Up until now Spengler has made many allusions to the idea that Stoicism, Buddhism, and Socialism form a category of a declining civilization’s phenomena (“old age attitudes”). To be sure, here he means that form of Socialism by which the lower castes are subsidized to do nothing: “welfare socialism”, in contrast to his more-vaunted Prussian socialism, which is socialism in the sense of Soviet-style economic management. Either way, I have had a hard time even beginning to understand how Socialism would relate even remotely with Stoicism and Buddhism. Here, at the end of this section, he has just now explained it.
Spengler contrasts two types of civilizations: one which cares only for the here-and-now and cares not for Time, and those which are utterly enraptured by Time. To the former he assigns the Classical and Indian civilizations, and to the latter Egyptian and Faustian (i.e. contemporary Western) civilizations. In Greece, Rome, and India, there was no reckoning of time like there is today; years hardly count for Greece and Rome, and in India centuries went by without much fuss. The Classical Stoicism and the Indian Buddhism are essentially formalized doctrines of this anti-temporalism. In contrast to the peasantry of these civilizations, who merely feasted, celebrated, slumbered, etc. as they pleased without caring to make plans for the morrow nor preserve what was created the day before, the aristocracy threw out even the present, and thereby embarked on the ascetical, monastic paths to Liberation. It is the difference between inertia and stability, tamas and sattva. The hylic pashu is utterly passive to the forces of the stream, to the cracks of Māra’s whip, and so indulges in every pleasure and flees from every pain. The pneumatic divya, meanwhile, sees the emptiness at the bottom of all this, and begins to reach for the sunlit riverbank instead of back down into the murky depths. It is a trivial remark to say that they are both without time, without history. Blind Mercury does not perceive Saturn’s prison bars around him; luminous Mars has long since escaped and killed Saturn; that they are both “unengaged with Saturn” is moot.
Now, it certainly makes sense to compare welfare-socialism (FDR, the Gracchi, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mazdak, etc.) with the serfish ignorance of time*, but not at all with the noble conquest of time. It might be said that the Buddhist saṅgha is somewhat of a welfarist institution, in that they refuse to farm nor raise money for their food, instead walking about with bowls to beg—the anti-temporal hand to mouth existence that Spengler attributes to the entire Classical and Indian civilizations. Very well! I would agree that such monks, however admirable their progress may be on the ariya-magga, are utterly dependent on the planning and organization of terrestrial producers. Better, in my estimation, would be the Roman farmer-emperors like Aurelius and Cincinnatus (the latter famously emulated by our own Washington), who despite their supratemporal orientations, recognized the need to plan and provide for their time-conditioned bodies. Perhaps this is why I plan to keep a small house and a humble job in my future course on the quest for the spirit: my orientation is more Classical than Indian.
The point, however, is that it is wrong to think all silence is equal. Slumber is not meditation, inertia is not balance, tamas is not sattva, stagnation is not tranquility—and a man who sees all this and judges “Well, none of them engage in planning, so they must all be equally lazy jerks!” is one of those chronic drunkards who, to quote Julius Evola†, thinks that all life is intoxication, and thus sees the end of intoxication as the end of life.
* Speaking of "time": economists of the so-called Austrian school (see for example Hans-Hermann Hoppe) have described socialists as having "high time preference", which is a fancy way of saying they prefer present goods over future goods. In contrast, market capitalists have a low time preference, which is to say they are willing to delay present gratification for future goods of greater quantity/quality. As an illustration, compare a welfare-dependent to an entrepreneur. The former is more present-oriented in that he prefers to stay at home and received checks, rather than go to work to receive paychecks of greater value at a later date. The latter is more future-oriented in that he invests his money in capital goods to expand his operations and (hopefully) earn greater profits.
It's
weird to model transcendent asceticism in economic terms, but in line
with what I've said: it could be said that Stoics and Buddhists have zero time preference—neither present-oriented nor future-oriented—in
the sense that they cultivate an attitude free of attachments and
preferences, in an endeavor that produces supratemporal fruits (ἀπάθεια
for the Stoics, nibbāna for the Buddhists). So, contra Spengler, Stoics
and Buddhists are so far from socialists that they are off the chart,
so to speak.
† The Doctrine of Awakening p. 203
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