Europe, which dominated the globe with weapons, wealth and culture, seemed to be sinking into an abyss along with its ten million deaths. In reality, Spengler had not introduced a new subject. During the 19th century, romanticism fueled the pessimism of those who prophesied the end of Europe. Faced with the ruins of the past, which were beginning to be uncovered with the first major archaeological excavations, many diagnosed the decline of progress
From La Lettura
When we talk about the crisis of the West, we often mention Oswald Spengler, a high school teacher, who in 1918 had extraordinary success with “Der Untergang des Abendlandes”, i.e. “The Fall of the West”. Spengler believed that every civilization, like every living organism, had its childhood, youth, adulthood and old age, and he thought that the Western one had entered an irreversible decline. He was not the only one to diagnose the decline of his era. After the Great War, reflection on the fate of modernity accompanied the works of many intellectuals and artists. Until that moment the world had never experienced, in such a short period, the catastrophic experience of mass deaths.
Europe, which dominated the globe with weapons, wealth and culture, seemed to be sinking into an abyss along with its ten million deaths. In reality, Spengler had not introduced a new subject. During the 19th century, romanticism fueled the pessimism of those who prophesied the end of Europe. Faced with the ruins of the past, which were beginning to be uncovered with the first major archaeological excavations, many diagnosed the decline of progress. Like all great and extinct civilizations, the European one, having reached its apogee, would have started to decline.
As was clearly seen, especially starting from the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Western culture was struck by the conflicts of modernity and its ambiguity. He had abandoned the belief that history coincided with the expansion of freedom. He had destroyed the idea of ​​the perfection of people, fueled by the tendency to seek ever better living conditions. He had questioned faith in the future. The heirs of the Enlightenment believed in human emancipation, thinking that the path to a better future would be irreversible. The critics of modernity, significantly more numerous, pointed to the illusory nature of this hope from different angles. Starting with many Catholics who regarded the French Revolution as the diabolical product of a man eager to live without God, the list would become very long and include the great protagonists of Western culture: writers, sociologists, historians, philosophers, artists with different political orientations.
Some welcomed the end of a world they despised, others anxiously announced disaster. We remember an author who is certainly less known than Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, but also Robert Musil. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, wrote that modern civilization had expressed, with maddened optimism, the conviction that human nature was good, returning to faith in progress and to an ideology of comfort and profit. Before her, he was drawn with a melancholy soul only by the desire for knowledge. A young man named Nietzsche followed his teachings and considered him a master.
One hundred and fifty years later we say that the West is in crisis. After all, West means the land where the sun sets. This may be the reason why since the French Revolution, which represents the origin of that Western modernity, certainly from a political point of view, the last perception has not abandoned our reflections?
In reality, today, as then, there is no agreement among Westerners about the symptoms of decadence. Who and what is declining in our time? Liberal democracy, Europe, white males, the United States, the family, the value of learning as a path to knowledge rather than the immediate consumption of information?
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what we are nostalgic for. In an interview given by Jonathan Franzen for “La Stampa” of Turin and published on July 28, the famous American writer distances himself from this narrative. Franzen believes that the perception of the crisis comes mainly “from the paranoia that many Europeans have, that they do not see the achievements accumulated during years of study and ignorance, erased by something unexpected, coming from Africa, from the East, from all that part of the world that the West itself has tried to colonize not only culturally, but also physically”.
