to ‘drown the region in blood’. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility for the Russian regime to be orchestrating the refugee crisis on the Polish border, but even if they are not, who is to say that they will not in future?
Almost no-one is discussing the reality that the next European refugee crisis is brewing in Ukraine, and the hardest truth to face up to is it might not even need Western nations’ involvement to erupt. The hard questions Europe has faced for nearly a decade are about to get harder.
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Book Review: Ten Year Anniversary, The Demon in Democracy
A rarely remarked upon effect of Covid-19 has been the neglect of works that would have ordinarily garnered broader acclaim. Thus, as we’ve been distracted by the medical events, an assortment of commendable offerings have largely escaped public attention. One such work is ‘The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies’ by Polish academic and European Parliament member, Ryszard Legutko. Originally published in 2012 as Triumf Człowieka Pospolitego (Triumph of the Common Man), then edited and first appearing in English in 2016, Legutko’s book is a rare recent work of real import. A decade on from its original publication, Legutko’s book is still one of the best indictments yet of our liberal age
In a similar vein to the works of Christopher Lasch and John Gray, Legutko’s is an account that is tepid towards the Thatcherite consensus that has come to define the right whilst resisting the easy overtures of our dominant left-liberalism. It’s a book that illuminates the errors of the age as it rejects the pieties that our epoch demands.
Like Ed West, Michael Anton and Christopher Caldwell, Legutko is one of few contemporary writers willing to provide an honest account of the liberal status quo. By not succumbing to our assorted unrealities, Legutko is able to articulate the inadequacies of liberal democracy without the pusillanimous equivocation that’s sadly all too prevalent. The book is thus a welcome addition to what is an otherwise bleak scene for the conservatively inclined, entrapped as we are in the all-pervasive mould of liberalism.
Such commendations aren’t restricted to this reviewer, however. Figures such as Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule and Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen have been equally effusive. For as Vermeule wrote:
“Legutko has written the indispensable book about the current crisis of liberalism and the relationship of liberalism to democracy”, while for Deneen the book is a “work of scintillating brilliance. [With] every page…brimming with insights.”High praise, undoubtedly, yet it’s well vindicated upon reading. The central thesis is that despite an outward appearance of difference, communism and liberal democracy share a range of similarities. An observation that appears prima facie preposterous, yet after 180-odd pages of tightly-packed prose the reader is unable to avoid this unsettling insight.
The rationale for this claim is as such: both are inorganic systems that involve unnatural impositions and coercive zeal in their pursuit of illusory utopias. Utopias that are to be achieved practically through technology and ‘modernisation’ and buttressed theoretically by the purported fact of human equality. The two are thus historicist projects, seeking to ground human affairs in delusions of ‘progress’ in lieu of any underlying nature.
Both platforms are thus mere dogma. They are, as Legutko states:
“Nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and – so to speak – impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by ‘modernizing’ it.”The two systems are hence unable to accept human beings and political affairs as they actually are: man and the polis must be remoulded along the lines of each respective ideology. For the communists, this involves the denial of man’s natural egotism and the subordination of his individual efforts towards an ostensible communal good. That this requires extreme coercion in implementation, unfathomable violence in practice, and has been deemed a delusion since at least Plato’s Republic, is a tragedy that’s all too commonly known.
So far, nothing new. Yet it’s the author’s elucidation of the unsavoury aspects of liberal democracy that is of particular note, especially for us here at the so-called ‘end of history’ and in light of the easy-going liberalism that permeates our societies, even as they slip further and further into evident decay. As Legutko suggests, liberal democracy shares a proselytising urge akin to that of Leninist communism, yet it’s as equally blind to its theoretical errors and its evangelical impulses as was its communist forebear.
As Legutko sees it, a liberal-democratic man can’t rest until the world has been vouched safe for liberal democracy. Never mind that this liberal-democratic delusion requires a tyranny over the individual soul – we’re neither wholly liberal nor democratic – and entire groups of people. An emblematic example is the recent US-led failure to impose either democracy or liberalism (terms that Legutko fuses and distinguishes, as appropriate) on the largely tribal peoples of Afghanistan.
The justification for this liberal-democratic ‘imperialism’ is, of course, its final and glorious end. Once there’s a left-liberal telos insight, then all means to its achievement are henceforth valid. For the communists, their failures are now common lore. Yet for our liberal-democrats, their – still largely unacknowledged – fantasies continue apace, aided as they are by their patina of ‘enlightened improvement’ and by the imperial patron that enables them.
That the effects of all this liberalising are unnatural, usually unwanted and often utterly repulsive to the recipients tends not to matter. Like all movements of ‘true believers’, there is no room for the heretic: forever onward one must plough.
The ideological spell cast by liberalism is thus as strong as any other. As Legutko observes:
“The liberal-democratic mind, just as the mind of a true communist, feels as inner compulsion to manifest its pious loyalty to the doctrine. Public life is [thus] full of mandatory rituals…[in which all] must prove that their liberal-democratic creed springs spontaneously from the depth of their hearts.”With the afflicted “expected to give one’s approving opinion about the rights of homosexuals and women and to condemn the usual villains such as domestic violence, racism, xenophobia, or discrimination, or to find some other means of kowtowing to the ideological gods.”
A stance that is not only evident in our rhetoric, but by material phenomena as well. One need only think of the now-ubiquitous rainbow flags, the cosmopolitan billboards and adverts, the ‘opt-in’ birth certificates, the gender-neutral bathrooms, the Pride parades, the gender-transition surgeries, the biological males in female events and so on to confirm the legitimacy of Legutko’s claims and our outright denial of physiological reality.
Indeed, here’s Legutko again: [the above] “has practically monopolized the public space and invaded schools, popular culture, academic life and advertising. Today it is no longer enough simply to advertise a product; the companies feel an irresistible need to attach it to a message that is ideologically correct. Even if this message does not have any commercial function – and it hardly ever does – any occasion is good to prove oneself to be a proponent of the brotherhood of races, a critic of the Church, and a supporter of homosexual marriage.”
This sycophantic wheedling is practised by journalists, TV morons, pornographers, athletes, professors, artists, professional groups, and young people already infected with the ideological mass culture. Today’s ideology is so powerful that almost everyone desires to join the great camp of progress”.
Thus whilst the tenets of liberal democracy clearly differ from those of 20th Century communism, both systems are akin in their propagandistic essence, as he writes:
“To be sure, there are different actors in both cases, and yet they perform similar roles: a proletarian was replaced by a homosexual, a capitalist by a fundamentalist, exploitation by discrimination, a communist revolutionary by a feminist, and a red flag by a vagina”.
Variations on this theme inform the entirety of the book and are developed throughout its five chapters: History, Utopia, Politics, Ideology, and Religion. Whilst there is some overlap, the book is written with a philosophical depth reflective of Legutko’s status and which only a few contemporary writers can muster. As Deenen remarks:
“I underlined most of the book upon first reading, and have underlined nearly all the rest during several re-readings. It is the most insightful work of political philosophy during this still young, but troubled century”.Yet the book isn’t exclusively an arcane tome. Aside from Legutko’s evident learnings, what further enhances the work is the author’s ability to draw upon his own experience. Born in the wake of the Second World War, raised in the ambit of Soviet communism, and employed in the European Parliament in adulthood, Legutko’s is a life that has witnessed the workings of both regimes at first hand.
The author recalls that the transition from communism to liberal democracy was greeted with an early enthusiasm that soon devolved into disenchantment. As he states, any initial exuberance steadily subsided, with Legutko sensing early on that “liberal democracy significantly narrowed the area of what was permissible – [with the] sense of having many doors open and many possibilities to pursue [soon evaporating], subdued by the new rhetoric of necessity that the liberal democratic system brought with itself.”
An insight which deepened the longer he worked within that most emblematic of our institutions of modern-day liberalism: the European Parliament. He writes:
“Whilst there, I saw up close what…escapes the attention of many observers. If the European Parliament is supposed to be the emanation of the spirit of today’s liberal democracy, then this spirit is certainly neither good nor beautiful: it has many bad and ugly features, some of which, unfortunately, it shares with communism.”Even a preliminary contact…allows one to feel a stifling atmosphere typical of a political monopoly, to see the destruction of language turning into a new form of Newspeak, to observe the creation of a surreality, mostly ideological, that obfuscates the real world, to witness an uncompromising hostility against all dissidents, and to perceive many other things only too familiar to anyone who remembers the world governed by the Communist Party”.
And it is this tyrannical aspect of liberal democracy to which Legutko ultimately inveighs. After some brief remarks on the eclipse of the old religion (Christianity) at the hands of the new, Legutko’s parting words are an understandable lament that liberal-democratic man – “more stubborn, more narrow-minded, and…less willing to learn from others” – has vanquished all-comers. As he adds:
“With Christianity being driven out of the main tract, the liberal-democratic man – unchallenged and totally secure in his rule – will become a sole master of today’s imagination, apodictically determining the boundaries of human nature and, at the very outset, disavowing everything that dares to reach beyond his narrow perspective.” A sad state whereby “the liberal democrat will reign over human aspirations like a tyrant”.In this regard, Legutko’s remarks echo the German proto-fascist-democratic-dissident, Ernst Junger, who ‘hated democracy like the plague’ and saw the triumph of America-led liberalism as an utter catastrophe. A posture which is also evident in Junger’s compatriot and near contemporary, Martin Heidegger, and in his notion of the ‘darkening of the world.’
Yet it’s perhaps the most famous German theorist of all, Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom we should finally turn and in whose light Legutko ends the book. Largely accepting the popularised Hegelianism of Fukuyama – that there’s no alternative to liberal democracy – Legutko nevertheless muses over whether our current status as Zaruthustrian ‘Last Men’ is a concession we must make to live in this best of all possible worlds or an indictment of our political and spiritual poverty.
As he concludes, the perpetuation of liberal democracy “would be, for some, a comforting testimony that man finally learned to live in sustainable harmony with his nature. For others, it will be a final confirmation that his mediocrity is inveterate.”
A more accurate precis of our current situation I’ve yet to see, and one of many such reasons to read this most wonderful of books.
