Spengler goes on with his thesis of civilizational decline. He writes that the “gleaming autumn of style” signifies a culture just before it begins its long death throes, since an obsession with refined taste, as we’ve said, is the beginning of decadence. And the arts, it also goes without saying, are “urban” and “therefore secular,” because true religious belief is absent in the great world-cities, which have insufficient “soil ties.”
