The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by
intertribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.[38])
the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before
that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed
radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something
having an inward unity common to all its forms of expression and
directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if
not indeed all over the earth’s surface, at any rate in man’s essence
a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive
Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever
dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something
different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to
primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and
which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of
every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely
new.
In all primitive existence the “it,” the Cosmic, is at work with such
immediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth,
custom, technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very
instant. For us, there are no ascertainable rules for the duration,
tempo, and course of development of these utterances. We observe, say,
an ornamental form-language--not to be called a style[39]--ruling
over the population of a wide area, spreading, changing, and at last
dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite different fields of
extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weapons, tribal
organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way
of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of
its own, completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some
prehistoric stratum we have identified an accurately known type of
pottery, we cannot safely argue from it to the customs and religion
of the population to which it belonged. And if by chance the same
area does hold for a particular form of marriage and, say, a certain
type of tattooing, this never signifies a common basic idea such as
is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder and that of
perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light between
ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god
and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means
always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of
the primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have
said before, is essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither
an organism nor a sum of organisms.
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