CULTURE SHOCK:Even when western domination was at its height, books predicting the collapse of western civilisation were bestsellers: it's a cultural thing
IN THE FACE of their terrible consequences in the real world, it is easy to forget that the ideas of the far right, the kind of mish-mash that ends up in the manifestos of mass murderers like Anders Breivik, are not primarily political. They are cultural. They may present themselves as responses to actual situations – immigration, so-called “Islamification” – but they are rooted in a long-established cultural tradition, that of seeing decline, decadence and degeneration wherever you look.
The supposed source of these threats is irrelevant: like other cultural viruses, this one attaches itself to any convenient carrier.
For conservatives, there is but one destination (hell) and one mode of transport (the handcart). Take almost any point in time, and you’ll find that things aren’t what they used to be.
An anonymous author in the Egypt of 2000 BC complains: "There are no righteous men / The earth is surrendered to criminals." In The Iliad, Ajax picks up a stone with one hand and the narrator throws in remarks to the effect that young people nowadays wouldn't be able to do it. As Arthur Herman puts it in The Idea of Decline in Western History, "Virtually every culture past or present has believed that men and women are not up to the standards of their parents and forebears." Everything is always going down the toilet. One era looks back on another as a golden age, but when that era was the present, it was looking back to another golden age, from which it, too, had fallen off. While the left is programmed to believe in the myth of progress, the right is hooked on the myth of decline.
It is important to remember that this notion of decline exists regardless of actual circumstances. The West, in particular, is always in decline, even when it isn’t. Even when western domination was at its height, books predicting the imminent collapse of western civilisation were bestsellers.
Houston Chamberlain's jeremiad, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,was a popular hit just as that century was ending. Chamberlain's inspiration was primarily cultural – he was the son-in-law of Richard Wagner, and a devoted Wagnerian. Among those taken with Chamberlain, at least for a while, was Bernard Shaw. More importantly, Chamberlain was avidly read by the proto-Nazi circle around Adolf Hitler, who later called him his "spiritual father". Two decades later came the daddy of all the paranoid pessimism that followed, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, completed in 1914 but not published until the closing stages of the first World War. Spengler suggested that the decline had begun around 1800, when the West began to expand outwards and lost touch with its pure roots in the soil and volk. It is worth stressing that the idea of the degeneration of the West was located not in the traumatic aftermath of the Great War, which would have made some sense, but in the 19th century, which is now seen as a period of extraordinary progress for western power.
Spengler's conviction that everything was falling apart was partly cultural: "Of great paintings or great music there can no longer be, for Western people, any question." But artists and philosophers, initially in the Germanic world but then far beyond it, lapped him up. Thomas Mann declared The Decline of the Westthe most important book of the era. Ludwig Wittgenstein was electrified by it. WB Yeats read it closely and it feeds into the historical and imaginative framework he elaborated in A Vision. F Scott Fitzgerald was fascinated by the book.
While right-wingers see themselves as responding to some immediate threat to their culture, the truth is that the threat is entirely immaterial. The form of the threat changes with cultural fashions. The source of the coming decline may be liberalism in general, identified by early 20th-century German thinkers as the virus that destroys nations and civilisations. It may be the development of cities, which Spengler saw as the key to the loss of contact with the soil from which renewal might spring.
It may, of course, be the Jews: anti-Semitism was for centuries the primary western expression of the ideology of decadence and decline. But the paranoia doesn’t need to be rooted in anything concrete at all. For much of the 20th century, the great cultural “threat” to the West was the “Yellow Peril”. The fact that there were tiny numbers of Chinese or Japanese immigrants did not prevent the emergence of the notion that the West was about to be swamped by the Asiatic or Mongolian hordes. One of the biggest purveyors of Yellow Peril paranoia was the Irishman Arthur Ward, writing as Sax Rohmer, who crystallised the fear in the figure of the evil genius Fu Manchu. Was Ward’s racism a response to the vast tide of Chinese immigration into early 20th-century Ireland?
So it is with today’s Islamophobia. Respectable conservatives may distance themselves from its most extreme and violent expressions, but they insist on seeing it as a real response to a real situation. They believe the West really is in danger of being swamped, its civilisation really in decline. (The irony, of course, is that the liberal values they know define as the western culture they wish to defend are the same ones their intellectual ancestors saw as the source of the alleged decline in the first place.) The problem is thus essentially the fault of the immigrants.
But the problem isn’t the fault of anything real. It lies with a cultural mentality of paranoid pessimism in which everything we hold dear is always under siege. The supposed besiegers can take any and every form, including that of pure invention. There is no point appeasing this paranoia. If Muslims disappeared tomorrow, it would focus on something else: the Brazilian threat, perhaps, or the Fijian peril. In this culture, there will always be some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.
