Briefly Noted 151

Staring into Chaos: 
Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization
by b. g. brander
spence, 418 pages, $29.95

This fin-de-siècle has seen much less talk about “decline” and “degeneration” than the last time around, probably because the idea of “organic” cultural decline is alien to the postmodern worldview. B. G. Brander, a former writer for National Geographic and sometime reporter for the World Vision global relief agency, has performed a useful service of recollection by providing this handy summary of the major “pessimist” philosophies of history of the last century or so. The intuition that the Western world had entered a new “Hellenistic” age was common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Staring into Chaos is chiefly concerned with Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin, each of whom turned the analogy with classical times into a meta-historical grand opera. Mention of Spengler’s Decline of the West still gives some people fits, but Brander notes it has been in print since the first volume appeared in 1918. Toynbee’s Study of History was a major cultural phenomenon in its 1950s heyday, though it has not aged well. Sorokin’s Social and Cultural Dynamics is today the most obscure of the three. Maybe he broke the rules of metahistory by doing too much empirical research. All three predict some sort of spiritual revival for the next century. (In its later volumes, Toynbee’s Study became in effect a theodicy of history.) Still, there are differences. For Toynbee and Sorokin, the religious revival can be the occasion of a new springtime, whereas for Spengler this “Second Religiousness” will be just another sign of senility. All three expect some sort of universal government, but Toynbee and Sorokin speak of the possibility of international cooperation, while Spengler will hear of nothing but the arbitrament of force. They all predicted an end to chaos; they differed on whether it will end by free will or compulsion.

The Art of the Impossible: 
Politics as Morality in Practice
by vaclav havel
knopf, 273 pages, $24 

In an age of spin it is refreshing to read the words of a national leader who in spite of numerous political difficulties and temptations remains a man of integrity. This is one reason why this collection of thirty-five speeches and essays written by Czech President Vaclav Havel between 1990 and 1996 is so welcome. In one typically forthright speech given in late 1991 Havel points an audience in Los Angeles to the environmental destruction wrought by the former Eastern Bloc’s command economists and warns them “against all those who despise the mystery of Being, whether they be cynical businessmen with only the interests of their corporations at heart, or left-wing saviors high on cheap ideological utopias.” To recognize and appreciate Havel’s frankness is not to say that his thinking is always clear. On numerous occasions Havel claims that if the world’s peoples wish to live in relative peace with one another they must look to that which transcends them. “The Declaration of Independence... states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty,” he said in Philadelphia on July 4, 1994. “It seems that man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.” What “the One” is in Havel’s view––what he variously refers to as “the transcendent,” the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle,” the “Gaia Hypothesis,” “a God,” “the Creator,” “Heaven above us,” “Him who is omniscient,” “the order of the Omniscient,” and “the mystery of the world”––is obscure. Yet that he speaks about such things openly, and not merely for political reasons, sets him apart from the great majority of the industrialized world’s public officials. And for that he can be respected.