Far more important, however, is the spread of new forms of thought. It is true that a philosopher like Aristotle, or a religious leader like Mohammed, is the offspring of a particular culture, and could not have appeared in any other land, or at any other period but his own. Nevertheless, the influence of such men far transcends cultural and racial boundaries. It is true that by becoming a Moslem the Negro or the Turk undergoes cultural transformation; a new cultural type arises which is neither that of Moslem Arabia nor that of the native pagan people. But the fact that such a process can occur at all is fatal to the Spenglerian theory of absolutely isolated and unrelated cultural cycles. It readmits the principle of causality and the opportunity for rational analysis which Spengler professes to banish for ever. And even if he denies that such an admixture is a true culture, and relegates the peoples in question to his category of Fellachenvolker—“Fellahin peoples”—can he exclude the factor of alien intellectual influences from the parent culture itself?
Thus, for example, in the dealing with Islam we must not only take account of the culture of the Arabs of Arabia, who created the original Islamic State. There is also the Byzantine-Syro-Egyptian culture which had a vital influence on Islam even before the days of the Abbasids; there is the culture of Khorasan and Trans-Oxiana, mainly Persian, but possibly containing a Bactrian Greek element, and certainly affected by Indian Buddhist influence; finally there are the non-cultured peoples—the Turks, who were for centuries in contact with Persian and Chinese civilization, the Berbers, who had previously been under the influence of the Roman-Hellenistic culture, and last of all the Negroes. All these cultures and peoples brought their contributions to the civilization of mediaeval Islam, so that under the surface uniformity of Arabic language and religion and institutions, an extraordinary process of fermentation and change was taking place.
Again take the apparently much simpler case of our Western European culture. Here we have several peoples, composed of different racial elements, all co-operating in the development of a common culture heritage. The life-cycles of these peoples do not necessarily synchronize, nor do they all come under the influence of the common culture-heritage in the same measure. Italy was in the direct line of the Graeco-Roman tradition which only lightly affected the civilization of the Baltic lands. Yet Herr Spengler takes the view that the whole of our civilization is essentially the work of one people—the Germans. Consequently he begins its life-cycle, not with the Barbarian Invasions, as the parallel of the ancient world would suggest, but in the centuries which produced the Crusades, the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal. This initial error falsifies his whole series of analogies between the ancient and modern cultures. He compares the Athenian democracy to the Bourbons instead of to Renaissance Italy, the age of Alexander to that of Napoleon instead of to the first European expansion in the sixteenth century, and the present age to that of the early Punic wars instead of to the Imperial epoch. Hence the depressing character of his forecast, since he would have us spend the next two centuries in that work of material organization which has actually occupied us for the last two hundred years.
In reality, since our civilization is the work of several peoples it embraces several parallel life-cycles. The most representative of these is no doubt that of the French, which stands mid-way between the early ripening of the Italians and the late maturity of the Germans. Indeed in many respects France has a similar importance to our culture to that which the Hellas possessed for the culture of antiquity. Nevertheless this is but an average standard, and it can only be applied with exactitude to the French portion of the Western European culture-area.
~Christopher Dawson: selected from Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations. (1922; 1929)
[Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880–1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history.]
