Like millions of others, I’ve admired the essays anonymously published in the Asia Times under the name ‘Spengler’. Spengler is a polymath, perceptive and clearly illumined by Biblical faith. His insights into culture and history – and his ability to transcend both – indicate a ‘universal mind’ of which there are so few today.
Well, Spengler has revealed himself. He is David Goldman, recently hired as associate editor of First Things, an indispensable journal of religion and culture. Goldman’s final anonymous essay is autobiographical. He describes his education and passion in Western classical music and his training in economics and philosophy.
But most of all he describes his despair at a Western culture that shrivels as it abandons the Biblical faith that gives it life. Of culture that is ‘undead’ – not living but not dead either. And of a rediscovery, later in life, of Judaism.
In this world of accelerated mortality, in which the prospect of national extinction hung visibly over most of the peoples of the world, Jew-hatred was stripped of its mask, and revealed as the jealousy of the merely undead toward living Israel. And it was not hard to show that the remnants of the tribal world lurking under the cover of Islam were not living, but only undead, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of modernity, throwing a tantrum against their inevitable end.
I have been an equal-opportunity offender, with no natural constituency. My academic training, strewn over two doctoral programs, was in music theory and German, as well as economics. I have have published a number of peer-reviewed papers on philosophy, music and mathematics in the Renaissance. But I came to believe that there are things even more important than the high art of the West and its most characteristic endeavor, classical music, the passion and consolation of my youth. Western classical music expresses goal-oriented motion, a teleology, as it were – but where did humankind learn of teleology? I no longer quite belonged with my friends and colleagues, the artists.
And though it sounds hopelessly self-serving, I share with him both an epoch and the discoveries of that time. While I was a thoroughgoing Christian in 1980, blessed with an extraordinary theological education at Durham University, I had not fully integrated a teleological world-view with the political seismology of the times. His transformation was far more eventful than mine, however.
G K Chesterton said that if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything, and I was living proof of that as a young man, wandering in the fever-swamps of left-wing politics. I found my way thanks to the first Ronald Reagan administration. The righting of America after it nearly capsized during the dark years of Jimmy Carter was a defining experience for me. I owe much to several mentors, starting with Dr Norman A. Bailey, special assistant to President Reagan and director of plans at the National Security Council from 1981-1984. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the US would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s. I thought him a dangerous lunatic, and immediately signed on.
And inevitably there comes the realization that the world is dying, separated from the One who gives both life and resurrection in the Valley of Dry Bones.
Renewal could not come from music, nor literature, nor the social sciences. The wells of culture had run dry, because they derived from faith to begin with. I was raised in the Enlightenment pseudo-religion of art and beauty. Initially I looked at faith instrumentally, as a means of regenerating the high culture of the West. Art doesn’t exist for art’s sake.
The high culture of the West had its own Achilles’ heel. Even its greatest cultivators often suffered from the sin of pride, and worshiped their own powers rather than the source of their powers.
Read it all. I look forward to reading his work in First Things.
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