How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

During the First World War, a German high school teacher named Oswald Spengler saw in the enervation of the ancient world the same infertility that had begun to afflict his contemporaries, and composed a massive tome that sought to explain why all civilizations must fail of their will to live. Spengler’s The Decline of the West appeared in 1918, at a moment when cultural pessimism hung over Europe in thick clouds. Absent the compulsions of traditional society, he declared, people simply would cease to raise children: The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine who belongs to herself—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.