. . . A malicious thought crossed my mind in 1999, though, as the Internet euphoria engulfed world markets: was it really possible for a medium whose premise was the rise of a homogeneous global youth culture to drive world economic growth?
Youth culture, I argued, was an oxymoron, for culture itself was a bridge across generations, a means of cheating mortality. The old and angry cultures of the world, fighting for room to breath against the onset of globalization, would not go quietly into the homogenizer. Many of them would fight to survive, but fight in vain, for the tide of modernity could not be rolled back.
As in the great extinction of the tribes in late antiquity, individuals might save themselves from the incurable necrosis of their own ethnicity through adoption into the eternal people, that is, Israel. The great German-Jewish theologian and student of the existential angst of dying nations, Franz Rosenzweig, had commanded undivided attention during the 1990s, and I had a pair of essays about him for the Jewish-Christian Relations website. Rosenzweig's theology, it occurred to me, had broader applications.
The end of the old ethnicities, I believed, would dominate the cultural and strategic agenda of the next several decades. Great countries were failing of their will to live, and it was easy to imagine a world in which Japanese, German, Italian and Russian would turn into dying languages only a century hence. Modernity taxed the Muslim world even more severely, although the results sometimes were less obvious.
The 300 or so essays that I have published in this space since 1999 all proceeded from the theme formulated by Rosenzweig: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie, and unadaptable Islam.
Before she was banned from posting to MATT.org's now defunct and disappeared messageboard, I enjoyed a wonderful exchange with an incredibly articulate Mexican illegal immigrant living in the Chicago area who sustained herself by teaching Spanish and English. Languages in which she was equally fluent.
She was, and remains, I suppose, what she claimed to be: a Zapatista who foresees the collapse of the American Empire. She would have no problem defending the likes of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales.
She, with her enchanting and incisively cutting wit, is probably enjoying our current difficulties and pointing out that as a debtor nation our debt holders, aka China, now have something significant to say about the course of our American future.
China is the piper playing the jig American politicians dance to, she might say.
Asia Time's Spengler is a treasure I wish had chosen to remain anonymous.
He reminds me of Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive.
He reminds me of Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Asia Time's Spengler is a treasure...
Yes he is. (WOW! I did not know he was on the forum.)
Thank you for the ping and post. I have much admired Spengler’s insightful writing. I wish him the best in his new publishing career. But I would also ask that he open himself to the possibility that the West might still pull up. History informs us, and repeats parts of itself, but never all of itself.