The Hour of Decision

The following is an excerpt from Oswald Spengler’s “The Hour of Decision,” 1933. Large paragraphs have been divided for easier readability.

A note from The White Tribe:
Please make a careful observation of the population numbers which Spengler has described, and understand that these numbers are now almost a hundred years old. An extrapolation can be made about current demographics in White nations, from which inferences about the direness of our situation must arise. White decline is not new to our century; Spengler himself here writes about it occurring, but by all accounts it must have been happening since even before his day.

But the decay of the white family, the inevitable outcome of megalopolitan existence, is spreading, and it is devouring the “race” of nations. The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of its families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting from his own and other lives the maximum of amusement — panem et circenses.

The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties towards family, nation, and State. The whole of Liberal-Socialistic problem-literature revolves about this suicide of the white race.

The consequences lie before us. The colored races of the world have up till now been twice as strong numerically as the white. But about 1930 Russia had an annual excess of births of four million, Japan of two million; and India, between 1921 and 1931, increased her population by thirty-four million. In Africa the extraordinarily prolific Negro population will increase still more enormously now that European medicine has been introduced to check disease, which was so strong a selective factor.

In contrast to this, Germany and Italy have a surplus of births of less than half a million, England — the country of publicly encouraged birth control — less than half this amount, and France and the old-established Yankee element in the United States none at all.  (This applies equally to the white element in South Africa and Australia.) This Yankee element, until now the dominant “race” of Germanic stamp, has been rapidly dwindling for some decades. The increase of population comes entirely from the side of the Negroes and emigrants since 1900.

In France some provinces have lost over a third of their population in the last fifty years. In certain cases the birth-rate is only half the death-rate. There are small towns and villages which are almost empty. From the South there is an influx of Catalonians and Italians as land-workers. Poles and Negroes are found in every grade, even the middle classes. There are black clergymen, officers, and judges. It is these prolific immigrants, accounting for a tenth of the population, who alone keep the number of “Frenchmen” up to anything approaching the old level. But the genuine Frenchman will soon be no longer master in France.

The apparent increase of the white population all over the world, little as it is in comparison with the volume of the colored increase, rests upon a temporary illusion: the number of children grows ever smaller, and only the number of adults increases, not because there are more of them, but because they live longer.

But a strong race requires not only an inexhaustible birth-rate, but also a severe selection process, which is provided by the resistances to living represented by misfortune, sickness, and war.

Nineteenth-century medicine, a true product of Rationalism, is from this point of view also a phenomenon of age. It prolongs each life whether this is desirable or no. It prolongs even death. It replaces the number of children by the number of greybeards. It promotes the world outlook of panem et circenses by estimating the value of life by the number of its days, not by their usefulness. It prevents the natural process of selection, and thereby accentuates the decay of the race.

The number of incurable mental cases in England and Wales has increased during twenty years from 4.6 to 8.6 per thousand. In Germany the number of the feeble-minded is almost half a million, in the United States over a million. According to a report sponsored by ex-President Hoover, the youth of America has a record of 1,360,000 with hearing impaired or “so defective in speech that they require remedial treatment and training,” 1,000,000 with “weak or damaged hearts,” 675,000 presenting “behavior problems,” 450,000 “mentally retarded to such a degree that they require special education,” 300,000 cripples, and 60,000 “blind or in need of sight-saving instruction.”

But added to these are the terrible numbers of abnormal people of every description, mental, spiritual, and physical: the hysterical, moral, and nerve cases who neither want nor can bear healthy children. Their number is unobtainable, but we can gauge it by the number of doctors who live by them and the mass of books that are written about them. From this degenerate crop comes the revolutionary proletariat, with its hatred born of grievances, and the drawing-room Bolshevism of the aesthetes and literary folk, who enjoy and advertise the attractiveness of such states of mind.

It is a well-known fact that important persons are seldom first children and almost never only ones. The marriage that is poor in offspring is a menace not only to the quantity but to the quality of the race.

What a nation needs quite as badly as a healthy race is the existence of an élite to lead it. But an élite such as that formed by the overseas civil service in England and the officer-corps in Prussia — or, for that matter, the Catholic Church — which unwaveringly, and in total disregard of money or origins, upheld its ethic and made good in difficult situations, becomes impossible when the available material rises nowhere above the average.

Life’s selection must have taken precedence of it; only then can the class selection take place. A strong stock demands strong parents. Something of the barbarism of the past ages must still be present in the blood beneath the strict form of an old Culture, ready to surge up in difficult times, to save and to conquer.

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