The Decline of The West - Races, Peoples and Cultures

Races, Peoples and Cultures

A race, writes Spengler, has "roots," just like a plant. It is connected to a landscape. "If, in that home, the race cannot be found, this means the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the extinction of the old and the appearance of the new one." In this instance, he writes of "race" in the tribal and cultural rather than biological sense, a 19th Century use of the word that was still common when the book was written.

For this reason, a race is not exactly like a plant. "Science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the micro-cosmic side of life a fresh group of characteristics appear and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to 'races' when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race 'Man.' With its talk of casual concentration it sets up a soulless concentration of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves – secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced from eye to eye. Nor are scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters".

Spengler writes that, "Comradeship breeds races… Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of a culture… the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this idea and eventually achieves it." He distinguishes this from the sort of pseudo-anthropological notions that were common when the book was written, and he dismisses the idea of "an Aryan skull and a Semitic skull." He also does not believe language is itself sufficient to breed races, and that "the mother tongue" signifies "deep ethical forces" in Late Civilizations rather than Early Cultures, when a race is still developing the language that fits its "race-ideal."

Closely connected to race is Spengler's definition of a "people," which he defines as a unit of the soul. "The great events of history were not really achieved by peoples; they themselves created the peoples. Every act alters the soul of the doer." Such events include migrations and wars. For example, the American people did not migrate from Europe, but were formed by events such as the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. "Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive." What distinguishes a people from a population is "the inwardly lived experience of 'we'," which exists so long as a people's soul lasts. "The name Roman in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population." In his view, "Peoples are neither linguistic nor political nor zoological, but spiritual units."

Spengler disliked the contemporary trend of fusing a definition of race similar to his with the biological definition. "Of course, it is quite often justifiable to align peoples with races, but 'race' in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people were ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science—never for folk-consciousness—and that no people was ever stirred to enthusiasm by this ideal of blood purity. In race (Rasse haben) there is nothing material but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is the incoordination of this (wholly metaphysical) beat which produces race hatred… and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love—so akin to hate—between man and wife."

To Spengler, peoples are formed from early prototypes during the Early phase of a Culture. "Out of the people-shapes of the Carolingian Empire—the Saxons, Swabians, Franks, Visigoths, Lombards—arise suddenly the Germans, the French, the Spaniards, the Italians." These peoples are products of the spiritual "race" of the great Cultures, and "people under a spell of a Culture are its products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art or mode of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, and Faustian cast... World history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfill their Destinies."

In attempts to tie race and culture together, Spengler is echoing ideas similar to those of Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellén. These ideas, which figure proeminently in the second volume of the book, were common throughout German culture at the time, and would be the most significant elements for the National Socialists.

In his later works, such as Man and Technics and The Hour of Decision, Spengler expanded upon his "spiritual" theory of race and tied it to his metaphysical notion of eternal war and his belief that "Man is a beast of prey." The authorities however banned the book.