← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · triskelion
Thread ID: 6624 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-05-13
2003-05-13 00:36 | User Profile
This topic has come up here and as I like this piece quite a bit I thought it should be posted.
Spengler: Criticism and Tribute Dr. Revilo Oliver, Journal of Historical Review, 17/2 (March-April 1998), 10-13.
Conceived before the First World War is Oswald Spengler's magisterial work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1918). Read in this country chiefly in the brilliantly faithful translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of the West (New York, two volumes, 1926-28), Spengler's morphology of history was the great intellectual achievement of our century. Whatever our opinion of his methods or conclusions, we cannot deny that he was the Copernicus of historionomy. All subsequent writings on the philosophy of history may fairly be described as criticism of the Decline of the West. [Image: Revilo Oliver in 1938.] Spengler, having formulated a universal history, undertook an analysis of the forces operating in the immediately contemporary world. This he set forth in a masterly work, Die Jahre der Entscheidung, of which only the first volume could be published in Germany (Munich, 1933) and translated into English (The Hour of Decision, New York, 1934). One had only to read this brilliant work, with its lucid analysis of forces that even acute observers did not perceive until 25 or 30 years later, and with its prevision that subsequent events have now shown to have been absolutely correct, to recognize that its author was one of the great political and philosophical minds of the West. One should remember, however, that the amazing accuracy of his analysis of the contemporary situation does not necessarily prove the validity of his historical morphology. The publication of Spengler's first volume in 1918 released a spate of controversy that continues to the present day. Manfred Schroeter in Der Streit um Spengler (Munich, 1922) was able to give a précis of the critiques that had appeared in a little more than three years; today, a mere bibliography, if reasonably complete, would take years to compile and would probably run to eight hundred or a thousand printed pages. Spengler naturally stirred up swarms of nit-wits, who were particularly incensed by his immoral and preposterous suggestion that there could be another war in Europe, when everybody knew that there just couldn't be anything but World Peace after 1918, 'cause Santa had just brought a nice, new, shiny "League of Nations." Such "liberal" chatterboxes are always making a noise, but no one with the slightest knowledge of human history pays any attention to them, except as symptoms. Unfortunately, much more intelligent criticism of Spengler was motivated by emotional dissatisfaction with his conclusions. In an article in Antiquity for 1927, the learned R.S. Collingwood of Oxford went so far as to claim that Spengler's two volumes had not given him "a single genuinely new idea," and that he had "long ago carried out for himself"ââ¬âand, of course, rejectedââ¬âeven Spengler's detailed analyses of individual cultures. As a cursory glance at Spengler's work will suffice to show, that assertion is less plausible than a claim to know everything contained in the Twelfth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Collingwood, the author of the Speculum Mentis and other philosophical works, must have been bedeviled with emotional resentments so strong that he could not see how conceited, arrogant and improbable his vaunt would seem to most readers. It is now a truism that Spengler's "pessimism" and "fatalism" was an unbearable shock to minds nurtured in the nineteenth-century illusion that everything would get better and better forever and ever. Spengler's cyclic interpretation of history stated that a civilization was an organism having a definite and fixed life-span and moving from infancy to senescence and death by an internal necessity comparable to the biological necessity that decrees the development of the human organism from infantile imbecility to senile decrepitude. Napoleon, for example, was the counterpart of Alexander in the ancient world. We were now, therefore, in a phase of civilizational life in which constitutional forms are supplanted by the prestige of individuals. By 2000, we shall be "contemporary" with the Rome of Sulla, the Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and China at the time when the "Contending States" were welded into an empire. That means that we face an age of world wars and what is worse, civil wars and proscriptions, and that around 2060 the West (if not destroyed by its alien enemies) will be united under the personal rule of a Caesar or Augustus. That is not a pleasant prospect.
Greatness or Optimism The only question before us, however, is whether Spengler is correct in his analysis. Rational men will regard as irrelevant the fact that his conclusions are not charming. If a physician informs you that you have symptoms of arteriosclerosis, he may or may not be right in his diagnosis, but it is absolutely certain that you cannot rejuvenate yourself by slapping his face. Every detached observer of our times, I think, will agree that Spengler's "pessimism" aroused emotions that precluded rational consideration. I am inclined to believe that the moral level of his thinking was a greater obstacle. His "fatalism" was not the comforting kind that permits men to throw up their hands and eschew responsibilities. Consider, for example, the concluding lines of his Men and Technics (New York, 1932): Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man. Now, whether or not the stern prognostication that lies back of that conclusion is correct, no man fit to live in the present can read those lines without feeling his heart lifted by the great ethos of a noble cultureââ¬âthe spiritual strength of the West that can know tragedy and be unafraid. And simultaneously, that pronouncement will affright to hysteria the epicene homunculi among us, the puling cowards who hope only to scuttle about safely in the darkness and to batten on the decay of a culture infinitely beyond their comprehension. That contrast is in itself a very significant datum for an estimate of the present condition of our civilization ...
Three Points of Criticism Criticism of Spengler, therefore, if it is not to seem mere quibbling about details, must deal with major premises. Now, so far as I can see, Spengler's thesis can be challenged at three really fundamental points, namely: (1) Spengler regards each civilization as a closed and isolated entity animated by a dominant idea, or Weltanschauung, that is its "soul." Why should ideas, or concepts, the impalpable creations of the human mind, undergo an organic evolution as though they were living protoplasm, which, as a material substance, is understandably subject to chemical change and hence biological laws? This logical objection is not conclusive: Men may observe the tides, for example, and even predict them, without being able to explain what causes them. But when we must deduce historical laws from the four of five civilizations of which we have some fairly accurate knowledge, we do not have enough repetitions of a phenomenon to calculate its periodicity with assurance, if we do not know why it happens. (2) A far graver difficulty arises from the historical fact that we have already mentioned. For five centuries, at least, the men of the West regarded modern civilization as a revival or prolongation of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Spengler, as the very basis of his hypothesis, regards the Classical world as a civilization distinct from, and alien to, our ownââ¬âa civilization that, like the Egyptian, lived, died, and is now gone. It was dominated by an entirely different Weltanschauung, and consequently the educated men of Europe and America, who for five centuries believed in continuity, were merely suffering from an illusion or hallucination. Even if we grant that, however, we are still confronted by a unique historical phenomenon. The Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, and Arabian ("Magian"), civilizations are all regarded by Spengler (and other proponents of an organic structure of culture) as single and unrelated organisms: Each came into being without deriving its concepts from another civilization (or, alternatively, seeing its own concepts in the records of an earlier civilization), and each died leaving no offspring (or, alternatively, no subsequent civilization thought to see in them its own concepts). There is simply no parallel or precedent for the relationship (real or imaginary) which links Graeco-Roman culture to our own. Since Spengler wrote, a great historical discovery has further complicated the question. We now know that the Mycenaean peoples were Greeks, and it is virtually certain that the essentials of their culture survived the disintegration caused by the Dorian invasion, and were the basis of later Greek culture. (For a good summary, see Leonard R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, London, 1961). We therefore have a sequence that is, so far as we know, unique: Mycenaean>Dark Ages>Graeco-Roman>Dark Ages>Modern. If this is one civilization, it has had a creative life-span far longer than that of any other that has thus far appeared in the world. If it is more than one, the interrelations form an exception to Spengler's general law, and suggest the possibility that a civilization, if it dies by some kind of quasi-biological process, may in some cases have a quasi-biological power of reproduction. The exception becomes even more remarkable if we, unlike Spengler, regard as fundamentally important the concept of self-government, which may have been present even in Mycenaean times (see L. R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, cited above, p. 97). Democracies and constitutional republics are found only in the Graeco-Roman world and our own; such institutions seem to have been incomprehensible to other cultures. [Image: "Mask of Agamemnon," funerary mask from a shaft tomb at Mycenae, c. 1500 BC.] (3) For all practical purposes, Spengler ignores hereditary and racial differences. He even uses the word "race" to represent a qualitative difference between members of what we should call the same race, and he denies that that difference is to any significant extent caused by heredity. He regards biological races as plastic and mutable, even in their physical characteristics, under the influence of geographical factors (including the soil, which is said to affect the physical organism through food) and of what Spengler terms "a mysterious cosmic force" that has nothing to do with biology. The only real unity is cultural, that is, the fundamental ideas and beliefs shared by the peoples who form a civilization. Thus Spengler, who makes those ideas subject to quasi-biological growth and decay, oddly rejects as insignificant the findings of biological science concerning living organisms. It is true, of course, that man is in part a spiritual being. Of that, persons who have a religious faith need no assurance. Others, unless they are determined blindly to deny the evidence before us, must admit the existence of phenomena of the kind described by Franz E. Winkler, M.D., in Man the Bridge Between Two Worlds (New York, Harper, 1960), and, of course, by many other writers. And every historian knows that no one of the higher cultures could conceivably have come into being, if human beings are merely animals. But it is also true that the science of genetics, founded by Father Mendel only a century ago and almost totally neglected down to the early years of the Twentieth Century, has ascertained biological laws that can be denied only by denying the reality of the physical world. Every educated person knows that the color of a man's eyes, the shape of the lobes of his ears, and every one of his other physiological characteristics is determined by hereditary factors. It is virtually certain that intellectual capacity is likewise produced by inheritance, and there is a fair amount of evidence that indicated that even moral capacities are likewise innate. Man's power of intervention in the development of inherited qualities appears to be entirely negative, thus affording another melancholy proof that human ingenuity can easily destroy what it can never create. Any fool with a knife can in three minutes make the most beautiful woman forever hideous, and one of our "mental health experts," even without using a knife, can as quickly and permanently destroy the finest intellect. And it appears that less drastic interventions, through education and other control of environment, may temporarily or even permanently pervert and deform, but are powerless to create capacities that an individual did not inherit from near or more remote ancestors. The facts are beyond question, although the Secret Police in Soviet Russia and "liberal" spitting-squads in the United States have largely succeeded in keeping these facts from the general public in the areas they control. But no amount of terrorism can alter the laws of nature. For a readable exposition of genetics, see Garrett Hardin's Nature and Man's Fate (New York, Rinehart, 1959), which is subject only to the reservation that the laws of genetics, like the laws of chemistry, are verified by observation every day, whereas the doctrine of biological evolution is necessarily an hypothesis that cannot be verified by experiment.
The Race Factor It is also beyond question that the races of mankind differ greatly in physical appearance, in susceptibility to specific diseases, and in average intellectual capacity. There are indications that they differ also in nervous organization, and possibly, in moral instincts. It would be a miracle if that were not so, for, as is well known, the three primary races were distinct and separate at the time that intelligent men first appeared on this planet, and have so remained ever since. The differences are so pronounced and stable that the proponents of biological evolution are finding it more and more necessary to postulate that the differences go back to species that preceded the appearance of the homo sapiens. (See the new and revised edition of Dr. Carleton S. Coon's The Story of Man, New York, Knopf, 1962). That such differences exist is doubtless deplorable. It is certainly deplorable that all men must die, and there are persons who think it deplorable that there are differences, both anatomical and spiritual, between men and women. However, no amount of concerted lying by "liberals," and no amount of decreeing by the Warren [Supreme Court] Gang, will in the least change the laws of nature. Now there is a great deal that we do not know about genetics, both individual and racial, and these uncertainties permit widely differing estimates of the relative importance of biologically determined factors and cultural concepts in the development of a civilization. Our only point here is that it is highly improbable that biological factors have no influence at all on the origin and course of civilizations. And to the extent that they do have an influence, Spengler's theory is defective and probably misleading.
Profound Insights One could add a few minor points to the three objections stated above, but these will suffice to show that the Spenglerian historionomy cannot be accepted as a certainty. It is, however, a great philosophical formulation that poses questions of the utmost importance and deepens our perception of historical causality. No student of history needed Spengler to tell him that a decline of religious faith necessarily weakens the moral bonds that make civilized society possible. But Spengler's showing that such a decline seems to have occurred at a definite point in the development of a number of fundamentally different civilizations with, of course, radically different religions provides us with data that we must take into account when we try to ascertain the true causes of the decline. And his further observation that the decline was eventually followed by a sweeping revival of religious belief is equally significant. However wrong he may have been about some things, Spengler has given us profound insights into the nature of our own culture. But for him, we might have gone on believing that our great technology was merely a matter of economicsââ¬âof trying to make more things more cheaply. But he has shown us, I think, that our technology has a deeper significanceââ¬âthat for us, the men of Western civilization, it answers a certain spiritual need inherent in us, and that we derive from its triumphs as satisfaction analogous to that which is derived from great music or great art. And Spengler, above all, has forced us to inquire into the nature of civilization and to ask ourselves by what meansââ¬âif anyââ¬âwe can repair and preserve the long and narrow dikes that alone protect us from the vast and turbulent ocean of eternal barbarism. For that, we must always honor him.
2003-05-13 08:33 | User Profile
Originally posted by triskelion@May 13 2003, 00:36 **This topic has come up here and as I like this piece quite a bit I thought it should be posted.
However wrong he may have been about some things, Spengler has given us profound insights into the nature of our own culture. But for him, we might have gone on believing that our great technology was merely a matter of economicsââ¬âof trying to make more things more cheaply. But he has shown us, I think, that our technology has a deeper significanceââ¬âthat for us, the men of Western civilization, it answers a certain spiritual need inherent in us, and that we derive from its triumphs as satisfaction analogous to that which is derived from great music or great art.
And Spengler, above all, has forced us to inquire into the nature of civilization and to ask ourselves by what meansââ¬âif anyââ¬âwe can repair and preserve the long and narrow dikes that alone protect us from the vast and turbulent ocean of eternal barbarism. For that, we must always honor him.**
We had an interesting discussion about Spengler on this thread where we discussed The Hour of Decision and the Nazi's criticism's of him. > Oswald Spengler was similarly attacked as a magian of decline, charlatan, Nietzsche plagiarizer, sadist, and decadent. Hitler Youth movement leader Johann Leer for instance in his attack on Spengler stressed that > Spengler and the Nazi's had in common only the negative opposition to the Weimar regime. Otherwise Spengler was attacked for his "pseudo-Marxist" determinism, his aristocratic bearing, and his denial of race. Von Leers summed up Spengers The Hour of Decision as "the first comprehensive attack against the National Socialist Weltenschaung and pointed it out as "the master plan of counter-revolution." [url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=12&t=884&hl=spengler,and,nazi&st=80]Why I'm Here (page 5)[/url]
Racialist Francis phobes I'm sure might find the discussion I had with Caitrina on the next page interesting to, where Caitrina argues Francis is a great NS lover, and I basically agree with her, in fact criticizing Francis for going a little overboard here. Amazing how one's positions can subtly shift over time. Anyway, guess I'll never get my NA card -I'm surprised Caitina got hers ;)
2003-05-13 13:20 | User Profile
Good article. But then I have never read one by Revilo Oliver that wasn't.
2003-05-25 14:00 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@May 13 2003, 15:40 **One criticism of Spengler made by Oliver and others is over his separation of Classical ("Apollonian") culture from Medieval/Modern Western ("Faustian") culture. Spengler did not consider Graeco-Roman culture to be an earlier incarnation of our own, but rather an entirely different development with its own worldview (one which emphasizes the finite and corporeal over the infinite and transcendent, contra Medieval mysticism and modern Western science and art).
The two main grounds for this objection seem to be A) That the ancient Greeks and Romans belong to the same race as modern white Europeans and B ) that modern science, philosophy, and law owes a great deal to the Greeks and Romans.
With regards to A), I would argue that this thinking is the outcome of a strictly racialist myopia. The ancient Persians and Aryan Indians were broadly speaking, members of the same "race" as white Europeans, but none would go so far as to say that Persia or India is part of the same civilization. As to whether the ancient Greeks and Romans are the same peoples as modern Italians and Greeks, that in itself is debatable, northern Italy in particular has received a strong influx of Germans, among other things, leaving a comparison between ancient Rome and modern Italy in the same position as a comparison between modern (largely Arab but also Coptic) Egypt with its ancient counterpart.
Concerning B ), the case is even weaker, in that Westerners have also adopted some of the cultural artifacts of decidedly non-Western peoples: namely, the Bible of the Semites. Of course, the interpretation of Biblical teachings passed through a uniquely western filter, thus making the assimilated form of Christianity something few in Palestine would recognize. I would also venture to say that much of the impact of "Roman law" and the teachings of the ancient Greeks that remain viable today are such that none of their creators would recognize.** Excellent points. Nice to find a site where people are discussing Spengler with familiarity. Mostly I just run into people either unfamiliar with Spengler, or who have wildly misinformed ideas about his writing. Some random thoughts...
In the case of racial identity, although Spengler was wrong in almost entirely dismissing the realities of the biological influence of racial stocks on the character of a people, he was quite correct to point out the historical (that is, temporary and transitional) nature of "race" as not merely a biological category, but "race" as a kind of historically determined personality type. So for instance, even had there been no importations of slaves or invasions of barbarians, the "race" of classical Rome would be just as dead today, even if all her lineal descendants were alive today, because there is no way to perpetuate a race whose historical course has played out, even if the physical stock remains. Changes in culture change the race just as surely as changes in the biological stock of the race must do.
That's a concept that racialists can grasp, if they can get over the 19th century obsession with "race" as a mere matter of skull measurements and pigmentation. That is to say, "race" as a collection of physical characteristics without any reference to cultural, spiritual, mental, behavioral, or psychological characteristics.
What's harder to grasp or accept, for those, like Revilo P. Oliver, who were weaned on the notion that our humanist, liberal, and scientific culture springs from Greece and Rome, is that the Classical civilization was as alien to our Western identity as was the Levantine civilization from which we got our religion. The Renaissance wasn't a sudden discovery of classical knowledge (which knowledge in fact Westerners had already known about for centuries); it was rather a kind of secural backlash to the Levantine influence over Western culture, using Classical sources as an antidote to Levantine (Christian) sources, or more generally, it was a literay fad.
The resulted in a denigration of the middle ages (thus obscuring the true origins of Western Civilization by pretending that we were a "revival" or "continuation" of the Classical Civilization) which led eventually to the moralizing historians and "philosophes" of the 18th century, and finally to the liberalism of the 19th century, all of which confused "the West" with the world, and which tended to deny or obscure the reality of a Western Civlization distinct from that of the rest of the world. The end result is the situation we have now, where few even abmit or are aware that there is any reality to "the West", and who insist that there is only "one world" whose history leads from ancient, to Classical, to Renaissance, and finally to us moderns, without explaining the rather large gaps between these "eras", or the strange absence of non-"Westerners" in a scheme which is supposed to describe "world" history. By seeing ourselves as the world, we lose sight of ourselves.
I digress.
Has anyone here read Lawrence R. Brown's "The Might of the West"? It's an excellent followup to Spengler; RPO has reviewed it. As I noted about Spengler, RPO, in reviewing Brown, also gets rather caught up in his reluctance to let go of the "West is derived from Greece" myth.
2003-05-28 07:00 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@May 25 2003, 12:55 > That's a concept that racialists can grasp, if they can get over the 19th century obsession with "race" as a mere matter of skull measurements and pigmentation. That is to say, "race" as a collection of physical characteristics without any reference to cultural, spiritual, mental, behavioral, or psychological characteristics.
What's harder to grasp or accept, for those, like Revilo P. Oliver, who were weaned on the notion that our humanist, liberal, and scientific culture springs from Greece and Rome, is that the Classical civilization was as alien to our Western identity as was the Levantine civilization from which we got our religion. **
I believe that the reason Oliver doesn't wish to acknowledge the distinction between Classical and "Faustian" Western culture is his fundamentalist attitude on race as a strictly biological concept.
Since Oliver was an accomplished Classicist and Linguist, he was obviously aware that only certain aspects of Graeco-Roman culture survived and influenced modern Western culture (and these passed through a filter almost as distinct from the Classical mindset as the Medieval Church was from its Hebraic founders), so in all likelihood the reason he continued to draw a line from Greece to modernity was on the grounds that the Greeks and Romans were Aryan (actually, just how Indo-European the Greeks are and were is debatable) while the Semites who introduced Christianity to the West were not. That of course is in itself a rather weak argument, after all the ancient Persians were also "Aryan" (if by "Aryan" we simply mean Indo-European), and nobody would argue that there is a continuity between the civilization of Xerxes and the modern West just because we adopted their number system and belong to the same race.
It strikes me that Francis Parker Yockey has done the best job of synthesizing the reality of biological race while acknowledging that the politically relevant "race" has as large a cultural and historical component as a biological one. In that regard he avoids the narrow racialist pitfalls of Oliver while being somewhat more consistent with our modern understanding of race as a biological concept than was Spengler (who actually was skeptical of Darwinism thanks to his Goethean "morphological idealism" and the influence of Nietzsche).**
Sorry not to respond sooner.
Yockey is fine, but he's a bit too literalist in his interpretation of Spengler, and a bit too purely political. One can use Spengler's insights to make generalized predictions with some confidence, but one can't speak precisely in terms of what decade a future event is going to happen, based on Spengler's comparative morphology of civilizations!
I much prefer Lawrence R. Brown's "The Might of the West" to Yockey. If you have not read it yet, get a copy and read it. It is a kind of "Spengler for Anglo-American empiricists": I understood Spengler a lot better after having read Brown. Brown accepts Spengler's thesis, but recapitulates and expands upon it in a matter more easily assimilated by those put off by Spengler's poetic mysticism and organicism. Brown doesn't expect his readers to have to "poetically interpret" his writing, and he is therefore much more straightforward, although in doing so he appears to make some minor errors, a fact that Revilo P. Oliver's review of Brown seizes on.
Getting back to the racial component of civilizations; our identification with Hellas and Rome is a very seductive identification. But we would have found the actual Classical civilization to be very alien indeed; we admire the green bronze and weathered white marble busts, and forget they were originally painted rather gaudily. We admire the polis and the various virtues we think we discern (depending on our political biases) in Athens, Sparta, Rome, etc., but ignore the vast differences in inner values between their polis (city-state) and our nation-states. We think we understand and admire their philosophy and culture, but ignore what we don't wish to see: brutality, slavery (which not even Southern negro slavery could approach in pervasiveness), public acceptance of homosexuality and pederasty, etc.
Western views of the Classical culture as the "source of Western culture" are pure romanticism. As such, and only as such, is the Classical culture important in the West: how we view the Classical culture says more about the West than it does about the Greeks and Romans. In reality their culture was long dead before the West was even born. The only foreign culture that was relevant to the West when it was young was that of the Levant: Byzantine Greek and Arab Moslem. It was through this Levantine culture that what little the West knew about the Classical culture was passed on. There is no chain of continuity, no point of direct contact, between the Western and the Classical cultures.
Racially, there is no real difference in their situations between the Aryans in Greece and the Aryans in Persia: both were local racial/class elites ruling over a majority, non-Aryan population. We imagine the future West in peril from the East, when the Greeks turned back the Persians at Salamis; we imagine that it was us fighting against the East. Not so. It was one group of Aryans, defending its homeland against an invading group of (very distantly related) fellow Aryans, who "happened" to have taken over and captured the old Assyrian empire and who were using it to vastly increase their military power. It was in fact the same situation, with roles reversed, that was to play out when Alexander invaded Persia. The image of Aryan West versus non-Aryan East, with the future West in peril, is seductive, but ultimately false.
Which gets us back to Spengler and race. Spengler has some weird ideas about race; he fell for the Boasian fraud about "changing skull shapes" in American immigrants, for instance. But otherwise his insights are not incompatible to a racialist viewpoint. The problem with Revilo P. Oliver is that he is usually writing polemically, and is often grossly simplifying. Just as everthing bad was due to a Communist Conspiracy, in his early days writing for the John Birch Society, so too writing as a racial nationalist, RPO writes as though every imaginable aspect of culture and behavior could be tied down to a specific gene.
Sometimes though RPO appears to imply that the interplay of gene and "meme" (not a term he used, AFAIK, but a useful concept) in a culture might be a more sophisticated way of understanding reality than a purely genetic reductionism. Or maybe I am being charitable. In any case, I noticed some evolution in his writings about religion and Zoroastrianism. Initially he appears to want to tie every move away from a pristine Aryan worldview as a result of the Jews, so he wants to see a Jewish, or at least a semitic, origin to Zoroastrianism. Later he is not so sure. Although I agree with RPO that the ethical dualism introduced by Zoroaster has been a disaster, I don't find anything particularly Jewish or semitic about it. It smacks all too much of typical Aryan misplaced altruism and universalism, of dogooderism. It's precisely the kind of idiotic belief we would find all too appealing.
The Jews were never very original, but they knew how to adapt Zoroastrian ideas in a way that subverted its universal altruism and diverted its ethical dualism to serve Jewish ethnocentric purposes. Supposedly (and I may be wrong on this), the Jewish Pharisees derived their name from Farsi (Persian), indicately just how closely the "new religion" of monotheistic Judaism was derived from Persia, and not ancient (polytheistic) Israel.
So, we have a partial Aryan civilization in Greece/Rome, a partial Aryan civilization in Pesia/the Levant, a partial Aryan civilization in India. We also have Aryan participation in, or involvement in, China, Babylon, and Egypt, to varying degrees. Only the West has been almost purely Aryan racially as well as culturally. The "non-Aryan" whites of Europe are close enough to the Aryan whites in terms of race and culture as to make distinctions difficult to draw. The West has been the one, and possibly only, chance for us to get it right. Looking back and romantizing our involvement in past cultures doesn't help us much in understanding our present plight. If we can better understand our own past, we have a better chance to secure our future.