Spenger Reveals His Identity

Interesting!  Spengler, who's been a columnist at Asia Times since 1999, starts work as associate editor and writer at First Things, a Catholic journal about religion, culture and public life.  His name is David P. Goldman and he's Jewish.  His coming-out story is here.  Excerpts from his latest column:

"A malicious thought crossed my mind in 1999, though, as the Internet euphoria engulfed world markets: was it really possible for a medium whose premise was the rise of a homogeneous global youth culture to drive world economic growth?  Youth culture, I argued, was an oxymoron, for culture itself was a bridge across generations, a means of cheating mortality. The old and angry cultures of the world, fighting for room to breath against the onset of globalization, would not go quietly into the homogenizer."

"....The end of the old ethnicities, I believed, would dominate the cultural and strategic agenda of the next several decades. Great countries were failing of their will to live, and it was easy to imagine a world in which Japanese, German, Italian and Russian would turn into dying languages only a century hence. Modernity taxed the Muslim world even more severely, although the results sometimes were less obvious."

"Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive."

"I needed to tell the Muslims that nothing would alleviate the unbearable sense of humiliation and loss that globalization inflicted on a civilization that once had pretensions to world dominance. I needed to tell Asians that materialism leads only to despair. And I needed to tell the Americans that their smugness would be their undoing. "

"...Europe's high culture and its capacity to train universal minds had deteriorated beyond repair; one of the last truly universal European minds belongs to the octogenarian Pope Benedict XVI. In 1996, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had said in an interview published as Das Salz der Erde, 'Perhaps we have to abandon the idea of the popular Church. Possibly, we stand before a new epoch of Church history with quite different conditions, in which Christianity will stand under the sign of the mustard seed, in small and apparently insignificant groups, which nonetheless oppose evil intensively and bring the Good into the world.' The best mind in the Catholic Church squarely considered the possibility that Christianity itself might shrink into seeming insignificance."

Sends chills up my spine, that notion.  Forget the Cafeteria Catholics that pick and choose which teachings of the Catholic Church they feel like believing and obeying.  Let's get back to basics and if that's a small tribe that keeps the light burning, so be it.

The Anchoress also started writing for First Things. Congrats and God speed!  Guess I have to get myself a subscription now.

Comments

[Brian Barker]

Dying languages! Perhaps there is an argument for Esperanto here.

If you have a moment look at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.

The argument for Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

[RWB]

I am glad that you have returned to the scene.

The forces of history would seem to conspire to propel us into a new dark age, if the academics are to be believed. But I choose to focus on that which I can positively impact. The parish that I attend, the city I live in, and the family I have are better because of the small loving actions I take every day. This is truly living one's faith and if more of us felt compelled to do so our faith would reform our nation and the Church and thereby the world.