{"id":40018,"date":"2018-11-01T07:58:19","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T12:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40018"},"modified":"2018-11-01T07:58:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T12:58:19","slug":"america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40018","title":{"rendered":"America and Russia: Tamanous and Sobornost"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost\/\">America and Russia: Tamanous and Sobornost<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>In the first two essays in this sequence, I sketched out the framework of Oswald Spengler\u2019s vision of the process by which great cultures rise, work through their possibilities, and fossilize once those possibilities have been pushed as far as they can go. That vision of history pretty reliably generates a profound unease among people raised in Western industrial societies, for those societies\u2014the heirs of what Spengler named Faustian culture, the great culture that emerged in western and central Europe starting around the year 1000, and holds temporary dominion over the globe\u2014prefer to see history in a different and far more simplistic way.<\/p>\n<p>In the Faustian worldview, it\u2019s inconceivable that the world\u2019s cultures each have their own possibilities, their own values and insights and ways of understanding the world, which cannot be reduced to any single trajectory. In the Faustian worldview, there is only one range of possibilities open to human beings, the one set out by Faustian culture; all other cultures can be seen only as inadequate attempts to attain the Faustian model. There can be no different but equally valid sets of values and insights and ways of understanding the world; there is simply the Faustian way, which is self-evidently true, and every other way, which is superstitious, benighted, and obviously wrong. (Watch today\u2019s ideologically correct literary critics denouncing the writers of past generations for not sharing the values of today\u2019s elite Western culture, and you can see this sort of giddily self-centered thinking in full and inglorious flower.)<\/p>\n<p>In exactly the same way, it\u2019s unthinkable to the Faustian mind that history might consist of a sequence of different trajectories of rise and fall.<\/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: Tamanous and Sobornost In the first two essays in this sequence, I sketched out the framework of Oswald Spengler\u2019s vision of the process by which great cultures rise, work through their possibilities, and fossilize once those possibilities have been pushed as far as they can go. That vision of history pretty reliably [&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":[1949,15417,22737,2499,1758,10641,694,22739,22738,827],"class_list":["post-40018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-america","tag-ecosophia","tag-faustian-culture","tag-industrial-society","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-oswald-spengler","tag-russia","tag-sobornost","tag-tamanous","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40018","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=40018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40019,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40018\/revisions\/40019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}