One of the many benefits of spending more time out in nature is that, similarly to being stuck on a long flight and suddenly finding yourself able to focus, you may find a clarity of thought where you were otherwise muddled. I recently had this experience while backpacking for a number of nights (for the first time in too long) in the Upper Peninsula and finding how, when every other choice is already made for you,1 decisions in your normal life become remarkable easy to make. Yes, I should just sit down and read that book, plan that trip, send that email — and you wonder why you ever hesitated in the first place.
The challenge is maintaining this once you have returned to your “normal” life, in which there is always a message or email or notification to which you have to reply, and things suddenly seem more jumbled than in the backcountry. You may find that while your creature comforts and access to information have returned, it can be as hard as ever to take advantage of them in a fog of distraction. It’s enough to make you want to move to cabin in the woods.
I had this in mind as I finally read this article in The Free Press about a hodgepodge gathering who describe themselves as “Optimistic Doomers” and their recent Wyoming retreat. You should read the article yourself, but the O.D.s (if I may) are an eclectic and perhaps-not-totally-cohesive group of people who are deeply skeptical about the direction of society, who expect a collapse of “the infrastructure of modernity,” who bring together well-trodden criticisms from religious traditionalists, environmentalists, and skeptics of liberalism as a political system. The optimism comes from refusing to wallow in the face of the inevitable and instead pulling together anyone else to sees decline over every horizon, and trying to figure out what to do next.
On a personal level, there are obvious attractions to living as an O.D. (the outdoors, live music). But thinking about what people were actually saying about their worldview, my main (not-unsympathetic) takeaway was that I had heard some of these themes before.
More pointedly: aren’t some of these points being pulled straight from what Spengler was saying a century ago?
Spengler in Short
Oswald Spengler (d. 1936) is difficult to condense into a short paragraph, but he is certainly best known for his world history, The Decline of the West, written 1918 (vol. 1)-1922 (vol. 2). It is a curious work, for while the title might make you think it is a cheap polemic , it is a far more subtle attempt (there are, after all, about 300 pages of art history alone in the first volume) to conceive of world history in terms of cultures and civilizations as opposed to “nations” or “eras.” The key idea is that the prime unit of historiographical inquiry is the Culture, the inner logic which drives the destiny of a particular people (however broad this “people” may be) and is the root cause behind the procession of historical events. To say that history is causative and orderly — that one event “caused” the next to happen, that the French Revolution “caused” the Napoleonic age — would be as absurd to Spengler as to say that summer causes autumn. There is a lower level of connections in the circumstances of events, perhaps, but at their root, they must be explained by the driving force of Culture.2
The pessimism inherent in the title derives from Spengler’s feeling that his own culture, that of Western Europe — driven by a “Faustian” spirit, striving ever towards infinity — was in a period in which the culture had largely exhausted its inner creativity. Rather than dynamic and growing Culture, the West had entered the period of Civilizational stasis marked by a stuck-ness in cultural forms, the megalopolitan world-city, and the coming of nihilism which, notably:
…is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full. (1:463)
There’s more to say here about both Spengler and his many critics, and the Decline itself is a difficult text to write about by virtue of its lack of systematization. There is not a coherent list of Culture A:Its Characteristics:Its Phases; Culture B:Its Characteristics:Its Phases, and some of the more compelling observations can trend towards the aphoristic. It can likewise be slow reading for those more familiar with other styles of world history, as the first volume of the Decline has the aforementioned ~300 pages (worth reading!) of a considering of art history as a means of determining key cultural signs and symbols.
But more relevant to the D.O.s is that Spengler also wrote a shorter, 1932 work on the interplay between his Western European Faustian civilization and technological society, Man and Technics. I would suggest that many of the core criticisms of technological society from the D.O.s are walking along a well-trodden path of modernity-skepticism — in some cases almost word-for-word.
A well-known Machine
Consider, for example, a weariness with “the Machine” (the capitalization appears in critiques both old and new), the driving force behind technological modernity which ever calls for more technological intrusion into natural processes or otherwise individualized decision making and, hence, more centralized surveillance power and control. Take as a starting point for the D.O.’s a summary of Paul Kingsnorth, the “prophet” (and “almost a philosopher king”[!]) of the group:
By [Kingsnorth’s] estimation, modernity by its very nature trends toward replacing nature with technology, replacing God with people. The [M]achine…is the ‘nexus of power, wealth, ideology, and technology that has emerged to make this happen.’ Basically, the infrastructure of modernity.
Kingsnorth is in both fine and well-established company in seeing a religious bent behind the desire for ever-increasing scientific control over the processes of nature, as this was a key fixation of Spengler in Man and Technics. Consider these passages from his discussion of the motivations of medieval scientific thinkers such as Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon:
[These scientists] imagined that their desire was to ‘know God,’ and yet it was the forces of inorganic nature — the invisible energy manifested in all that happens — that they strove to isolate, to seize, to turn to account.
God was no longer looked upon as the Lord who rules the world from His throne, but as an infinite force (already imagined as almost impersonal) that is omnipresent in the world. It was a singular form of divine worship, this experimental investigation of secret forces…(83-84)
I am reminded here of the epigraph carved in stone above the sciences building at Bowdoin — Nature’s Laws are God’s Thoughts. And yet, to complete the train of logic in these passages:
To build a world oneself, to be oneself God — that is the Faustian inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines to approximate as nearly as possible to the unattainable limit of perpetual motion. (85)
It is not a surprise that Kingsnorth might sound a bit like Spengler, given that he was already writing about him some years ago. But what is curious to me is not that someone in 2024 would be interested in Spengler (hence this post), but that the criticisms of modern technological society have been so enduring as to be almost identical for 100 years.
In case you think I am cherry-picking, look to the concerns over modernity which unite the otherwise-disparate groups among the D.O.’s:
They believe that we’re at ‘the end of industrial modernity’…or ‘the end of the end of history,’ or they think that liberalism is over, or that we’re living within ‘a collapsing global empire’ — a million different ways of saying that, in short, we’re screwed.
The “million different ways” would also suggest to me that this group might not actually internally cohere, but more on that in a minute. The feeling that modernity had run its course, that the spirit behind the dominant civilization had become fully-expressed and thus hopelessly stale, is one of the running themes of both Man and Technics and the Decline. In Man and Technics the every-increasing complexity of technological society brought with it “a spiritual barrenness…a chilling uniformity without height or depth,” in which the success of scientific development has become its own point of vulnerability:
The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered.
All things organic are dying in the grip of organization. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. (94)
This was likewise presaged in the Decline, in which highly-sophisticated developments in science and technology affect not only the physical world, but the soul of the one experiencing them:
Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds…Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident — hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice — or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem…(1:465)
This feeling of a corruption of nature that goes beyond actual pollution and environmental despoilation towards an inner discontent is a through-line running under the entire D.O. profile, as in the penultimate quote: “There’s something corrosive about modernity…that’s inimical to human flourishing.” For those sympathetic to this critique, the response one often hears of appealing to technological developments’ being able to improve human material conditions not only conveniently ignores negative externalities of technological society — it misses the point altogether.
And in this situation, a world at the brink, what sort of movement emerges?
A weariness is spreading, a sort of pacifism of the battle with nature. Men are returning to forms of life simpler and nearer to Nature…The great cities are becoming hateful to them, and they would fain get away from the pressure of soulless facts and the clear cold atmosphere of technical organization…
The flight of the born leader from the Machine is beginning. (97)
In other words, you find yourself at an intellectual retreat of optimistic doomers in Story, Wyoming.
Beyond resonating with the desire for an escape to nature, what is curious to me is that this passage from 1932 could just as easily be applied to various iconoclasts in 2024.3 The challenge for those who would take a more materialistic view of history, but may provide succor to the Spenglerites who see culture and civilization as the ultimate drivers of human discourse, is that there has been quite enormous technological progress since Man and Technics — and yet, the criticisms of modernity and technological society largely lay cleanly upon similar criticisms in the modern day United States.
Those of a more scientistic leaning would, of course, rise in unison and say that these criticisms come from Luddites, that there have always been opponents of progress in the name of tradition, that all aspects of human life (and who can bother with non-humans when you are in the light of discovery) have benefited from technological advancement, that, admittedly, the march of scientific and industrial development might have to result in the Earth warming by just a few manageable degrees (wait—), all the usual canards.
The important piece is not whether you side with the D.O.s, the whiggish-scientistic vision of progressive history, or somewhere in between — the point is that these contemporary arguments already feel like they are rehashing old debates, whether they are happening before or after the moon landing and personal computers. In other words, when read through a Spenglerian pessimism, the question would be less about reactions to particular technologies and more about a phase of civilization, in which the arguments and counter-arguments will feel repetitive precisely because they have continued to emerge from the same cultural impulses. One long modernity, with an equally long train of skeptics.
A few other thoughts
First, an observation about the “Optimistic Doomers” themselves: what I read from this, and what I think the author herself has let remain between the lines, is that this coalition is, in some sense, fundamentally incoherent. You have a set of groups who are aligned on the breadth-value — being dissatisfied with various trends in modernity, suspicious (at best) of technological society — but mostly irreconcilable on depth-values of what, exactly, is supposed to be the practicable alternative. This is not actually a criticism, for the record. Fundamentally incoherent coalitions can lead to all sorts of human movements, and there are plenty of historical examples of a moralist/reformist baseline bringing together people who have worldviews that otherwise simply do not cohere.
Ironically, the construction of this coalition itself — while something that your standard DC staffer or Atlantic writer would view with ironic detachment and a raised eyebrow at best, and wholesale rejection at worst — largely aligns with classically liberal values. There is a metastructure of consensus (a set of core values on which most can agree, rejection of outright hatefulness, skepticism towards concentrated power) which allows for a wildly disparate coalition of people who might otherwise disagree on almost every other issue to work towards a common cause. In the author’s own words:
There are Jews and Christians and agnostics; careful environmentalists and commercial ranchers; Bernie voters, Trump voters, never-voters; military men and pacifists. The Doomer Optimists’ resistance to orthodoxy extends to themselves; it’s pluralistic by design.
This may seem to come across as a “gotcha” against the Optimistic Doomer coalition, but it is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, there is a path to consider (optimistically!) that the current liberal-democratic system could remain largely intact while taking a different form, and while being more in-tune to the O.D.s than the current political-economic milieu. This would require neither revolution nor devolution, but it would certainly take a political will that is not (yet) manifest. Mass movements do not have to be completely internally-coherent to be impactful — it may even be an impediment to getting the “mass” in “mass movement.”
Another question is that of the “optimistic” side of all of this. In some ways, what is being described is something that we all know could lead to reduced feelings of frustration and dread, even if we don’t always act upon it: interesting conversations with like-minded people, spending time in the wilderness, live music and religious contemplation.4 One can do these without heading out into the woods, but they require intention and community, and whatever benefits a fully-technologically-mediated society may have, I doubt many people would say their smartphones help them be more intentional and tapped into community.
In tone, if not in apocalyptic expectation, the D.O.’s have a different mien than their Germanic predecessor. For Spengler, the inevitable collapse of Western European-Faustian civilization could be met with nothing other than a proud resignation:
Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only one world-outlook worthy of us, that which has already been mentioned as the Choice of Achilles — better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without content…Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.
For Spengler, defiance in the face of inevitable decline meant the stiff upper lip of pessimism — doomerism, indeed.
There is another side of inevitable, metahistorical trends, though, if they are really assumed to be inevitable: the inevitability means that on a personal level, the final result is the same whether you spend all day looking at X-formerly-Twitter and seeing signs of impending doom, or doing the sort of things you do at the O.D. meetup in the American West. You don’t have to move to a primitive commune to improve how things work around you, even if “around you” extends only as far as your apartment and family.
Put that way, maybe the path forward really is that simple.
Cited Works and Further Reading
Note that the two volumes on this list of the Decline are idiosyncratically from two different publishers, but nonetheless:
Costello, Paul. “The Problem of Oswald Spengler.” In World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism, 46–69. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Volume 1: Form and Actuality. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. London: Arktos, 2021.
———. The Decline of the West, Volume 2: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Rogue Scholar, 2020.
———. Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York; London: Afred A. Knopf; George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1932.
Filtering water when you are thirsty is technically a “choice,” but not in the way we usually mean it.
This approach is meant to take aim at a few different frameworks, such as the division of history into ancient-medieval-modern, in which you compare ancient Greece to ancient China to ancient Persia given that they are all “ancient,” when, in fact, chronologically neighboring civilizations can be in different periods of development. For Spengler, Harun al-Rashid is not a “contemporary” of Charlemagne, but of the Alexandrian Age, and Beethoven — a period when the “intellectualized form-language” has already been perfected and the the beginning of the end of high cultural style. The first volume has a handy chart for all of this.
For all of this discussion of Western civilization, one might also note that Spengler felt that not only was Western European culture not an inheritor of Classical culture, but that their fundamental cultural attitudes were diametrically opposed.
This extends beyond just the D.O.s, themselves. There is a mention in the Free Press profile of “Ted Kaczynski’s early stuff” (presumably not the mathematics) and I would ask those who have also thought about the Power Process to consider if this passage from Man and Technics (86-7) sounds at all familiar:
In reality the passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with the consequences. It is his personal life-motive, his personal joy and sorrow. He wants to enjoy his triumph over difficult problems, and the wealth and fame that it brings him, for their own sake. Whether his discovery is useful or menacing, creative or distributive, he cares not a jot.
The effect of a “technical achievement of mankind” is never foreseen — and, incidentally, “mankind” has never discovered anything whatever. Chemical discoveries like that of synthetic indigo and (what we shall presently witness) that of artificial rubber upset the living-conditions of whole countries…Have such considerations ever caused an inventor to suppress his discovery?
The traditionalist religiosity element of the D.O.s comes up in the Free Press profile, but this also goes way back. As Spengler would see it, “he who was not himself possessed by this will- to-power over all nature would necessarily feel all this as devilish” (Man and Technics, 85).