The few who had a higher perspective above the masses of the ignorant

We might now understand how prophets such as Jeremiah and a few of our own historians such as Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Rene Guénon, could warn that their societies were in the process of decay, when tradition was being forgotten.

These often ridiculed doom-sayers were the few who had a higher perspective above the masses of the ignorant and the smug. Hence the wide denigration among academia of Oswald Spengler by those who are too immersed in the present Zeitgeist to understand what is happening around them, while most of our esteemed modern historians such as Francis Fukuyama and Arnold Toynbee can only see the continuing “march of progress” towards a universal democratic millennium. The response of academia is epitomised by the dogmatic assertion of Robert Nisbet that,

“No one has ever seen a civilization die, and it is unimaginable, short of cosmic disaster or thermonuclear holocaust, that anyone ever will. Nor has anyone ever seen a civilization – or culture or institution – in literal process of decay or denegation, though there is a rich profusion of these words and their synonyms in Western thought from Hesiod to Spengler. Nor, finally, has anyone ever seen, as we see these things in plants and animals – growth and development in civilizations and societies and cultures… We see none of these in culture, death, degeneration, development, birth”.69

While Dr. Nisbet, typical of most modern academics, albeit lauded as a great “conservative” sociologist,70 can only see a jumble of unrelated facts, Spengler discerned a pattern. Dr. Nisbet assures us that this is not possible. One of those who saw what was going on about him, who was ridiculed and vilified for his warnings, retorted: “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not”.71

69 Robert A. Nisbet, 3.
70 Gilbert S. Sewall, “Robert Nisbet’s Conservativism”. Nisbet was a libertarian, not a conservative; an example of the careless use of such terms. He saw history in terms of the individual; hence his aversion to the organic, morphological approach to sociology and history.
71 Jeremiah, 5: 21.

Kerry Bolton
The Decline and Fall of Civilizations