The Idea of Decline in Western History Quotes

“In 1892 the Hungarian doctor and journalist Max Nordau published his Entartung (Degeneration), which he dedicated to Cesare Lombroso. Despite its size (almost six hundred pages), the book became an international bestseller and soon appeared in a dozen languages. Nordau had expanded the Lombrosian analysis to show that “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes … lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” Charles Baudelaire and the French “decadent” poets, Oscar Wilde (Bram Stoker’s original model for Count Dracula), Manet and the Impressionists, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, as well as Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—all the leading lights of fin de siècle culture, in fact—came under Doctor Nordau’s critical microscope. He concluded that they were all victims of diseased “subjective states of mind.” The modern degenerate artist, like his criminal counterpart, lacks a moral sense: “For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty.” Emotionalism and hysteria, as well as that old disease of Romanticism, ennui , pervade their works and outlook, Nordau proclaimed, because of their enfeebled nervous state. “The degenerate and insane,” he wrote, “are the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Democracy makes a stable civic life impossible. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “I turned my back on those who rule when I saw what they call ruling: higgling and haggling for power with the rabble.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Being “civilized” had originally meant living under Roman, or “civil,” law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or “middling ranks” as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization’s moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“It became a commonplace to say, as we do today, that a market economy depends on people pursuing their own self-interest. But self-interest to a student of civil society such as Adam Smith did not mean avarice or greed. Those were the typical antisocial attitudes of a more primitive state of economy and society, in which the fear of material scarcity is genuine and real. Instead, self-interest in a civilized or “polite” society involves the rational desire to provide goods and services at a profit to an equally self-interested consumer”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“The Middle Ages had given that awesome power of directing the fate of the individual to God and His representatives on earth—popes and kings; the nineteenth century gave it instead to history, first as progress, then as decline. However, the Enlightenment had posed the really revolutionary question: What if society is not an organism with a predetermined course and lifespan, but is made up of individual organisms, each with the power to more or less shape his own destiny? Then society’s future is not the product of some inevitable law of Progress, or Decrepitude; it is what the society’s members decide to make of it. At one stroke, the anakuklosis is broken and the cycle of disillusion and despair dispelled—not out in the world, but where it actually exists, in the minds of men and women.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century liberalism was in a sense the culmination of that humanist tradition. Undeniably, it generated its own forms of orthodoxy and complacency, which prompted a backlash. What Tocqueville in 1853 already sensed in Gobineau’s ideas has now largely come to pass. Modern pessimism has done more than just counterbalance excessive optimism regarding the future; it has managed to wreck our faith in the idea of civilization itself. Our real problem is not that our popular culture is filled with obscenities or trivialities, but that no one seems able to present the necessary intellectual grounds for an alternative.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“So our contemporary radicals and so-called progressives turn out not to be so progressive after all. The Unabombers, Albert Gores, Cornel Wests, Noam Chomskys, Toni Morrisons, and Edward Saids are actually throwbacks to a nineteenth-century view of society in which the modern West is a predetermined whole created by the impersonal forces of race, class, gender, and nation. An alternative view of society and social action, one that stems from the Enlightenment and an earlier humanist tradition, is not much in evidence these days.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“The notion that social groups are never merely aggregates of their members, and that “we must study the history of the [social] group, its traditions and institutions, if we are to understand and explain it as it is now,” once propped up Romantic nationalist history and universal histories of civilization from Hegel to Toynbee.3 Now it has become dogma among feminists, proponents of African-American studies, and other minority group-identities. Without it, in fact, much of the multiculturalist program would collapse under its own weight.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“In the action movie Broken Arrow, a character says, “You’re out of your mind.” The other replies: “Yeah, ain’t it cool?” This is the contemporary Nietzschean spirit. Yet today we have the sense that it has also outworn its welcome. Complaints about our degraded and degrading “mass culture” multiply, even as almost against their will our educational institutions and entertainment and news media find themselves returning repeatedly to those same themes. These include not just violence and sex as expressions of vitality, but all the assumptions of historical pessimism that underpin cultural pessimism: the “failure” of modern democracy, the loss of identity in mass society, the threat of corporate capitalism and the computerized police state, the life-threatening dangers of too much technology and science (in industry and the economy) or too little (in medicine and health), and a constantly “vanishing” middle class. From universities and public policy institutes to daytime talk shows, we are the heirs to the modern idea of decline in its strange twin form.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Radical multiculturalism implies that American society systematically produces race hatreds and social inequities, while cultural pessimism’s various other offshoots and branches insist that our society is irremediably racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, phallocentric, greedy, and proto-totalitarian; or alternatively (for those on the political Right), corrupt, decadent, mindless, hedonistic, apathetic, morally bankrupt, as well as proto-totalitarian. In effect, the very things modern society does best—providing increasing economic affluence, equality of opportunity, and social and geographic mobility—are systematically deprecated and vilified by its direct beneficiaries.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Man, then, is the ultimate stranger, “traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful”—this is Spengler describing the degenerate world-city man in The Decline of the West. Deep ecology’s Homo sapiens corresponds to Werner Sombart’s trader or J.A. Hobson’s capitalist Jew: a parasite, “a locust-like blight on the planet,” according to deep ecologist Gary Snyder, to whom human history is one of “ravaging this precious, beautiful planet.” And Gaia’s final solution to this threat? “Nature will be able to reconstitute itself once the top of the food chain is lopped off—meaning us.”79 Activist Judi Bari has concluded, “I believe the Earth is going to rise up and throw us off … The Earth’s failure to be able to sustain this kind of life will cause it to collapse. I’m sure life will survive that,” she adds, “but I don’t know that humans will. I don’t know if we deserve to.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“For Sale, Europeans are nature-haters; they are cut off from life.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Bookchin looked forward to a future “ecological society, structured around a confederal Commune of communes, each of which is shaped to conform with the ecosystem and bioregion in which it is located.” Everyone will engage in organic farming and use solar and wind power. New technologies will be employed in “an artistic way,” freeing up time for other activities: “gardening, the crafting of objects, reading, recitations,” and experimental mixed farming for biological diversity. The notion of ownership, even collective ownership, will disappear, replaced by “a holistic approach to an ecologically oriented economy.” Instead, “everyone would function as a citizen, not as a self-interested ego,” committing himself to a sense of oneness with the community—and with nature.47”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, whose studies of animal behavior (the best known is On Aggression) stressed Haeckel’s notion that animal and habitat—including man and his environment—form a single unit”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Development, even in its modest sustainable form, had become a Western curse on the rest of the world. An environmentally sound society in Ehrlich’s terms meant explicitly rejecting what he saw as all the key values of Western society: growth, affluence, and private enterprise, along with “racism, sexism, religious prejudice, and xenophobia.” “Unless these divisive traits can be managed,” Ehrlich warned, “they could cripple attempts to develop the global cooperation needed to create a new civilization.”25 “A new civilization”: Ehrlich’s vision of the future now reflected modern ecology’s call for a new cultural order to replace its old, moribund predecessor. The passing of the West, ecology’s more radical proponents in the seventies and eighties announced, would open the doors to a vital, holistic human community rooted in a “new” organic vision of nature. That radical revision culminated in the influential Deep Ecology movement, which described itself as “going beyond the so-called factual scientific level to the level of Self and Earth wisdom.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“As David Hume explained, “The mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholy disposition. In such a state of mind, where real objects of terror are wanting, the soul … finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Like Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, Wells foresees a future divided between a permanent underclass and a “cognitive elite.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Race history, such as Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium or Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, has always rejected empirical research in exchange for a mythic vision. The world of verifiable facts becomes unimportant because a deeper vital truth lies underneath. As a form of universal history, Afrocentrism follows the same prophetic pattern. As one of its practitioners states, Afrocentrism “takes whatever data are available and squeezes enough truth from them as circumstances will allow” in order to bolster racial identity and self-esteem.85 In doing so, however, it has merely created an inverted image of Western racial pessimism, just as the multiculturalist mirrors the nihilistic precepts of Western cultural pessimism.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“White envy of the black penis appears in various symbolic forms: the penchant for gun ownership, nuclear missiles, cigarettes (especially among white women feminists who smoke as a sign of liberation), and the Washington Monument. Even the chessboard becomes a symbolic racial battleground, with the black player allowed to move first on alternating black and white squares but the white player, naturally, always guaranteed to win.84”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world,” George James says in Stolen Legacy, which “laid the foundations of modern progress.” Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, “How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“The most essential requirement of a Pan-Africanist history, like an Aryanist or Pan-Germanic history, is a moment of pure origin from which all subsequent developments derive their character, whether as triumph or decline. Diop turned Negritude and older Pan-Africanist elements into a complete theory of civilization, with the diffusion of a vital and superior black culture to the rest of the world. Diop divided humanity into two types: southerners (Negro-Africans) and “Aryans,” which included Semitic peoples, Mongoloids, and American Indians. Aryans formed patriarchal societies, characterized by the political suppression of women and a lust for warfare. They celebrated materialism, individualism, and pessimism. Southerners, by contrast, were matriarchal, creating a unified community of free and equal people who were creative and idealistic and who lived by the rules of social collectivism instead of competitive capitalism. In every aspect”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Black Studies guru Houston Baker has defended rap music in the same terms. “Rap is like a rich stock garnered from the sudden simmering of titanic B-boy/B-girl energies. Such energies were diffused over black cityscapes.” Baker also describes the same energy in “wilding,” and in the murderous mass rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1987, as the vital overthrow of the white man’s attempt to tame nature by constructing a park in the first place. Just as in The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche’s blond beast emerges “from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student’s prank,” so do young blacks joyfully bring the reality of terror to the white power structure (as Nietzsche wrote, “That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange”).56”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Maya Angelou’s 1992 Inauguration Day poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” mentions the Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, West Indians—everyone except the ethnic group that originally created the American republic. History as diversity, then, comes to mean a “reverse exclusion”: pushing Anglo-Saxon white males and their institutions out of memory, or at least showing them to be dependent on those groups that have been subordinated to their cultural and political control.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“All of Takaki’s representative American figures—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Andrew Jackson, and George Custer—appear as classic degenerates, sexually twisted and driven by dark obsessions and profound psychological weaknesses. The American founders were sick in mind and body, Takaki implies, while their “external aggressiveness signified inner torment.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“All of Takaki’s representative American figures—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Andrew Jackson, and George Custer—appear as classic degenerates, sexually twisted and driven by dark obsessions and profound psychological weaknesses.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“In the last analysis, this stereotyped image of American culture as “sick” owed its existence to critics from the New Left.* America now displayed all the characteristics of a decadent modernity, or Zivilisation , as well as a decaying Faustian empire. Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Richard Barnet, and Richard Slotkin all explained that American culture glorified violence, imperialism, and genocide. It practiced a vicious form of capitalism and technological repression (described by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden), a bankrupt liberalism (scathingly criticized by Roberto Unger), a manipulative consumerism (laid bare by Christopher Lasch and William Leach), as well as racism and a hatred of all minorities and subordinate groups. Not only blacks but American Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Hispanics, and women suffered unendurable humiliations at the hands of mainstream American society.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“For Jackson, Cleaver, and other Black Power extremists, black violence reflected a vitalism that was also, as it was for Nietzsche and the German Expressionists, a breakthrough to reality. “The magic dance in the street,” according to LeRoi Jones. “Run up and down Broad Street niggers take the shit you want. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up! … Our brothers are moving all over, smashing at jelly-white faces. We must make our own World, man, our real world, and we can not do this unless the white man is dead.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“His sense of community with other blacks is affirmed as he addresses them as “brothers” and “sisters,” a community built not on rational self-interest (as in the American political community) but on affective bonds. His new heroes are Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis—and Frantz Fanon. He also prepares for political mobilization in accordance with his new self-image. Although he recognizes that violent revolution on the total scale preached by Fanon is not feasible in America, he will forthrightly adopt a rhetoric that involves “confrontation, bluntness, and directness” in dealing with his former white oppressors and asserting his new and vital self-image. Verbal violence as a form of cultural vitality overlaps with physical violence as part of the same black anti-Western Kultur . Turning the pages of Eldrige Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, or the poetry of LeRoi Jones, one meets with a delight in violence both as a cleansing, purifying process (as in Frantz Fanon’s “holy violence”) and as an affirmation of vital cultural identity. The black inner-city criminal thug took on the glamorous image of Frantz Fanon’s fellah or revolutionary guerrilla cadre, as urban street gangs reorganized themselves as the Black Panthers. In a notorious passage, Norman Mailer had even praised the vitalism and “courage” of these hoodlums when they murder neighborhood store owners. “For one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man,” he wrote, “but an institution as well,” namely, private property. Mailer concluded that “the hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History