Spengler (columnist)
Spengler is the pen name of an anonymous Internet columnist published in Asia Times Online (ATol) since January 2000. He writes from a conservative Judeo-Christian religious perspective but in a provocatively iconoclastic style, using aspects of Western history and culture to comment on current geopolitical events.
Writings
Articles by Spengler appeared in ATol only occasionally before October 2003; since then, they have appeared on a more or less weekly basis, usually on Monday morning Greenwich time. Summaries of all Spengler’s articles, with links to each of them, are accessible in reverse chronological order on The Complete Spengler page of ATol's website and in a categorization by subject on a reader-maintained reference thread on Spenglers Stammtisch, an independent reader-moderated discussion forum.
Spengler also has written numerous informal contributions to online forums on which his articles have been discussed, including: the “Spengler” section (and its archives) of ATol’s discussion forum, The Edge, from October 2004 to June 2006; an open-registration Spengler's Forum hosted by ATol and moderated by Spengler, since June 2006; and Spenglers Stammtisch from December 2006 to September 2007. Spengler’s surviving contributions to each of these discussion forums, in reverse chronological order, are publicly accessible via Links to Spengler's writings, a reference thread of Spenglers Stammtisch.
His essay "Christian, Muslim, Jew" (on the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig) appeared in the October 2007 issue of the American religious magazine First Things.
Recurring themes
Spengler’s analysis of contemporary geopolitical events revolves around the theme of Christianity’s encounter with paganism, which he also describes as the conflict between individual freedom and traditional national identities. Receiving repeated emphasis is the idea of immortality, which pagans seek to find in a particular time-bound culture. Spengler finds this hope misplaced and refers repeatedly to European nationalism as an extension of paganism. Instead, Spengler believes that Christianity offers a hope of both individual immortality and a transnational collective identity that is potentially compatible with individual freedom and resistant to destruction by it.
Spengler indicates that the West has declined culturally since the 17th century and now has lost its will to survive, largely because its Christianization was incomplete and failed to eradicate pagan loyalty to traditional nations and cultures that growing individual freedom has been destroying for centuries but to which post-Christian Europeans still cling emotionally. This cultural decline underlies not only Europe’s nationalist wars but also the demographic contraction of contemporary Europe.
Spengler holds up the United States of America as an alternative to the European model. According to Spengler, the United States is not a product of Western Civilization, but rather a Christian rejection of it, and has been spared the decline of the West by its distinctively Judeo-Christian, non-traditional, ethnically and culturally diverse character.
The United States also serves as exemplar of the individual freedom that creatively destroys traditional cultures and nations, and against which they often react violently.
Spengler treats Judaism as a symbiotic complement to Christianity. Jew-hatred, which springs from Gentiles’ envy of the immortality of a religiously covenantal nation, becomes rampant in post-Christian rejection of Christianity, to the fundamental truth of which the survival of the Jews bears inadvertent witness.
Spengler contrasts Judaism and Christianity with Islam, which he claims is a traditional culture of which aggressive jihad is a core element, fundamentally distinct from Judeo-Christian religion and not easily reformed, and whose growing hostility to the West is a reaction to the threat posed to Islam by individual freedom. He suggests this threat has engendered both a Crisis of faith in the Islamic world and an incipient demographic contraction in parts of it.
However, Spengler is not certain of Western success in the war against Islam. In particular, he maintains that such cultural and religious conflicts often cannot be resolved without a large amount of bloodshed, and that horror of such vast bloodshed is a critical Western weakness in such conflicts. Efforts to pursue stability or to perpetuate the status quo tend to be counter-productive in the long run. Instead, successful and ultimately humane statecraft in cultural and religious conflicts requires accepting and exploiting uncertainty and instability. Similarly, democracy offers no solution to such conflicts, and its promotion of individual liberty, being inconsistent with the collective identity of a traditionalist culture, can either exacerbate traditionalist reaction or accelerate traditionalist collective [...].
Intellectual Background and Sources
Spengler has cited works and studies of philosophy, religion, history, economics, psychology, mathematics, music and art. He has cited material written in German, Spanish, and Italian, as well as English.
Writings and authors to which Spengler has referred often and favorably include Goethe’s [[Faust|Faust]], Rosenzweig, the Bible, Clausewitz, and Kierkegaard.
Agenda and Method
"What is my agenda? … It is to promote Judeo-Christian ecumenicism in the support of traditional moral values and the resolve to defend the West against its enemies … But it is also to inculcate the habit of mind of accepting uncertainty. That is, if you will, the Clausewitzian side."
-- Spengler, 23 May 2006 posting on the "Spengler" section of ATol’s "The Edge."
"The basis of my forecasts is … a religious-existential approach to analyzing the motives of the protagonists, contrasted with a reality check (demographics and economics), and an effort to synthesize the response. A spiritual rather than a positivist approach to global politics has some predictive power."
-- Spengler, 14 July 2006 posting on the ATol-hosted "Spengler’s Forum."
Anonymity and Pen Name
Spengler has indicated repeatedly that he is a male of middle to advanced age. He is not known to have made public his nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, class background, formal education, marital or family status, occupation or work history.
Spengler has characterized his namesake, the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936), as “an unspeakable racist” who believed “that man was a ‘beast of prey.’” He has written that his choice of pen name “is ironic rather than semiotic,” although it “reflects the original Spengler's conclusions about the West,” namely that it is in decline. He has claimed to “have no sympathy for cyclical or ‘biological’ theories of history of the sort that Oswald Spengler promulgated,” and not to share the original Spengler’s historical pessimism: “If I were not an optimist at heart, I would not compose these essays.”
Online References
As of February 2007, a web search for "Spengler" and "Asia Times" yielded 88,100 references on Google, or 66,800 excluding initially undisplayed references.
As of March 2007, Marketleap’s link popularity check service showed that major search engines contained more than 41,300 links to The Complete Spengler page of ATol’s website, excluding links to specific articles by Spengler listed on that webpage.
References and Links
- The Complete Spengler (Spengler’s articles in reverse chronological order)
- Links to Spengler's writings (including Spengler’s forum postings)
Footnotes
es:Spengler (columnista)