This article was initially published in La Vanguardia on Saturday, July 14, 1979.
I don't remember exactly how things went, but in a novel by Max Aub, from the “Campos” cycle, two or three characters discussed ideologies, wars, Hitler, the West, in terms between ironic and pessimistic. And one of them exclaimed: "Here, Spengler, Don José!" The expression, castiza, un si es no es barriobajera, had its grace: evil, but grace. He contained a cruel sarcasm towards Professor Ortega y Gasset who had been the one who had Oswald Spengler's “The Decline of the West” translated into Spanish and prologued it. This distinguished tome, one of the most reactionary books of the 20th century, had its audience among us, and in half of Europe, during those confusing 1930s. It was not an easy read, and I will never forget the sweat it cost me to swallow it - that was already later-: one trudged through hundreds of pages where historical generalizations and a hysterical, hoarse prophecy were mixed. Two José Ortegas seemed to like these combinations, because later he repeated the operation with Arnold Toynbee, another one. "Take Toynbee, two Joses!" Probably Ortega's "vitalism" was not enough. Irrationalist intellectuals - and therefore idealists - have quite predictable hobbies.
I don't know if Spengler was a Hitlerian with a card, a mere pro-Hitler, or perhaps not even that. It does not matter. Nor does it matter much what the metaphysician Heidegger was in life. And it is secondary, even more so, whether or not Count Keyserling came to sympathize with the Führer. Heidegger and Keyserling were also supported by the Madrid “orteguería”. The case is, in short, that that contradictory philosophical soup -and more illustrious names that constituted it- was at the root of the European convulsion of that time. If they didn't invent them, these learned thinkers supported and justified the string of basic concepts that fueled the Nazi-Fascist imbroglio. The "superior race", the "return to earth", the "being-for-death", the "telluric forces", the "healthy and happy youth" and other nonsense that produced so much impact, they blessed them with his rhetorical devices. And Ortega, with the aristocratism that exudes -as much as fear- his “Rebellion of the masses”. I doubt that Hitler ever read a single page of Spengler, Heideger, Ortega It's not about that either. What counts, at this point, in retrospect, is the prediction: the decline of the West. Did they accept? In any case, "his" West, of course, went into decline.
Although not because of what they diagnosed. His culturalist approach would force us to launch a modest paradox: if the West "decayed" it was precisely because not a few of its most distinguished brains - those mentioned, and others - acted as birds of ill omen, and with notable success. But this would be a superficial interpretation. The defeatism of the intellectuals, in a direct or indirect way, responded to an evident political-social background sea. And it did not stop at the economic or class malaise: the changes of "life" that were unleashed in the western area, even "without revolutions", by the mere mechanism of the sale. The horrendous "mamas", which they called Goosebumps don José, emerged in a peaceful "rebellion" against the "elites", and the "culture industry" - is a way of speaking - has ended up strengthening their decisions. The planned "welfare society", hedonistic and permissive, it provided the "masses" with a place in the sun. But philosophers, like the anchorites, are not too in favor of the joyful and spa-loving rabble. The demographic spillover and the aspiration to comfort alternated the classic schemes of the " select minorities." It could come to a time when no one would be select or a minority...
That West has already collapsed. By reaching the highest possible levels of "civilization", as Spengler would say? But, was that "civilization" so negligible, which is that of household appliances, medicines, airplanes, utility cars and paid vacations? I will not sing praises to "Western civilization" -by the way, barely implanted in a small part of the world-, because it offers a sinister counterpart: the unprecedented lethal capacity of its technological devices. Along with the operating rooms, the pocket book, the farm chicken -something is something- or the Mozart record, we have the nuclear bomb, napalm, missiles. In other words: war. But the war never created excessive scruples among Spengler, the Heideggers, the Keyserlings, the Ortegas. For them, "heroism" was a "value". Most of them were openly warmongers. Or sneakily. Yes, his inherited pseudo-humanist West collapsed, which if in Keyserling it was a nostalgia for the Old Regime, in Ortega it was that of the “belle époque” and its tricky “liberalism”. The new West, the final capitalist, neo-capitalist or whatever you want to call it, did not seem to be facing serious imminence of disaster. On the contrary. The hegemony of the United States and the mirror of its "standing" set the tone. On another side, the socialist, the conjunctural difficulties did not annul the illusion enunciated in a phrase attributed to Lenin: "The revolution consists in the electrification of Russia plus the power of the soviets." “Electrify”, metaphorically, here, meant “modernize”: “civilize”.
This new West, however, had, giant as it is, feet of clay. It's the matter of oil. Current alarms go quite another way. "Decadence" is not to be ruled out. The bosses from everywhere, for whatever account they have, will already make sleeves and hoods to prevent us from returning to the Upper Paleolithic. The risk is there, with the Third World on the prowl. The problem is too complex to deal with in a few lines. The factors at play are multiple, and will simultaneously affect capitalists and socialists, and the poor as much as the rich, or more so, as ever. Certainly, "life" is not Cartesian, and the fix, even if it is a patch, is difficult. But “life” does not depend on a miracle either. The new "Decadence of the West", of the only palpable West -that of Spengler and Ortega is already a ghost-, announces itself with terrible signs. The day before yesterday we would not have believed it. Millions of cubic meters of North American printed paper, written by economists and sociologists, predicted otherwise. But these guys were and are just as aberrational as Spengler. For example: they do not know how to add. And the delicious prospects of "leisure" multiplied and distributed become the daily drama of "unemployment"...
