{"id":39339,"date":"2018-10-18T08:33:10","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T13:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39339"},"modified":"2018-10-18T08:33:10","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T13:33:10","slug":"america-and-russia-part-two-the-far-side-of-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39339","title":{"rendered":"America and Russia, Part Two: The Far Side of Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/america-and-russia-part-two-the-far-side-of-progress\/\">America and Russia, Part Two: The Far Side of Progress<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Two weeks ago, in the first part of this sequence of posts, we explored the way that Oswald Spengler\u2019s insights into the cycles of history can be used not only to make sense of the past, but also to get some idea of the shape of the future ahead of us. That\u2019s explosive stuff, because the future thus revealed isn\u2019t the one demanded by the cultural obsessions of the present day.<\/p>\n<p>Every great culture, to use Spengler\u2019s phrase, has its own vision of what the future ought to be like. In Apollonian culture\u2014the great culture of the ancient Mediterranean basin, which hit its cultural stride in classical Greece and metastasized beneath the eagles of Rome\u2014the future everyone expected was the present endlessly prolonged. The vision of time and change that guided Apollonian culture in the centuries of its maturity had three phases: first, things were in chaos, then a mighty power arose to set things in order, and that order endured forever.\u00a0 In religious terms, the mighty power was the god Jupiter taming the Titans with his thunderbolts; in political terms, the mighty power was the Roman Empire bringing the warring kingdoms of the world under its sway; the same logic applied to classical philosophy, which sought to teach the rational mind how to reduce the chaos of the self into an enduring order, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>In Magian culture\u2014the great culture that emerged in the Middle East as Apollonian culture peaked and began to fade, hit its cultural stride during the Abbasid caliphate and metastasized under the Ottoman Empire\u2014this vision found few takers once the Apollonian pseudomorphosis faded out. The Magian vision of time and change, rather, is the one familiar to most of my readers through its reflection in Christian theology.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>America and Russia, Part Two: The Far Side of Progress Two weeks ago, in the first part of this sequence of posts, we explored the way that Oswald Spengler\u2019s insights into the cycles of history can be used not only to make sense of the past, but also to get some idea of the shape [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15417,1758,10641,694,827],"class_list":["post-39339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-ecosophia","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-oswald-spengler","tag-russia","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39340,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39339\/revisions\/39340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}