Dear List Members, I followed the debate between Geoffrey and Bertil with a degree of interest, even if we did get a little far away from EJ himself. "The Cold War Revisited" and we're in the 1990s! Cyclical history is an interesting phenomenon. Only slightly dafter than teleological histories. With Nietzsche's "Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen" we're in the realm of the utterly vague, celebrated as the myth of the Uebermensch and preached by Zarathustra. But does anyone have idea what it actually means - for Nietzsche of Zarathustra? If anything it seems like a call for the elimination of history and specific context in discourse and for the establishment of the Uebermensch outside of history? Spengler is, of course, much more precise in his "outline of a morphology of world history". So precise, that he forces much sharp observation and comment into the intellectual straight jacket of his rigid morphology. Of course, one can discern the return of similar situations and the like - IMHO that's human DNA speaking and most definitely not the the life of various cultural souls (and anyway in Vol 2 of "UdA" Spengler digresses and starts talking in more conventionally conservative terms about race (not biological, incidentally) and nations). If anything is going to effect a profound change in human history it is the combination of genetic engineering and cybernetics (in its broadest sense). One further problem with Spengler, and, in a way, with the debate on the "West" and "China" is the assumption that the borders betweeen cultures are still impervious. Globalisation? What makes us think that states are still chasing after territorial hegemony on a grand scale? And is the PLA really capable of effective power projection when it's busily making money for its generals? And where does the West start and stop? With the last MacDonald's? The last Coke machine? Sony in Berlin? Special economic zones in South China? And let's not glorify the "West" so much? If anything, Spengler's contribution was (even if he didn't really succeed) to attempt to turn away from Eurocentrism and relativise traditional history writing with its self-centred linearity. The "West"/"Europe" produced an awful lot we feel proud of because we grew up with it and its existence is no doubt a feeling of cultural similarites across the continent and the globe. But it is always a two sided coin and much as I have little time for wallowing in guilt and self-pity about the past - the West is also Imperialism, environmental destruction, and systematic annihilation. (Here we come to EJ and the Paris diaries, and the essays of the early 1950s - especially "Über die Linie"...). Best wishes from HH, John King
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