The idea of decline in Western history Book

Arthur Herman is a conservative historian and this book is a study of the phenomenon of "cultural pessimism," which he describes as an apocalyptic sense that (Western) civilization is doomed by its very nature. Herman rounds up the thought of a disparate range of "pessimistic" thinkers on both the left and right, including W.E.B. Dubois, Lothrop Stoddard, Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, Oswald Spengler, Marcus Garvey, the Unabomber, Toynbee, Gobineau, Nietzsche and many more. Herman has an established gift for adequately summarizing the positions of intellectuals within a short span and he does a good job of it here. The book was rare in that it started off so unpromisingly I almost abandoned it, but ended up being so interesting that I couldn't put it down by the end.

Contrary to the book's branding, this is really only a history of the last two centuries of "declinist," thinking rather than something that extends back to antiquity. Such thinking is clearly a unique product of modernity rather than something timeless. As he establishes, most cultural pessimism actually draws from the same source: German Romanticism. The birth of liberal technocratic societies in Europe in the early 19th century gave rise to a group of anguished intellectuals in Germany, and later the rest of Europe, who began to feel deep reservations about what was being created and what was being lost. These men began to lament what they saw as the loss of an authentic vitalist Kultur in the face of a rationalizing Zivilisation. Kultur stood for a natural way of being and existing in the world, whereas Zivilisation stood for alienation and anomie, even while it afforded human beings greater raw power over nature. Another way to think about it would be the contrast between Gemeinshaft and Gessellshaft (community vs society), also terminology that came from the German thinkers.

The German Romantics went on to influence generations of thinkers and ordinary people in places they could have scarcely imagined. One thing all these people had in common was that they were latecomers and subjects of modernity, rather than its creators. W.E.B. Dubois for example helped create the notion of "soul" in African-American culture. But Dubois himself had been educated in Germany and deeply influenced by the Romantic ideological trends of the time. The "soul" he was talking about was in fact Kultur, which he defined African-Americans as possessing in contrast with the sterile and brutal white Europeans who held power in the United States. While Dubois started off as a patrician and ended up as a supporter of the Soviet Union, the core of Romantic thought tended to view industrial capitalism and socialism as "a distinction without a difference," as Nietzsche said, both being an expression of the same alienating vulgar materialist worldview. The idea of living vitally, which led some to promote the "purifying" utilization of violence and sexuality, came out of an attempt to negate Zivilisation. We can see this in the thought of Nietzsche and his varied European offspring (including indirectly the Nazis), but also in Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael and other Third World revolutionaries. American pop culture like action movies and popular genres of music continue to embrace this logic in an unconscious way, glorifying violence and coarseness for its own sake. The idea of a "rebel without a cause" is a crude attempt to revive Kultur in the face of Zivilisation.

The other major theme of the book was the consistent fear of "degeneration," under modernity. This has taken the form of fears of racial pollution, environmental degradation, the hollowing out of the soul by technology, and decadence of all types. Gobineau and Lothrop Stoddard in France and the United States respectively helped articulate the fear of a "pure" nation being submerged by degenerate racial Others, with specific degenerate types supposedly identifiable by physical characteristics such as skull size. There was a pronounced fear in many places that the physical conditions of modernity would slowly lead people to waste away physically and morally, a fear that has not gone away at all and continues to be expressed widely in certain circles. There has also been a longstanding fear, as well as hope, that the people of the Third World who have maintained their vital force could either overwhelm or revive a decadent West through immigration and foreign confrontation. The absence of war, acceptance of a shiftless liberalism and alienation caused by technology has long been accused of consigning people to a slow, degenerative death. Germany was a latecomer to modernity so it made sense that its thinkers were the first to articulate the pain of what seemed to be the inner degeneration caused by losing ones their soul (Kultur) to the machine. As Bismarck proceeded to centralize and modernize Germany, some people in that country even began to shortsightedly yearn for a war that would perhaps reawaken people's spirits and break the bovine, soul-destroying boredom that seemed to characterize their new modern lives. The degrading mass culture and minimalist anthropology of modernity chafed and dehumanized them. The chief enemy as they saw it was the ideology of liberalism, with capitalism and technology being its footsoldiers in the war against humanity's vital nature.

Herman's idea of "cultural pessimism" seems quite flexible and able to encompass all the people who criticize the conservative liberal Enlightenment that he identifies with Western civilization. While he is a historian, this is clearly a work of polemic and literary criticism, both of which he is actually quite gifted at. I had to laugh at some of his razor-sharp attacks on the thinkers whose work he reviews here, including some whom I am generally quite sympathetic towards. I picked up the book hoping to be snapped out the prevalent pessimism of contemporary politics, as I hoped that Herman would articulate deeper roots of this phenomenon. Upon completing the book I'm not so sure that all of today's pessimism is unwarranted, nor was that of yesterday. Those who warned of the doom of Western civilization at the turn of the 20th century were not exactly proven wrong by the horror of the world wars and totalitarianism. Its also very unclear that the "eco-pessimism" he excoriates in the last chapter is at all irrational or unfounded. In Herman's defense this book was written in 1999 and thus at a high-point of Western triumphalism, so perhaps these blind spots can maybe be forgiven.

Despite his naked partisanship, which I actually kind of appreciate for its transparency, I thought this was a very entertaining and enlightening read. It never ceases to amaze me how a seemingly broad diversity of movements, including Afrocentrism, conservative reaction, anarcho-primitivism and Islamism, always seemingly to end up tracing their roots back to a small group of German thinkers who first confronted what it meant for people to truly live in the modern world.