Cultural critic John David Ebert visited Lafayette on Sept. 10, 2020 to deliver a talk entitled, "Oswald Spengler and the Cycles of History." A Q&A session follows his presentation.
@@josephmelton4721 You don't understand the perspective. There are three types of people in the world: the people who won the culture war decades ago and are still fighting it, the doofuses who lost the culture war decades ago and are still fighting it, and the people who know this civilization has already reached its end and we're just watiing for the shooting to start. There is no point arguing with people anymore. Just make your point and walk away, the precious few who are capable of understanding will get it instantly without the drama of 'arguments.'
@@wroughtiron7258 you sound like you don’t have kids and you think civilizations are easy to read maps for kids and you’re dead wrong. You think you’re some how enlightened because you listened to some guy who read Spangler and you’re laughing at all the people arguing because you know the cutlture is already dead? You sound like an unemployed kid with too much time on your hands. Human will determination decides civilizations. Not loners like Spengler. The future isn’t set. You’re what we call a indeterminate pessimist. You think it’s getting worse but you don’t exactly know why. You think it’s going to get worse so you have no energy to do anything. You’re CHOOSING that.
@@josephmelton4721 maybe if you had more time on your hands you'd be able to research and see where we are at, you're a free range tax slave as it is, you think it's going to get better for you or any of us? you really have no clue bro, not agreeing with that guy but you're dead wrong yourself
It’s great to get new material from John when you’ve been watching the older videos for years. Don’t get me wrong I will always cycle through the older material but prescient developments give rise to questions I would love to hear John answer e.g I always wanted to ask John about the West European American organisms Caesar era and how it relates to national populism and trump etc. You guys provide such answers and I’m grateful for that not to mention the great deal of thought and intelligence you bring in this video and the sit down interview with John.
Fantastic. Very well organised lecture, with a lot of time for questions. Half the importance of the lecture is on Q &A part. Very good filming and editing of the event, too. Thank you for posting this.
@@swordoflight56 going through his blood meridian series, and how while he’d expand about judge Holden and his encyclopedic-sanguinary-quests, whilst lecturing to us himself (JDE) about geographical histories of river states and meso-American myths, with I the student, and kid, listening to this hypnotic and well-delivered riff of an account by this bald, giant man, was not lost on me. It would not surprise me one bit if this lecture could be found in the Texas State McCarthy archives
Compared to the nutless f-bomb like that like keeps asking boot like the proletariat like hero hopes like others will see him like one day, like so he can like finally get like some pussy. 'It's not fair, I want to be like Spartacus'
Completion of Western mathematics seems to be a stark utility triumphing over meaning. The neural network. It is like a birth of a new religion in itself - the aspiration to emulate life in AI and demonstrate materialism by experimentation.
Fascinating talk. Shocking however to hear you describe Buddha as a nihilist. As you probably know, nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, that life is meaningless. But Buddhism does indeed have values and principles...Nirvana, wisdom, and compassion - to name a few.
Great talk. Thanks very much. I was hoping someone would ask him his views on how modern China fits in the Spenglerian scheme. John mentioned that the Sinic civilisation had its own modern phase, peaked around 1500 AD and, along with India, is now in a state of slumber. Is contemporary China now a copy/outgrowth of the West's Faustian civilisation (think of its modern cities and skyscrapers, technological drive, as well as its nascent space programme)?
@18107863 I'm no expert on Chinese history, but Spengler actually said that the Qin represented the begininning of China's Imperial age and that Qin Shi Huang was China's Caesar. So the summer of Chinese Culture was actually the whole Spring and Autumn period, with Confucius appearing at the end of it as the bearer of the Culture's most ripe philosophy (essentially the Chinese Kant or Aristotle). Thus, the Warring States period is the Civilisation phase, its wars being analogous to the Punic Wars and the World Wars. And then you have Qin and everything after. I just did a bit of research and I found something interesting which adds weight to the Qin is Caesar idea. Spengler says every Culture from birth to old age/Imperialism has a lifetime of 1000 years. He also said every Culture's first expression is death-related in some way (Greek geometric funerary urns, Egyptian tomb-temples, Early Christian sarcophagi, Gothic cathedrals in which the death and resurrection of Christ is re-enacted). Well, if you look 1000 years back from Qin Shi Huang you get the first inscribed oracle bones (c.1250 BC): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone which were found in the Ruins of Yin, the last capital city of the Shang: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinxu These were used for divination which often focused on ancestors, and they were ritually buried alongside the dead. Finally, you said the Chinese prime symbol is stability. I don't believe this is something Spengler has exactly set forth. I have also seen an idea, maybe from Toynbee, that it is the "Winding Path of Nature", which is an image gleaned from the two great rivers. I recently read a part of Prussianism and Socialism in which Spengler claims the words "Tao" and "Li" are strong indicators of the fundamental essence of Chinese culture. These are the natural order and flow of the Universe. It seems to me that the Chinese prime symbol must be something nature-related (from what I can tell your painting often depicts nature and your literature is full of nature analogies) that gives rise to a preoccupation with stability.
“Recent mapping of a number of raised beach ridges on the north coast of Greenland suggests that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced some 6000-7000 years ago. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free.” -Science News, 2008, Norway
Seems to be a fractal nature to history. E.g. astrology is a springtime activity for Spengler, then Ebert mentions astrology was born in Sumer at the dawn of civilizations.
Great stuff. I've been playing the Spengler-future game for about 25 years now. I thought 911 Saddam and Osama were parallels to the Jugurthine war (112-106 BC or so), which kicked off the Caesarism phase with Marius and Sulla. However, that model hasn't played out -- yet. The bigger parallel could be with the civil wars that followed. They were fought between Romans, the prize was Rome, but the actual wars happened far from Rome. Cheers from England!
You're absolutely correct, but Anglo culture allowed itself to be overtaken. Anglos have been heavily influenced by Scots, who have a strong libertarian ethic.
@@bigboomer8739 Dude, I don't even remember writing this comment. Idk why tf I would blame the Scots when we all know Finklesteins don't come from the Highlands.
@43:00 Feuerbach is properly a vitalist, along with Nietzsche, Klages, etc. not an empty shallow vision with Spencer et. al. read Paul Bishop's work. The Indian case is complicated by tantric Saiva philosophy (Pratyabhijna darsana: Abhinavagupta, Ksemaraja, Utpaladeva) and tantric Indian Buddhism (spread to Tibet), to say nothing of cultural fusion (chan/zen, Islam in India, etc.). Would like to see Spengler's model compared against that of Steve Farmer ("Syncretism in the West," "Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History"). Perhaps Spengler himself is replaying the old 4/5 degenerating world ages mytheme of (some strains of) Laurasian mythology? Witzel ("Origins of the World's Mythologies") believes this to be a later version of the original mytheme of (ascending) world-ages, found in Mesoamerican myth. Good talk.
Trump is not Ceasar. Elon Musk is Ceasar. Homology is not analogy. An expression of ceasarism doesn't need to be similar to Ceasar, but it does need to reflect the civilization's shift from old sources of meaning towards personal charisma.
Elon Musk is definitely not Caesar.... he's not the all-powerful genius you and the media make him out to be. Bill Gates is more like a caesar as he's involved in global politics, but still no caesar by far! JFK could have been a new caesar but they rightfully assassinated him
1:20:30 Minor nitpick, the Romans did cross the Rhine several times after Teutoberg, including during several successful retaliatory campaigns, and again successfully under Marcus Aurelius in the Marcomanni Wars. The Romans did stop trying to consolidate Magna Germania into its empire, but that's more of a cost-benefit thing, the lands of Germany were very poor and would have cost more to maintain than they would have brought back in revenue
From what I know of history, I think scholars should look more into the effect that the security of the individual has on these stages of civilization. I find that, regardless of level of technological advancement, at whatever level the civilization is in, the "mood" of the days is strongly determined by the security felt by the average member of that civilization. If everyone feels pretty safe, because crime is at all-time lows within the civilization and wars are only on the periphery, nihilism sets in, because... well.... "where's the fun in that?" Basically... without the drama of violence and aggression and retaliation, as the state develops a degree of organization that affords it immunity to internal threats, and security from external threats, this sets the stage for a sudden flip as citizens start viewing the state itself as something to be plundered, and fellow citizens as targets for them to use the state to abuse and victimize for personal gain (caesarism, imperialism, etc).
Ironically, by calling oneself a cultural critic, you are taking up an acting role in the great play Spengler illustrated. When a society turns to the stage of endlessly critiquing itself and steamrolling it’s own pillars and deconstructing it’s own culture, so begins the endless decline to inevitable destruction. It’s literally in the book he’s talking about.
The wests individual haunts you. Ebert is an overweight brilliant autodidact. He's just being... Now exhale yourself and be, where you are.. ...and in temporal relationship to your decaying society as well BVD and Ebert are a blast to listen to!
you are confusing the prescriptive with the descriptive. death of the culture is inevitable according to this theory. it's a description not a prescription. having cultural critics who realize that the founding myth of the culture is untenable is part of the natural process. If you are upset at the participants of the fourth stage, then you are missing the whole point of the work.
1:31:08 Astrology. One thing about astrology is that as far as I know, it has no history of being used to manipulate or deceive people or of being used to dominate others and virtually always seems to search for positive or aspirational aspects and objectives in life. Also it has no impact on those who do not engage with it. This cannot be said of most religions throughout the ages.
It's not a religion, and it definitely has a negative impact on people because it leads them to make irrational choices based on pseudoscience. The rest if the talk was good, but him just asserting astrology as correct with 0 evidence was rather annoying.
When I was reading Spengler in the eighties, you couldn't quote him, because people just dismissed him as a Nazi philosopher/historian. Of course, I didn't agree, but no one else would read his work.
knowing of many facts, does not equate to insight, or wisdom. This does not depict Spengler, as he depicts himself by his own words. I do not glean much wisdom by this 'academic' and his many words.
What would be insightful about depicting someone with the words they use to depict themselves? Isn't that just quoting? I don't get your point as you've expressed it.
How do you know what you know? How are synthetic apriorí statements possible? That they are is not the question. So then is there a better world view and if so doesn’t that falsify Spengler‘s idea of organic civilization? Not all civilizations are organic if one isn’t. And if there was one exception then that would defeat the argument. How do we know until all the cards are played out. Thus we are justified in believing we don’t know everything.
Interesting talk but pretty dismissive and bit patronising to your fellas question telling him he's just wrong and he doesn't care what he thinks. It's quite a sweeping statement to state atheism leads to nihilism to violence so new religious sentiment is needed. This rejection of rationalism leading to growth of religious expression surely carries with it also acts of and threats of violence. Immediate example is various fundamentalist Islamic groups and jihadism. Looking to the west specifically there has been a massive growth in conservatism which generally draws in the more religiously fervent, expressing itself particularly through populism which at part of its core involves a rejection of truth, divide and conquer, resentment and the idea they are always under attack. Far right groups holding a combination of these conservative, Christian, nationalist views carry a very real threat of violence. Christian evangelicalism the path its evolving down overlaps and also carries violence wether it be through they re growing belief the rapture and end times is imminent or they re more hardcore conservatism regarding society. As a recent phenomena Qanon could also placed in here with the rejection of rationality to believe in an absolute fantasy that also carries with it a threat of violence. I could see how it could be argued that this has happened as a result of nihilism and people seeking to find meaning in their lives through some form of faith but personally I would find that disingenuous. Perhaps it could even be the case that this new rise of religious/conservative ideas lead to fear that leads to violence. History is full of religious violence. I might be remembering this section wrong but from reading Spengler I took his ideas for the Winter that it would be a rise for forms of radicalism relative to the current civilisation and he termed the instigators Youths? I didn't take it to mean specifically always a rejection of rationalism for religious ideas but that it could take many forms. Wherever anyone stands on their views/support of these groups like the rise of populism , far right militia groups, jihadism, BLM, antifa etc I'm not here to comment on that but they could all be viewed as symptoms of this radicalism of which not all are exclusively coming from nihilism or religion for that matter.
Anti-rationalism is a symptom of the end of rationalist era and the beginning of second religiousness. We're at the transition phase for sure. The leftists zaelotism, right populism, religious growth, jihadism, indigenism, feminism, BLM, etc. are just expressions of that, some of them lies into the _arguments_ of iluminist humanitarian morality, some of them deny them. Even there are groups mixed: I see muslim-converted feminist, feminists seeking for animist cults (african, native american), hinduism, buddism; and some sort of "traditionalists" that are completely empty of methaphysical trascendent component and belives in darwinism. It's just a phase of transition, in the future all of them will be deeply religious, and by the way West is not tolerant with the non-believers, simply the winner will chase the loser; authentic witch-hunt. I see clearly, who will be the winner. Do you?
Okay your dead wrong on it only being northern europe. Thats only true if you take a liberal lense. When you dispense of liberalism, Italy and Spain have both made huge contributions.
This is the most surface level lecture I’ve ever seen. Essentially just a recap of what Spengler says without any of the nuance that’s available in his hundreds of pages on the topic
