[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Age of Memory

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (January 08 2009)


Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Oswald Spengler, whose shade I have evoked several times already in
these essays, is not the kind of philosopher that most intellectuals
today find appealing. He had rather too much of the old-fashioned
schoolmaster in him: precise, didactic, unsympathetic, dry. Worst of
all, he had no patience with the fashionable logic that sees the present
generation - or any other - as destiny's darlings, to whom the lessons
of history no longer apply. It's no wonder that so few people read his
books nowadays.

Still, these unendearing habits are among the reasons I find Spengler so
useful as a guide just now. There are certainly times when the cultural
pendulum has swung too far in the direction of logical rigor and cold
analysis, when the disciplines of intellect need to be relaxed to make
room for the life of the feelings and the play of the imagination.
Still, I'm far from convinced that this is one of those times. Rather,
it seems to me, we've approached the other end of the pendulum's swing,
the point when the world needs a reminder that a belief's emotional
appeal is no argument for its validity, and when what nineteenth-century
writers liked to call "the heaving passions" - a phrase that seems
rather too appropriate these days - have drowned out nearly everything else.

Now of course there are plenty of people these days leading the charge
to flog what remains of reason out of our collective discourse about the
future; it's one of the finer ironies of cultural history that most of
the people who think they're rebelling against their culture are simply
pushing its agenda a little further and faster than most of their
contemporaries. This, again, is why I find Spengler so congenial. He
matched up the twists and dodges of modern thought with their
equivalents in the lives of half a dozen dead civilizations, and showed
how those cultural factors most often claimed as evidence of progress
nowadays are simply phases in a life cycle that is beginning to close in
on its end. Like the poetry of Robinson Jeffers or the ethics of
Epictetus, he has no time for our self-importance, and reading him
clears the mind the way a bitter aperitif clears the palate.

Among his least popular arguments is the suggestion that modern Western
culture - Faustian culture, as he called it - finished its creative age
in the nineteenth century. Of course this is a generalization, as any
statement about history must be; as generalizations go, however, it has
quite a bit going for it. Take the arts as a test case: those that have
their roots in the Faustian world, if they are still practiced at all,
have either fossilized into repetitions of old forms, like classical
music; turned for inspiration to the arts of other cultures, like
popular music, which draws heavily from African music by way of the
influence of blues on rock and jazz on nearly every contemporary genre;
or become the self-referential concern of a narrowing circle of
cognoscenti, like today's avant-garde art music.

Similar patterns can be traced straight across the spectrum of the
Western world's cultural forms. Political thought across the industrial
world, for example, is spinning its wheels in ruts laid down decades
ago; a central reason why politics has degenerated into struggles over
personalities and petty issues across the political mainstream, and into
Utopian fantasies out on the fringes, is that nothing even approximating
a new idea has entered the Western world's political discourse since
well before World War Two. (This applies to alternative culture as much
as to the mainstream; nearly all of the ideas now being put forward as
cutting-edge, avant-garde, New Age political ideas were already creaking
with age when they were last recycled in the 1920s.) True to form,
Spengler does not even give us the comfort of a good ringing
denunciation of decadence. instead, he suggests that it is the natural
fate of the cultural life form that sprouted in western Europe around
900, burst into flower at the beginning of the Renaissance, and has now
gone to seed.

The botanical metaphor is one that Spengler himself would have
appreciated, but I mean it in a slightly different way than he did.
Spengler's view of what he called civilization - the second half of a
culture's life cycle, when its creative possibilities have all been
worked out - was largely negative. The ancient Egyptians, among others,
would have disagreed strenuously; from their viewpoint, geared as it was
to cultural stability and the preservation of traditional forms, what a
Faustian mind necessarily sees as a creative period becomes a matter of
blind groping in the dark, and what a Faustian mind sees as stagnation
is the healthy balance of a successful society. Nor can the Egyptian
viewpoint be dismissed out of hand; maintaining cultural continuity, a
rich and tolerant religious life, and stunningly beautiful art and
architecture as living traditions for more than three thousand years is
not a small achievement.

Even within a Faustian perspective, the completion of the Western
world's cultural trajectory has potentials that need to be recognized.
To return to an example I have used several times before in these
essays, the sorting process that picked Aristotle's Organon out from
among scores of other Greek works on logic, and spread it throughout the
Mediterranean world, happened long after the creative age of Greek
philosophy was over. As culture gives way to civilization, a ruthless
winnowing of cultural heritage typically begins, and those creative
works and techniques that survive the process become basic to the arts,
crafts, and sciences of the mature society. From there, they move past
the periphery of the civilization and become part of the common cultural
heritage of humankind.

This is the phase toward which Spengler saw the Western world advancing.
Whether his scheme makes sense of the broader phenomenon of historical
change he hoped to clarify, it provides a perspective crucial to our own
time. The end of the age of cheap energy has many implications, but one
of the most important - and most daunting - is that it marks the end of
the road for nearly all the cultural trends that have guided the
industrial world since the paired industrial and political revolutions
of the eighteenth century. Those trends pursued greater size, greater
speed, greater power; the replacement of human capacities with ever more
intricate machines, demanding ever more abundant energy and resource
inputs; an escape from the interdependence of living nature into an
artificial world transparent to the human mind and obedient to the human
will.

That way to the future is no longer open. The nations of the industrial
world could pursue it as far as they did only because abundant reserves
of fossil fuels and other natural resources were available to power
Faustian culture along its trajectory. The waning of those reserves and,
more broadly, the collision between the pursuit of unlimited economic
growth and the hard limits of a finite planet, marks the end of those
dreams. It may also mark the beginning of a time in which we can sort
through the results of the last three centuries, discard the ones that
worked poorly or demand conditions that no longer exist, and keep what
still has value.

One useful way to talk about this process, it seems to me, is to borrow
a common habit of talking about history and put it to work in a new way.
Not that long ago it was common to describe the medieval period in the
Western world as the Age of Faith, and to contrast it smugly with an Age
of Reason that was held to have dawned with the first stirrings of the
scientific revolution, and come into its own with the Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century. Oversimplified though these categories are, they
point up certain important distinctions between the phases of our
cultural trajectory that were primarily guided by religious thought and
those guided by the expansive Enlightenment belief in the limitless
power of human reason.

That latter belief is on its last legs just now, because the effort to
direct human behavior solely according to reason simply didn't live up
to its advance billing; the inevitable reaction is following. Thus the
faith that unchecked rationality is a ticket to Utopia, or the only hope
of the human future, or whatever other set of religious ideas might be
assigned to it, is wearing very thin these days, and the decline of
today's technological infrastructure in the wake of peak oil may just
put paid to it. Reason will doubtless retain an active role in our
collective life, just as faith has done, but other forces will likely
take the lead in the decades and centuries ahead of us.

Thus it may not be inappropriate to suggest that in a very real sense,
the Age of Reason is ending. If Spengler is right, what will follow it
is an Age of Memory, where the collective imagination of the West turns
back to contemplate its own past and extract the most useful elements
from a thousand years of innovation. The cultural conserver concept,
which I introduced in an earlier post here, represents one workable
response to that possibility. I plan on discussing that in more detail,
and in more practical terms, in the weeks and months ahead - subject to
the usual interruptions, of course.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/age-of-memory.html



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