#2 I always enjoy reading Spengler's essays whether or not I agree with him or can even follow him. This essay uses Freud as a whipping-boy for some larger current cultural issues.
"What impels so many young people in Anglo-Saxon countries toward slow-motion suicide? " is followed several paragraphs later by "The therapeutic community has perfectly valid explanations for anorexia and self-harm at the individual level. But it reminds me of a doctor who explains with great precision how a metal object has passed through your body wreaking damage on various organs without also mentioning that the city in which you live is subject to aerial bombardment. Without addressing the cultural catastrophe, the therapeutic profession will be hard put to save many of the individuals." and "the morbid refusal to reproduce that condemns most of the industrial world to depopulation and eventual extinction, not to mention the epidemic of suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world."
He links sexual objectification and self-centeredness to a community-wide failure to preserve and propagate: "Women can expect only a brief flowering of beauty before age and child-bearing attenuate their sexual attraction. The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty." These types of consolation provide support, not just for mothers, but for fathers, and also for servicemen and -women facing a premature death on the line somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan. Something to think of as Memorial Day approaches. |