The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  New styles lie in the combining of past ones.

  When and if we do find ourselves in a cultural rebirth, ready to mould ourselves from the new clay, then a way to achieve new art is by the collusion of reliable influences. Always use nature as a template. Find strange and unique ways to combine and embellish working elements of past art movements. The evolution of all our previous styles worked in much the same way, via organically occurring trends and egotistical individual inspiration. You like Art Deco and Baroque? Find a way to combine their forms and motifs into something new. Again, we look at history and take from the good. But always follow ratios, always follow form, always aim for æsthetic perfection and harmony – in writing, sculpture, painting, music, architecture, all of it. Find a way to express style combinations as something new, something that allows that sense of life, of the eternal, to be inexplicably expressed. Photo-realism is not good enough, it is not a style. There must be imagination, cultural confidence and sacred mystery. Never shy away from bold, aristocratic tastes. To regain standards you have to set limits. Contrary to how emotional thinkers will feel about this, limits (structure) are the secret to opening the closed doors. The illusionary limitless abstract world is the very opposite of what it proposes. To set limits, we will have to be willing to be cruel within measure and not have endless gushing sentimentalism for every half-hearted attempt. We must be merciless when we detect relativism, vulgarity and bad art trying to pass itself off as good.

  A modern grail quest.

  Through this thinking, the reaching for and re-tooling of historic bedrock ideas, bound in flesh and soul, we may find our final defeat of Modernism. This is the grail quest for the new breed of Western man. If we fail, then consumer quantity will devour the last of the old world and we will truly become as rats crawling on a plain of garbage, with only ancient legends of a people who lived in fairy tales and reached for the stars.

  But to win the grail we must acknowledge it is a vast war being fought on many fronts. While sinister guiding forces have led us down the garden path towards this verminous future, we must accept that it is us who have taken the bait and allowed ourselves to be duped. It was us who were seduced by easy living, an idea that was anathema to our forebears; us who have shown cowardice in the face of social ostracization. Even at the height of their success, the Romans remarked quite often about remaining on guard against the perils of luxury. However, we have sadly gone much farther than them down that lazy road. We no longer understand in the slightest that luxury and sloth are anything to be guarded against. We now can find no moral reason to prevent becoming so obese we must peruse the aisles of our convenience grocer in motorized bikes, too lazy even to squeeze our fat bulks into anything but all-day leisure wear. Indeed, we rave with manufactured outrage at the idea that being obese is anything other than a beautiful life choice. In this comfortable boredom we have let our courage slip away into the night and now awaken from our midday nap to find an artless zeitgeist has made off with our values. But we live in high-trust societies and alien and incompetent elites have made our decisions for us. The Western culture that still exists sputters along on the final fumes of a former greatness and can only be considered a shadow of its former self.

  Without æsthetic standards we do not just lose art but other functional norms lose their measurability as either good or bad. And despite our moral compass currently shifting by the week as new victim grievances emerge, we are too confused to stand any ground – and even worse, we still smugly assert our superiority over our ancestors. It is an unforgivably disrespectful attitude. There is no future if you have been taught to revile your past and to have knowledge of these truths means a forgiving attitude towards modern art, despite our desire to be nice to the poor hopeless fools, is no longer allowable. You either fight to preserve your civilization and its future like your ancestors did, or you meekly watch it whither away to nothing like a coward.

  Regardless, browbeaten as we are, I do not believe we will succumb. Many are now setting out to undertake the inner-life grail quest, the search for sacred knowledge — for what is missing. Searching for the strength to keep the fire lit through this darkness and the greater dark to come. To recognize and reject the modern world as it is being presented, to accept inwardly that it is now subverted and decadent, and to prepare ourselves for a way out. A guiding flame leading to the resurrection of the Roman fides; the man of today must rekindle this heroic fire within, with tradition as a guide and art as a yoke but neither explicitly. While we must never again disrespect our past, we cannot sustain ourselves on history or mimicry alone, and a return to healthy culture will need this culture to be something new but based on eternal principles. It will be æsthetic and virile, which means it must be adroit and pitiless towards obstacles and enemies.

  This re-emergence of our true selves will come about either sooner, from widespread admittance of our mistaken detour, or later, in the more harsh and looming maelstrom of collapse. But either way, it is inevitable.

  This latest cycle is ending. Our Marxists and capitalists alike are in agreement: true art stands in the way of hedonistic quantity-materialism. While we live through this dying culture, our powerlessness grows as a new and final threat rises in the form of tidal human migrations that threaten to overwhelm and destroy our European history and future. For rest assured, what art and history the globalists have failed to destroy with appeasement statue removal and Modernist architecture, the mass migration of groups with their own identity will ensure. It will all of it be physically destroyed for good. And then what human world would be worth struggling for? We may well find ourselves, at the very cusp of reaching for the stars, falling back into the shadows of a dark age at the zero hour — what immense tragedy is that?

  We can see our historic sites and artworks being degraded, decayed, dismantled by hand (Palmyra), torn down and mocked in mainstream media. Much like the Mamluks used the Great Sphinx as target practice and the Great Pyramid as a quarry. If we do not stem and reverse that particular tide, nothing will outlive a combined one-two punch of materialist Modernism followed by a foreign dominant religion of fanatical Islam. Ironically, what is most threatening about Islam is likely the very thing we must reclaim to overcome it: a total, sweeping epistemology of theology, daily life, morality, law and caste that is wholly mandated by a political religion and strictly enforced (ideally with a European bias as opposed to an Eastern one). Part of what makes us unique is the European drive, at least since Heraclitus and Pythagoras, to continually soul-search for what is good, which we then seek to achieve. We are experimenters but when experiments fail, we take that information and move on. Unless we are wiped out completely, it is our nature and sacred duty to carry on the quest for what is good. This is the idealism intrinsic to us. Hence the selective attitude I suggest towards technology: a spiritual cultivation of the heroic, of the philosophical, of exploration abroad (space, high technology) and verdant pastoral husbanding of life on earth, as of old.

  Sadly, if trends do not change, there will be many people who will not even understand what has been lost. They will stare blankly as European art treasures are burned down, not understanding that it even has significance, and return blankly to their fast-food, shopping bargains and social distractions. Judging from the leftist zeal at the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States, many of us are sadly at this irredeemably apathetic stage as we speak. What is the point of raising a hand against tossing a ‘gendered’ Dutch master painting into the bonfire — a relic from older, bigoted generations that does not relate to consumerism or egalitarianism? The last man will be too lazy to raise a hand to save himself, too naive to even know how or why he is being killed.

  And if my words fall on deaf ears, if for any reason we fail to overcome these challenges and revive our art and future, we should seek comfort in the fact that the cosmos has already recorded our achievement, no matter what the revised history books will say. As is the eternal vouchsafe honour o
f the knight errant who has kept personal honour intact, the truth will be apart from what is taught to those living that dark future. Bad times cannot last forever any more than the good. We will save what we can and let the entire cycle end intentionally, even expedite it, in full determined awareness of what is happening and what has to be done. In truth, their world will not function without us and there will come a limit to their provocations, for every nation.

  Can we halt decline?

  This brings us to our current major crossroads, whether we should be reversing cultural trends or seeking the end of our present incarnation. This is a very important argument which centres on the question: “Can Western civilization be saved?

  According to Oswald Spengler’s 1922 opus The Decline of the West the answer is no. His interesting and well-considered theory is that civilizations are like living organisms: they are born, have a peak period and an eventual lingering decline and death. He believed that this is a law of nature as inevitable as all other types of life cycles. Furthermore, those civilizations are all based on a spiritual impulse or principle, commonly a religion, which will be unique to each. An aspect of crossing the threshold from thriving to declining is self-realization, or self-awareness, of the culture viewing itself as a completed thing. The early and golden years are all in the upward push to perfection.

  If we accept this admittedly clever assessment, which recognizes the inevitability of perennial cycles in everything, then we are locked into irreversible decline regardless of what we do and all the terrible modern art, demographic shifts, civil strife, moral degeneracy, failing families and collapsing birth rates are inevitable symptoms of an already terminal patient. It could be inferred then that the advent of Modernism as an art movement was not the cause but merely a leading symptom of this fatal illness. If this is true, the West as a concept and as a civilization is doomed to irreversible decline, one way or another, whether we reclaim the true art and reverse cultural rot or not.

  “Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you...a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free-—he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.”

  – Oswald Spengler

  But can that be true and what would terminal and irreversible decline be like? Modernist art does not strike one as an unstoppable or inevitable force, although at this moment Corbusier-style housing blocks are being erected over twice the acreage that traditional buildings currently assume, this is only evidence of their current power. If Heraclitus’ rule that change is the only constant is true, then even this æsthetic disgrace cannot carry on forever. But is it possible we are merely experiencing a downward turn that can be reversed? Or a painful, exhausting and perilous transition to some new morality? Or are we experiencing a purely manmade decline, the result of subterfuge and inept leadership that is repairable, albeit with great struggle? A sure knowledge of the answer to these questions is the difference between knowing to aid and speed up decline (to reach the next cycle) or exert the heroic energy to reverse or subvert it now. It is a big decision. We do not want to waste our efforts.

  According to Spengler’s theory, all human cultures have their emanations: their art and architecture, music, politics, achievements, wars and languages. And these are merely the apparatus or contrivance of their sentience. Golden age Greece, Egypt, Rome, Imperial Germany, the British Empire, Persia, the USSR and the USA have all seemed virtually immortal at one stage and all eventually died (or are currently dying) to likely never be seen again. The same can be said of the golden ages of classical China and the Islamic world, though they do seem to dwindle on seemingly forever in a dim and dormant twilight. Still faintly warmed by the fading glow of former glories. According to Spengler, curiously, the very moment an essential cultural drive is perfected, the civilizational ascent is essentially over. It only remains for a long, protracted decline and inevitable swallowing by a stronger society. At the moment the Greeks perfected the Doric style, after a long ascending labour, the progress ends – metaphysically, idealistically and pragmatically. The importance of the journey and not the destination has never seemed more metaphorically profound.

  Or does it end? The Doric style is still around to inspire and a huge swathe of this volume is worship and praise for Hellenic values. So are they alive or dead?

  Spengler’s theory that inorganic concepts have a lifespan is possibly an observable phenomenon at a more microscopic level. It seems an observable trend in, for instance, our favourite musical groups – there is the early brilliant stage, often leading to a climax of creativity, then a long, lingering death of bad albums and self-parody. With the arguable exception of Johnny Cash and a few others, this seems a universal truth. To grasp this meaning is to understand that everything that exists, including ideas, ebb and flow in this cycle, they must perish because they have the breath of life. Non manet in æternum. But of course, if this is universally true, how does that explain the few exceptions? Did Mozart and Beethoven have a period of declining self-parody? Therefore it is perhaps not universally true. As individuals, however, this may not be a damning enough observation to posit as a gap in Spengler’s theories of civilizations.

  The disheartening part of Spengler’s theory is his observation that the entirety of the West can now be thought of as one giant culture or idea, for the reason that all the Western nations are in the thrall of America and can be said to be districts of that larger empire. Spengler spoke of this hopelessness 80 years ago, decline being an observable trend even back then. However, apart from the Mozart consideration, there are further observations suggesting the theory may not be completely solid. These may give us reason to doubt its supposed all-encompassing inevitability, or if nothing else, to pierce the veil of illusions to see the future green valley beyond.

  The first reason to doubt is that the death of the West is the death of a certain idea, or a certain conception of the West of itself. It means that in its death there will be fragmentation and new ideas, nothing that likely can even be predicted, something totally alien and strange will rise out of nowhere, which seems likely in view of the unpredictable events we see occurring throughout history. Europeans, those who created the West to suit their genetic idealism and cultural yearnings, will likely still live and require new idealisms, providing they do not expire completely. But that is the interesting thing about the future: it is absolutely impossible to predict. Nobody in the fifteenth century could have foreshadowed the invention of the nuclear bomb, nobody in the early twentieth century could have conceived of the internet. Life always takes an unexpected route. On one side of the coin we have decline is an unstoppable fact of nature, meaning collapse is outside any agency we might have, and we have no creative power in this world. The flip side is that heroes and men of agency can and will alter the course of events, under divine guidance or their own. My view is that both are true.

  Even if the whole of the West falls, how could it be replaced by cultures that flourished and grew old and have been in lingering stagnation for many centuries now? That is not in keeping with Spengler’s rules and in some ways these ancient cultures, whose flourishing period should be long over, are enjoying a resurgence — albeit a barbaric and derivative one. This might be a kind of illusion as they merely advantageously skirt the same toilet whirlpool that the rest of us do. Perhaps they too are somehow no more than a facet of the American-led West tearing itself apart? They certainly seem to share the same obsession with abstract Modernist art and kitschy convenience-technology. And if the entire West falls, like Rome after a fashion, would that event not merely signify the rise of a new culture, such as we saw in the rise of medieval Christian Feudalism? If everything in this universe has a life and a death, if both living beings and i
deas can be seen as forms forcing their way into the plane of reality then retreating, then ideas and cultures have a lifespan. But then could not Spengler’s theory itself die? In fact, since self-awareness is a trait of being past-peak, should our knowledge and self-realization of his theory be evidence that it will not actually come to pass?

  “And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  – H.P. Lovecraft.

  If decline is irreversible, it does not mean it won’t be replaced by the new vitality. It seems likely now that we have to pass through the eye of that cyclone in order to emerge on the other side. That means something close to total destruction, including the irreparable loss of a great amount of our art treasures. But better violent temporary destruction than slow, permanent dissipation, if a bright side can be found in that outcome. This seems the likely prediction, that most of what we currently know and believe is set for the cosmic chopping block, and the sooner we let go of that which is corrupted, the more likely we are to survive. Opting to ‘not survive’ goes against our basest instincts and is therefore not nature’s intent. There are many variables in the dice roll and tenets of primordial tradition, including change as constant, will remain eternal truths. Be prepared for a mighty change and for cataclysmic events. For those who love art, abandon completely the institutions, the academies, the system.

  In the meantime, as this Spenglarian train rolls on towards the cliff, save what you can and work to save as many souls as possible by making them aware of the truth of our situation. Every one of us will die eventually, and in that sense we each live an individual doom-scenario regardless of world events or what existence delivers. The truth is your life is a natural cycle and metaphysical journey to a future transcendental event that is apart from the physical world and should facilitate the abandonment of ego before the Whole. Spiritual courage follows in this realization, regardless of what one lives through. By abandoning the corrupt modern systems, at their worst, is to recognize the need for the formation of a new culture, if it can be husbanded in such a fashion, which would exhibit the worldly wisdom that is characteristic of us at our best. Idealism. Armed with the knowledge of both possibilities (cyclical decline and intentionally designed decline) we might yet find an exit strategy that would be preferable to our needs. For the immediate future we can only be aware of the dead and dysfunctional aspects of our culture and work as much as possible to be free from Modernism, corporate capitalism and egalitarian lies, and uphold tradition among the chaos. We must be searching always, like quest knights, for the new art, for the victory of the local over the global, for the return of beauty values and heroic exploration and the undercurrent of the vital. The inevitable hardship of this looming reality is precisely what we need to awaken the sleeper. The illness will become the cure, the West as it is today is a walking corpse.