Spengler contrasts his model of history with the flat, British model of cause and effect - the formulae and rites of the priests just become equations for the modern day scientists. For Spengler - historical forms are concrete, unfold over time and have distinct lifecycles. Civilization itself unfolds like a giant organism - an early phase, a late phase, a climax, budding, and then disintegration.

Almost everything is treated as a biological metaphor for Spengler, which I find especially interesting / useful - eg civilizations are superorganisms, and you can tell the health of the immune system by various behaviors / stages in its lifecycle (like for example how well a society responds to attacks on its founding myths is a critical immune response - there's also a relationship between the intellect and disease I need to go back over that has to do with decadence ..)

One of the foundational ideas is that civilizations (he lists 9 total) go through these two primary phases - culture phase, then civilizational phase. The coulture/culture phase is intensive, civilization phase extensive - inward looking and concerned with metaphysics versus outward looking and extending geographically. Typified when we think of the Greeks versus the Romans - the Greek soul versus Roman intellect. In the culture phase the main concern is metaphysics and art, then passes through and gives way to concerns with extensivity - social problems, politics, etc - society is motivated by politics, economics and ethics

It's too dense to cover but one especially interesting idea - he's talking about the idea of how technology liquidates values - all values -

we see another clash between the Germans and allies - where the world wars were a collision between the two ideas of utopia. The Germans were trying to escape the world they saw coming under British/allied hegemony. For the Germans, utopia was a moment frozen in time that preserved their ways of life. For the allies - a world governed by science and reason, a cult of change. Hanging on to metaphysical cosmic depth vs all surfaces and no depth - seen in the two genres fantasy vs science fiction. Wagner creates the mythology of the fantasy genre, backwards looking and a world of myths and mystical wonders, versus Jules Verne and the sci-fi - a world of proliferating gadgets of science and technology. Whether it's berating the Socratic man (and Socrates himself) for worshipping intellect/reason, or the allies' utopia - a consistent theme is that Spengler hates this worship of rationality - people think it's liberating them from convention but it just creates a sterilized world drained of all its life, and questioning / deconstructing everything just fractures tradition, communal values and is a path to lonely, sterile world

Spengler and the German philosophers nailed this - they saw what such a world would amount to - pure nihilism and a technopolis consumer shopping mall of proliferating gadgets where nothing matters but how much money you make.

New technology liquidates values, *all* values - allies and the germans, left and right - an example was the introduction of the gramophone, which brought the concert into the home, so musical education completely fell out since if you wanted to hear music you just popped on a record. A modern example is the proliferation of TVs into pubs/bars and restaurants - which killed singing in bars, killed the communal atmosphere, and just locked people into this private modality. A society that embraces change for the sake of it is a society that has no values or just willingly surrenders them

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43847876)

Guy who does the series is *incredibly* good - tells you what Spengler nails, what he gets wrong etc (eg Indian civilization doesn't fit this model)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43847949)

great content but at the same time who the fuck is spending genuine time with spangler lol.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43850875)