The UK controversial statues debate is about the decline of the West

The argument

Proponents of caution on the statues question argue that the debate is a symptom of something larger than the monuments themselves, and they read it through Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West — a two-volume book and thesis on the cycle of civilizations throughout history, published in 1918 and 1922. Spengler argues that Western civilization has passed its Cultural stage and is now in a stage of decay, and the framework matters to this argument because it treats the pattern as recurrent rather than unique to the present: what is happening now is held to be something civilizations do at a particular point in their life cycle. The specific element applied here concerns what a civilization does once decay has set in. On Spengler's account it embarks on a crusade to put forth its moral code on the people of the world — turning outward to impose judgement precisely when its own creative period has ended. Proponents take this to explain the tearing down of statues by not only protestors but the government alike: the removals are read not as an argument about the individuals commemorated but as a retrospective moral crusade, directed at the past because a confident civilization directs its energy at building instead. Two features of the argument follow from that reading. Because the pattern is presented as a cycle, participating in it is said to deepen the phase rather than resolve it; and because the diagnosis concerns the impulse behind the removals rather than any particular statue, it applies whatever the merits of the individual case. The conclusion is therefore procedural rather than a defence of any monument. If the statues debate marks the decline of the West, the priority is avoiding that period of decay rather than perpetuating the cycle — which is why proponents say we should approach the statues issue with caution.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Oswald Spengler’s thesis on current Western civilization can not be considered as a philosophical issue of today, because he was not only wrong about the “inevitable path” of 2 of the 8 cultures referenced in his books, he also argued that Western civilization is already in decline at the time of writing these books, which were published 100 years ago.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A century-old cyclical thesis about civilisations is a framework rather than evidence, and Spengler's own morphology has found little support among historians — invoking it establishes only that a category exists into which the events could be sorted. [Rejecting P2] The application is unfalsifiable in the way that makes such schemes useless here: if imposing a moral code marks decay, then so does resisting it, and the same premise would classify the erection of these statues by Victorians confident in their own moral code as evidence of the same decline — which shows the framework accommodates any outcome rather than explaining this one.