A DARK OR A BRIGHT FUTURE?

from Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By

Chapter: The Confrontation of East and West in Religion

"There was another German culture-historian also writing in those days, Leo Frobenius, who, like Spengler and like Yeats, conceived of culture and civilization in morphological terms as a kind of organic, unfolding process of irreversible inevitability. He was, however, an Africanist and anthropologist, and so included in his purview not only the higher civilizations but also the primitive, his leading concept being of three distinct great stages in the total development of the culture history of mankind. The first was of the primitive food-foragers, hunters and planting villagers, non-literate, greatly various, and of a time span extending from the first emergence of our species on this earth to (in some quarters) the very present. The second, commencing ca. 3500 B.C., was of the “monumental cultures,” literate and complex—first of Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece and Rome, India, China and Japan, Middle and South America, the Magian-Arabic Levant, and Gothic-to-modern Europe. And now finally comes stage three, of this greatly promising, dawning global age, which Frobenius looked upon as probably the final phase of mankind’s total culture history, but to last, possibly, for many tens of thousands of years. That is to say, what both Spengler and Yeats were interpreting as the end of the Western culture cycle Frobenius saw in a very much larger prospect as the opening of a new age of boundless horizons. And indeed, this present season of the coming together of all the formerly separate culture worlds may well mark not only the end of the hegemony of the West but also the beginning of an age of mankind, united and supported by the great Western gifts of science and the machine—without which no such age as our own could ever have come to pass.

"However, the darker vision of Spengler foresees only desolation here too. For science and the machine are in his view expressions of the mentality of Western man, which are being taken over by non-Western peoples only as a means by which to undo and destroy the West. And when this killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs will have been accomplished, there will be no further development either of science or of industry, but a loss of competence and even of interest in both, with a resultant decline in technology and return of the various peoples to their local styles; the present great age of Europe and its promise for the world then but a broken dream. In contrast, Frobenius, like Nietzsche before him, saw the present as an epoch of irreversible advance in the one life course of the entire human race, here passing from its youthful, locally bounded stages of cultural growths to a new and general future of as yet unforeseen creative insights and realizations. But I must confess that while in my own thinking it is to the later view that I incline, I cannot quite get the other, of Spengler, out of my mind...."


SPEAKING OF A DARK FUTURE WHICH IS NOW PRESENT

Why was a Catholic archbishop kidnapped on Monday in Baghdad? Is Bush's war becoming ever more religious in tone? Why wouldn't Moslem fundamentalists believe Bush's war is a war pitting Xtians like Bush versus Moslems like them? For, after all, Bush has said time and time again that he's doing god's work. He more or less admits he's got a religious reason for doing everything he's doing. Look, folks, the man's a nut case, plain and simple, and is supported in office by nut cases like himself. Let's hope that most Americans are modern enough to recognize the danger he and his kind (fundamentalist Moslems too) put the world in. From both sides, I hear moderates like myself shout, "It takes one to know one?" It takes a tyrant to recognize and buck against a tyrants like himself. By opposing evil, doesn't one become evil? Doesn't Captain Ahab teach us that?