CITIES AND PEOPLES (C) PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 159-186

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.159

Now at last it is possible to approach if with extreme precaution the conception "people," and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear! their theoretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, raceparts, and speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have established a racial connexion. If a few "roots" correspond, the curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this "thinking in terms of peoples."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.159-160

But "people" is a linkage of which one is conscious. In ordinary usage, one designates as one's "people" and with feeling that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one. And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. [...] A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.160-161

How many peoples may have originated in a chief's following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achaeans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there. We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity. But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli; lastly, an unlimited number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.161

How often may a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. [...] It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the noti on of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen "Prussians," and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris !

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.162-163

Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home. [...] It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our outlook upon the nature of the peoples. [...] The motive, too, that is everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of the century that invented it material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their nests

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.163-164

Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less, but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population, which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming. Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so. But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else win new lands for old. Already there is the out-thrust into space. No tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men. Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatn ess. Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we have the only migration-form that counts in historic times warrior bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.164

we know that all migrant peoples and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and the "Sea-peoples" of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this sense were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the natives only in respect of their determination to be a Destiny and not to submit to one.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.165

For me, the "people" is 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. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. [...] This is the one and only connotation of the word "people." Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the "we." The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.165

Of course, it is often quite 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 was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science never for folkconsciousness and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for this ideal of blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the
march of historical Being.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.169

With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a morphology of peoples. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoological, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between peoples before, within, and after a Culture. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are more distinct in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, beco ming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. [...] And that which follows a Culture we may call from its best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times fellah-peoples.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.169-170
I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. [...] In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is whether our science is aware of it or not a group of great peoples of identical style, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. [...] Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call Nations, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of "we" that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; underlying the nation there is an Idea. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.171

Further, nations are the true city-building peoples. In the strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world-consciousness, and in the wor ld-cities they dissolve. Every town-formation that has character has also national character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so characteristically colours the nation's public life that its slightest manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate we can scarcely imagine the force, the self-sufficingness, and the loneliness. If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other, and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.172

Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be uniformly and throughout a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. Every nation is represented in history by a minority. At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility, which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse receives its destined Style. [...] With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national consciousness that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that in the name of the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.174

A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandaeans or the Christians.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.178-179

In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved. [...] The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that, considering the period and its means of communication, can only be called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland as extent, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely, if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point-focus.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.179

Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance in time. Before the fatherlandidea (which is a consequence of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence - the dynastic idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling "house."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.184-185

At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, "everlasting" and historyless, was a people before the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. [...] But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wideawake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any "reasonable" connotation for the nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of history as the expression of Destiny.[...] The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers alike in the China of the "Contending States," in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world to-day are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen. [...] However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact ("my country, right or wrong!"); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be) in a word, the will-to-power has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believ e that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.185-186

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warriorgroups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannae seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror's hands to another's, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and for ever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed world-peace never diminishes that alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes. "Lever doodt al s Sklav (better dead than slave)" is an old Frisian peasantsaying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.