History as Mind

The political right needs to understand where our historical consciousness is at in the present age

Welcome to all new subscribers who found their way here via

Darryl Cooper

, who kindly recommended this Substack after my short piece about the whole Churchill blowout.

In this essay, I go into more detail on some of the philosophical points made there about our relationship with history — something that should be of interest to new and long-time readers alike.

Basically, what the Churchill debate and the screeching reactions show is that the political right needs to come to terms with where the historical consciousness is at in our age: we can’t go back to the ancient or medieval ways of dealing with history, because the experience of the scientific age makes this impossible. We want our myths to be provably true. But since history is not science, this can’t really be done, as the postmodernists understood. In the end, as I’ll argue, the only serious criterion for the quality of a historical story, a particular take, is the quality and level of the mind looking at history. Hence what kind of myth, what kind of story about our past we should tell, is not just relative to the power of this or that group enforcing it; there are better and worse stories. Good takes on history can only be brought forward by a mind coming at it with all it’s got: its experience and understanding of the deepest aspects of the human condition, paired with knowledge of every possible field and realm, looking at history from the inside, the world of thought and inner experience driving historical events. And since our minds exist in history themselves, it also needs to understand itself as part of history, conscious of how its own thinking came about historically. A good take produced by such a mind can only be recognized as such by another mind that has achieved a similar level of development. But there’s more to say about all that, as you’ll see, which may shine a new light on some of our political-historical controversies.

I took much inspiration from R.G. Collingwood’s work here. A few parts even follow his arguments quite closely. Check out his “The Idea of History” if you are interested in this sort of thing.

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“History does not presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.”

— R.G. Collingwood¹

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I.

The history of ideas can teach us a great deal about the world we inhabit and ourselves. By studying it, bare threads of thought running over long time stretches come to our attention, illuminating pathways that jump-start areas of our minds having laid dormant before. We make ourselves available to the great becoming of history itself: a version of which having always been there in potential; a version whose trajectory playing itself out is a necessary feature of the cosmos.

To trace the history of thought is to strengthen what makes us truly human: our capacity to step out of our minds, taking the position of an observer looking at our own thought processes. Such a jump-start can kick us out of the parthogenetic sauce our brains are habitually cooking up, enabling us to watch it, study it: notably its disastrous entanglement with an unconscious logic playing itself out mercilessly. For to a large degree, we are the product of our thoughts — so what could be more useful than discovering them, understanding them in their wider historical context, so that we may work with them instead of being worked by them?

One of those threads running through recent history is the decline, if not outright destruction, of our long tradition of valuing what we might call the art of truthful reasoning. It is the art of developing and cultivating a beautiful and sharp mind, one that cuts through the jungle in front of our mental eyes, able to conquer new lands in the vast expanse of wider reality; a mind that takes in the deeper fabric of the thoughtscape in stride, a fabric built of logical connections across time and space, therefore transcending what we moderns like to think of as material reality. This thought-structure underwriting reality can be discerned via a wholesome form of reason, a perception rooted not in empiricism, but in Experience unfolding over time, in time, as Being.

True thought, beautiful reasoning, is not aimed at stating true facts that you discover once and hammer in stone. What you gain isn’t a thing, a material price. Results of thought are just fossilized artifacts; you might hang them on the wall if you like, but try to take them as timeless truths from which to build a worldview, and you end up with a monster made of dead parts: twitch it will, perhaps, but not live. And like ideologies, which are just such monsters, it will eventually haunt you and everyone it touches.

True thought is a movement, a process. It’s a bold charge, fueled by the dialogue between soul, mind and the hidden nonverbal mindspace from whence our experience ultimately flows. While it expresses truth, its truth is only valuable in the very act of thinking or rethinking it. Hence the fruits of true thought are never the last word, but an achievement in a certain direction. Such thought, when told or written down, and when read or listened to, may open a connection to the ground of all truth for all who are equipped to do so. With each connection so established, the next connection may become easier. True thought breeds more true thought.

To understand the decline of this form of beautiful and truthful reasoning and how it relates to history, we must look at how the ideas have formed that got us there: ideas that are part of a thought complex playing out its inner logic in a sort of background program running in the collective mind. Such background programs can arrest our development in history towards self-awareness, towards mind understanding itself in an ongoing act of illuminating the wider thoughtscape.

II.

There is a long-standing battle in philosophy between the schools of realism and idealism. Realists, who (re)gained ground in the late 19^th century particularly in Oxford and Cambridge and later went on to dominate Anglo philosophy entirely, emphasized the outside world, the reality that we see. In this picture, our mind’s purpose is to faithfully reproduce what’s out there, and it mostly does a decent job of it, to the point that we can safely ignore philosophical mind games for the most part. If this view seems to be entirely self-evident to you, this is because it is close to how science looks at the world, and as we know, we are in the near-total grip of a science-worshiping age: in fact, a big part of the realists’ motivation was to get rid of traditional philosophy as a competing sense-making framework and strengthen the scientific world view. This had been an ongoing process ever since Descartes and the dawn of the scientific age, fully actualizing itself in the positivist spirit of the 19th century. Figures like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and later the logical positivists sought to inoculate the high priests of the scientific age against those pesky philosophers threatening to undermine their grand ambitions to know the secrets of the universe using empirical facts and the scientific method alone. (A corollary to this program was their rejection of the traditional idea that ethics should be about helping people build character; instead, they proclaimed morality to be just another object of scientific study: let’s figure out how morality works, why humans behave morally or not, but let’s not be fooled by outdated notions such as that studying ethics can actually make us better men.)

But this downplaying of mind hadn’t been the standard view before. Difficult as it is to imagine these days, people at different times took the primacy of mind for granted. Their deepest background assumptions, their absolute presuppositions, formed a different constellation, as R.G. Collingwood put it. How exactly they went about it varies from recognizing a divine plan behind it all to assuming an inner logic not just to movements of objects, but to thoughts as well, this inner logic coming from a place more fundamental than the material world. Others assumed the world to be alive right down to the smallest part, not drawing the hard line between mind and nature that we take for granted these days.

The idealists came at it from many angles, ascribing to mind various roles in the process of knowing, understanding and perceiving the world that are very different from simply reproducing external reality. While we are somewhat used to thinking of our minds at least as a sort of “filter,” like colored glasses that may warp what’s really out there, the idealist tradition goes far beyond that. For Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, while reality most certainly exists (we don’t just make it up in our minds willy-nilly), what we actually experience is to a large degree conditioned by the make-up of our minds. Not just in the sense of those colored glasses, but much more deeply: even such fundamental categories as time, space and causality for those thinkers are not “out there” in the physical world, but are imposed on our perception by mind, thereby creating the world of appearances we experience. While this still implies a certain mind-matter duality, other approaches went beyond that and sought to give up such dualistic thinking entirely by looking at our experience more holistically, refusing the sharp distinction between life on the one side and dead matter on the other. But even such an approach tends to be misunderstood these days because of our scientific presuppositions: a philosophy centered on life that assumes the cosmos to be alive right down to the smallest material stuff invites us to think biologically about the world, and therefore ultimately scientifically, again losing sight of the role of thought and its place. You don’t have to diminish the intellectual achievements born of the scientific mindset that focuses on “nature out there” to ask the question: isn’t it weird to exclude thought itself as an object of study — not via experiment but, well, via thought?

You might say the battle between philosophical idealism and realism is pretty far-out stuff; and it’s easy to get lost in all those different positions and arguments. But the important thing to understand here is whether consciously or not, we all adhere to this or that philosophical school, the habitual way of thinking of our age. This creates sort of a hidden program running in the back of our minds, through which much of our perception of the world is directed. And since realism, and the connected thought complex of the materialist-reductionist program, has won the day not only in academia, but in the wider collective consciousness as the founding myth of the scientific age, it forms our standard assumption — the story we all “know” somehow, without us even noticing it. One of the implications of the realist mindset is that our attention is magnetically drawn to bottom-up materialist explanations and a view that treats everything, including history, as a sort of spectacle best viewed from the outside. In this light, it’s no wonder that we tend to forget about thought proper, as experienced from the inside, in our inquiries: our background assumptions, unnoticed by us, push us away from such an endeavor. This is especially relevant when it comes to our relationship with history.

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Entrenched assumptions — foundational myths of our age — are like magnets, like gravitational fields guiding our thinking as invisible forces. They are the reason why, for example, when we look at a historical warrior, we would rather explain his behavior by referring to a biological need or a psychological theory instead of writing a poem about his inner state on the morning of his greatest battle; why we don’t seamlessly blend myth and history anymore like the ancients, or see history through a theological lense like the medievals, but rather pretend our own myths to be proven fact; why we look at the age of industrialization and apply economic theory instead of thinking about man’s place in relation to his and his civilization’s destiny; why we see class warfare, revolts driven by clashing institutions and sociological laws dictating outcomes instead of great men changing a people’s fate, teleologically attracted outcomes, or people’s complex and diverse driving forces as expressed in their thinking. It is why we have lost our sense of the individual, of the individual difference in thought quality and depth apparent in historical actors. And it is why we tend to perceive events in the past as objects moving around according to this or that law, and seek to find the one cause or explanation for every event of the past. And when there’s a dispute about the cause, we pretend it can be settled simply by referring to a set of facts, as if we were in a physics laboratory conducting experiments.

When we are more on the idealist side in our habitual way of thinking, on the other hand, which is only possible when the age we live in has anchored such ideas in the collective mind (or when things are changing, as seems to be the case in our own day and age), we tend to focus on thought — including its inner logic and its power to illuminate the world and our place in it from the inside. We won’t overlook the role of mind in bringing about our world as it unfolds in history; indeed we recognize it to be the driving force. While such a view doesn’t necessarily diminish the importance of the scientific approach, it leads to a natural attitude of thoughtful exploration, of an understanding of mind from mind, and formulating it in beautiful and piercing prose that blurs the line between academic and poetic expression, between philosophy and history, between spiritual development and insight into past and present.

III.

Every historical event has two aspects to it: the material event itself (what actually happened), and the thoughts that produced the event. This is what differentiates a historical event from, say, a geological event: the first has an additional layer at its root, namely human’s participation in a sophisticated thoughtscape. Consequently, when dealing with history, we are dealing with what people have thought — individually and collectively, as expressed in various mind constellations. Idealist-leaning philosophers of history such as Hegel have often been ridiculed for devising their grand schemes of hidden logic behind historical events as if there was some strange Geist literally shaping material events as they play out. But they didn’t talk about the logic of the material side of the events; they meant the thought constellations behind the material events and their inner logic. All individual minds are embedded in these, and to the degree there is a certain logic to how things go on the thought plane, how thoughts flow, develop and evolve, we may be able to discern it. Whether Hegel and others like him were right about the specifics or not, this is not such a crazy thing to say, and only appears to us that way because of the hidden assumptions of our own age.² Marx famously reversed Hegel’s order, seeing thought as a consequence of the material, in this case his version of economics. In that sense, he played his part in the shift away from idealism.

The move away from approaching history through the idealist lens was sweeping, and in line with the general thrust of 19^th century positivism – that is, the program to elevate natural science to the top of the heap and subjugate every domain of human knowledge to what was thought of as the scientific method. In that picture, you gather facts and then generalize what you found to come up with laws. Problem is, this method is ill-suited to the study of history, because history is not some material show external to the historian’s mind that he can study like a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is the product of mind, and hence must be approached from the inside, by getting into people’s minds and the wider collective mind from which these individual minds draw. To understand a historical “fact” is to try our best to rethink what a person in the past thought: his reasoning, understanding, explanations, narratives, and so on. To put ourselves in their shoes, re-experiencing what they experienced, allowing the thought constellations that drove them to fill our own minds.

Mistaking history for natural science, as we unconsciously tend to do these days, channels historians away from such “re-enacting” (Collingwood) of people’s thoughts, tempting them to think of history in purely material terms, as an external happening. But since the usual scientific method of collecting isolated facts and coming up with a general law via induction doesn’t work when dealing with history, historians in the positivist age became increasingly content with just amassing huge piles of historical facts – which obviously is a useful thing to do, but also makes history boring and ultimately self-defeating if it doesn’t offer genuine insight. It is also hardly the stuff that captures people’s imagination and invites them to think more deeply about where we came from and what we are.³ History is partly about facts, but these are of little use without the spark of mind that reads between the lines with a deep understanding of, well, mind. Only then history becomes intelligible, which is possible precisely because our minds are connected in the sense that we potentially have access, to varying degrees, to the ground of all experience: historical experience itself lives on in our own minds, because history-as-shaped-by-mind is the realm we roam in. It is our terrain, our world. Just as the explorer can tell you more about the terrain he has actually experienced than someone who just read about a place in a book, those who have gone further developing their minds via experience and challenge will have a deeper understanding of history, and will be able to deliver a richer and more insightful narrative about the past. This is because, again, mind unifies our experience and history: our mind lives in history.

There is another way that a ”scientific” approach to history can hurt a rich understanding of what happened in the past. Favoring as it does a neutral standpoint, where we strive towards being non-judgemental, can make us blind to how historical actors actually experienced events, and what that means in the grand scheme of things. For example, if you describe a horrible historical massacre merely from the outside, narrating “what happened” in a neutral tone, this makes it difficult to put yourself in the shoes of the survivors (or even the perpetrators) and what it meant for them. Rather than staying neutral, you must judge the event from the perspective of the participants – only then can you understand how it might have impacted the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the group and the meaning of it all down the line. Similarly, when you look at, say, the colonization by Europe, you should try to judge it as something positive in order to understand what went down: think how individual Europeans back then thought. Like, how colonization enlightens and civilizes the world, how it is only natural for Europe to rule the natives, and so on. But also judge it from the perspective of the colonized and how it played out for them, always staying focused on individual events and people and their nuances. You don’t have to agree with any of such judgements, but it’s useful to temporarily adopt them to get a grip on people’s drives and motivations: to allow their thoughts to flow into your own mind. (Just be careful to stay at least somewhat detached when you are channeling the really dark stuff.) Otherwise, to stay with the example of colonialism, all you have is, say, economic analysis, a story of exploitation of natural resources and so on. Which obviously is part of the picture, but without getting into the minds of different people in the past, our understanding of history will always remain superficial, and more often than not we just end up crudely slapping the assumptions of our own age on the past. Here again, development of mind meets ability for historical insight: we can only do that if we have managed to transcend, at least to a degree, the guardrails in our minds — the background programs — that keep us away from thinking thoughts foreign to our day and age, but which we can actually learn to think because they had been thought before and therefore are latent in our own minds as well.

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IV.

Given this picture, it is clear that a) history must be understood as mind, and that therefore b) when studying history, we are really studying mind, including our own mind as part of history, part of the wider mind.

History is not a series of isolated events, just as our mind cannot be broken down into a series of unconnected thoughts and experiences. History is a whole, is the human condition itself, is the expression of mind in the totality of time: complete with logical relations, dialectical movements, changing perspectives, ideas and attitudes, morphing, evolving according to deeper dynamics as mind becomes conscious of itself. When you look at a supposedly isolated event and keep asking poignant questions, you will be confronted with the totality of man’s spiritual-philosophical conundrums, just as it is when you are asking questions about mind. We begin to see that historical truth is, indeed, relative in a specific sense: yes, there are historical facts. But since there exist an infinite number of such facts, and worse yet, each of these facts runs infinitely deep, there is an infinite number of stories we can tell about history that are all true. Which brings us right back to the view that it all depends on the quality of our own minds: the more developed we are, the better, more truthful, more comprehensive, more appropriate and more insightful the story we tell about past events — the better we can choose the facts we focus on and the deeper we penetrate the bottomless well that is each fact. This also explains why during disputes about history, people tend to talk right past each other: not only can both parties tell narratives that are both true but seem diametrically opposed, if one party has a less developed mind then it won’t be able to comprehend what the other party is going on about.

The scientific approach to history isn’t useless, because science, too, is part of mind. But it is only one fiber in a bundle, one way mind can understand mind. If the realist-materialist program is mistaken for reality itself and not seen for what it really is, namely just one angle from which to approach the world, then we will only ever produce insights into history of a certain kind. While it is all fine and good to criticize some of the wilder escapades of freewheeling thought about history, at this point we need to recapture our ability for piercing, imaginative, beautiful and rich thought based on a well-developed character. A philosophy that devalues our capacity for insight via thought, and mistakes history for a series of hard facts that can be ironed out using a criterium outside of mind, will bring out our worst tendencies for identification with this or that narrative that we take as set in stone.

The tragedy of postmodernism is that while the critique of positivism and history-as-science is valid, and we are talking about mind understanding history-as-mind here, this has led some to believe all we have to go on is power dynamics: if there are many equally valid narratives, so the argument goes, then the dominant group will just impose its particular version of history on everybody, and that’s the end of it. But this view doesn’t take into account the quality of mind as the determining factor whether a particular take is more truthful than another: the stories we tell about history aren’t created equal, even when they are both based on fact.

Getting into people’s heads and adopting their vision, ideas and experience is only possible if you developed your mind to the degree that you can transcend your own knee-jerk reactions. You must have made conscious your own background assumptions and identifications as much as is possible, wrestled with them, understood how they came to be. You must understand your own principles, your own spiritual-philosophical place. This is something that can never fully be achieved in this life — we are not gods. But there are those who are further along on their journey than others. The implication here is that when lesser minds look at history, in the case of postmodernists unchecked even by a scientific approach to history (wrongheaded as such an approach may be in many ways), they will turn the critique of positivism into the silliest form of relativism: every narrative is as good as any other. Which then gives them license to use their low-level minds to come up with low-level narratives, hammering away at history through the brutally inaccurate lens of their own unconscious, untranscended assumptions, their perception of history constrained by their mind’s (in)capacity for depth, plasticity and imagination. Or they will live in cognitive dissonance: on the one hand, they proclaim historical narratives to be purely relative, all being subjective and all; but on the other hand, they will shamelessly use their own poor subjective lens and proclaim the results to be gospel truth, unable to perceive the richness of mind in history that richer, more developed minds can see. To the degree they are aware of this contradiction at all, they will justify it by simply declaring it all to be a power play, and that they need to win the narrative war against the baddies.

V.

The understanding of history as mind, and the recognition that we have a way of accessing it that goes far beyond “gathering facts,” has wide political implications for how we deal with history. You see, there is a flip-side to historical awareness being based on re-enacting thought: whenever we are confronted with historical facts, even when put forth neutrally but especially when wrapped in a narrative vividly describing intense events, we are forced to to relive the past from the perspective of those involved. Our minds are forced to recognize this particular aspect of mind, a sort of high-resolution snapshot of a certain situation. This is the reason why atrocity propaganda is such an effective and widespread tool — and the reason we shy away from any narrative that emphasizes aspects that don’t conform to our political beliefs, especially the founding myths of our society. For example, the allied bombings of Dresden and other German cities during WWII are almost never mentioned, and if they are, they are talked about in very generic and detached terms, often implying that tragic as those events were, they were also somewhat justified. Same is true for the horror experienced by ethnic Germans in Poland before Germany’s invasion, or the expulsion of Germans from the east after WWII. Whereas Jewish suffering at the hands of Germans is not only talked about all the time, it is described in all its horrifying, gory details. Similarly, those who flip the script and like to blame the Jews for everything don’t talk about brutal pogroms, of peasants butchering Jews in their homes and raping their wives and daughters. They will either deny such things happened, or just mention them in general terms while painting them as somewhat justified or understandable. Again, being confronted with such historical details forces mind to recognize mind: we re-experience aspects of this kind of suffering, according to our own mind’s capacity. Except that we don’t do it consciously but simply are drawn into it by those who seek to dominate the narrative for their own purposes.

Hence interested parties have always kept a tight lid not not so much on historical facts, but which aspects are kept alive in the collective mind of the present, and which are excluded or only mentioned in detailed historical studies read by few. The more certain events are “remembered,” the more they enter the collective consciousness, the more we get stuck in a sort of time-loop, experiencing them again and again: we integrate them into our own mind, creating those background programs that form the consciousness of an age. That way, history itself is altered and channeled into certain directions; we inhabit a certain mindspace, kept down by the magnetic force of the constant re-living of certain events. By warping history that way, the propagandists and myth-guardians not only warp our minds, but mind-at-large. It matters immensely to which parts of history, particularly historical tragedy, the public mind pays attention to. It matters immensely which aspects of history we direct our mind’s eye towards.

Now, this sort of keeping us in a time-loop, forcing us to re-enact certain events again and again, holds true for events that actually took place in one form or another. But what about propaganda that simply invents things? Take the story from the run-up of the Kosovo war that Milosevic had built concentration camps, which turned out to be a lie to justify the war and particularly trigger Germans into giving up their pacifistic doctrines.⁴ Here, the propaganda, to the degree that we believe it, forces our minds to relive events that never took place. Such propaganda is even more insidious: it acts like poison to our minds, creating a chaotic disturbance, a black vortex in mind-at-large. In some sense, it conjures up a parallel reality for us: for if history is mind, a false version of history creates a parallel mind. Except that where the real mind is shaped by past thought, this artificial version is shaped by present lies, effectively decoupling us from mind-at-large by jamming the signal as it runs through history via the thoughtplane. In the final analysis, however, such jamming, such an artificial mindspace can only go so far: it is not sustainable. If a given mindspace cannot draw its energy from Reality, but needs an exponential supply of manufactured input in the forms of lies, it will collapse eventually. The truth will come out, and where it won’t, our minds may develop to such a degree of insight from the exercise of looking into history with increasing imaginative power rooted in mind recognizing mind, that we will be able to fill in the gaps even without hard evidence. When the fake reality bursts, we shall be free: unmoored by the gravity pull of the time loop, finally able to re-enact those events of the past we’d rather ignore for the sake of our myths – myths held together, barely, by warping our minds, therefore history, therefore mind-at-large.

How to choose which aspects of history to re-enact, to re-live, if we don’t want to leave it to the propagandists, no matter which side they’re on? Can we get out of the perpetual dialectic of myth-building, myth-crumbling, myth-inversion, new myth building? Should we even try?

I don’t have the answers to those questions. We can’t go back to the ancient or medieval approach to history: having experienced the scientific age won’t allow it. We like our myths to be provable facts, thank you very much. But since this can’t work for the reasons stated, we can’t do that either, and in any event we can’t just discard a century worth of criticism of positivism. Obviously however (at least to me) divorcing historical story from any quality criterium except the power to enforce it won’t do.

Perhaps the best we can do as individuals is to use the current time of myth-transition as an opportunity to strengthen our minds, to learn how to see further and wider through history (and therefore reality) by developing a sort of mosaic consciousness: to see the whole picture by perceiving many narratives at once; narratives that various people held in the past, which have shaped our own narratives. Because to know history is to know the terror of history, this can be painful, but painful it must be if it is to be useful. Once we understand more of reality by having all those mosaic pieces in place, illuminating the human condition from the inside, we can choose wisely what to focus on in any given moment as we participate in the process of narrative-shaping. We will understand others and their narratives better, and won’t be sucked in so easily into the propaganda efforts of various interested parties. We might also become more immune against the merciless inner logic of history: the thought processes triggered by certain developments, leading to new theories and counter-revolutionary concepts based on a poor understanding, a poor mind, which then turn against us, like that monster made of dead fruits of knowledge mentioned at the beginning. Understanding our mind as part of history can make us aware of these dynamics.

In the meantime, thinking about history in this way will make the historical controversies of our own time less baffling and less infuriating, strengthening our awareness of our birthright to move away from the vortex, towards one possibility that has always been latent, and that must play itself out at least for some people: the process of mind coming to understand mind unfolding in history.

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1. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 226

2. As Collingwood remarks, “if it is maintained that temporal sequence and logical implication have nothing to do with each other, historical knowledge becomes impossible, for it follows that we can never say about any event ‘this must have happened’; the past can never appear as the conclusion of a logical inference. If the temporal series is a mere aggregate of disconnected events, we can never argue back from the present to the past. But historical thinking consists precisely of arguing back in this way …” (p. 110)

Notice how Collingwood stays on the plane of thought here, trying to figure out how a deeper logic that connects our own minds with patterns playing out in history, instead of defaulting to a realist perspective that sees events as “material stuff out there” which we just need to perceive. From such a realist or materialist perspective, we might be tempted to say instead, well, that something “must have happened” is simply because cause and effect have brought it about, just as a physical cause has a physical effect. And when someone objects that we are dealing with humans here, and therefore minds, if we are running materialist background assumptions, we might say OK, but we can understand human reactions bottom-up via psychology: someone did this because he was frightened, and he was frightened because of the flight-or-fight response conditioned by evolution, and so on, and therefore this or that must have happened. In other words, to the realist, any talk about an inner logic of the thoughtplane, transcending time and place because our own minds can potentially share this inner logic, seems absurd – such things don’t even occur to him.

3. It is interesting that Oswald Spengler’s daring and sweeping work, promising to lay bare no less than the destiny of entire civilizations, was such a huge success with the public, and sparked such outrage and ridicule among professional historians. He was in fact a positivist in the sense that he treated history as something external, zoological. But he took positivism seriously and didn’t stop at gathering facts, generalizing them to universal laws of nature. While such a program is fundamentally mistaken in many respects, it was at least appealing in its daring narrative, as opposed to the dry fact-gathering by those historians trapped between science-worship and the realization that history can’t be science.

4. There had been a great documentary about this that even made it to German mainstream TV (although apparently, once they realized what it actually says, they pushed its transmission to the middle of the night), appropriately called “It began with a lie” — it’s on YouTube.