If you load the program, the old machine will peep and mutter after the fashion of its kind. Then, after some copyright notices relating to the underlying software appear on the screen, the program begins with the cheerful greeting:

Welcome to Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer.

A somewhat fishy beginning, perhaps. Certainly it does not evoke great expectations of meticulous and dispassionate scholarship. It suggests, rather, carnival barkers and patent medicines, fortunetellers with the cunning of successful psychotherapists, and paperback reprints of the prophecies of Nostradamus with garishly colored covers depicting a fierce-eyed bearded lunatic. Indeed, the very self-deprecation raises even deeper concerns. It is obviously an attempt to get you to lower your guard. Very likely, the program is designed to induce a false sense of security in its users.

Before it is possible to make a firm assessment, however, another message rises onto the screen as the first disappears:

If you would like an explanation of the theory behind the program, please type '1' and press 'return.' If not, type '2' and press 'return.'

[Online readers: remember, these options do apply to you.]

Though life is too short to read all the instructions offered to you, particularly the ones offered by computer programs, this situation obviously requires some explanation. Therefore, you pick the first option, and the computer soon explains:

Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer can predict the future into the 27th century.

The range for the program is not arbitrary. The early 27th century is about where the analogies from past civilizations which might some day apply to the West run out. Of course, how it can be said that analogies from, say, ancient Egypt run out at a distant point in the future is a matter which will require more explanation still. Before providing it, however, the program moves on to address some preliminary questions:

Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer is based on the ideas of the German philosopher, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936).

Oswald Spengler was a secondary school mathematics teacher who achieved world fame on the strength of one of history's most improbable best-selling books. Spengler's doctorate was in Classical Greek philosophy, with a doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Heraclitus. (It should also be noted that Spengler's understanding of mathematical theory was formidable; his ability to treat mathematics as a characteristic product of a given culture and time may have been unique.) His own philosophy, strongly influenced by Nietzsche, bore more than a passing resemblance to the ideas of Martin Heidegger (who, like Spengler, would also become a supporter of the Nazis).

A few years before the First World War, Spengler came into an inheritance which permitted him to quit teaching school and to pursue a historical study which he long had in mind, an examination of the parallels between the Western Europe of the early twentieth century and the Classical Mediterranean world at the time of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (roughly, from the mid-third century B.C. to the mid-second century B.C.). The outbreak of the First World War confirmed him in his opinion that Western civilization had entered a period of great wars of annihilation. It also came to deprive him of most of his income, since the inheritance which had subsidized his studies was largely in the form of income from stock in American companies which were eventually forbidden to pay dividends to Germans.

Nothing daunted and with Hannibal at the gates, Spengler had the first volume of his masterpiece, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, ready for publication just as Germany effectively surrendered to the allies in 1918. (The second volume appeared during the disastrous early 1920s.) Called The Decline of the West in English, this book became extraordinarily sought after throughout the German-speaking world, and then controversial throughout the whole world in various translations. Even during the great Weimar inflation, when each issue of money would become worthless after a few days, Spengler became wealthy just on sales in Switzerland alone. He wrote several more brief books (such as Man and Technics and Prussianism and Socialism) which simply expanded on points raised in his magnum opus.

Why any book becomes popular is fundamentally mysterious, particularly when the book is long and deals in large part with remote or abstract matters. However, the attraction of Spengler's ideas seems to have been firmly based on the fact that he made it possible even for bad historical experience to make sense, something that the endlessly ameliorative models of history from the nineteenth century could not do. It is not true, as is often implied when The Decline of the West is mentioned, that Spengler thought the West was collapsing or would soon be overcome by outsiders. Far from it, as you shall see.

Spengler was a German nationalist, or perhaps just a naive patriot. At any rate, he looked forward to a war which would erase the humiliation of 1918, and he believed that democracy did not have much of a future. He was willing to support the Nazis until a pragmatic regime came along which would support the mix of state socialism and cultural traditionalism which he thought was the shape of things to come. He does not appear to have been either a racist in general or an antisemite in particular. For what it is worth, it can be noted that after the Nazis came to power he repeatedly made disparaging remarks about Hitler in public and by preference kept company with nationalist-conservatives, many of whom did not survive the regime. It is quite likely that his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1936 saved him from eventual arrest or execution.

The program pedantically proceeds from biography to ideology:

Dr. Spengler believed that civilizations go through life cycles of about the same duration, and that each civilization goes through similar phases.

Spengler divided up the life phases of civilizations in different ways, depending on whether he was talking about their artistic life, political history, or spiritual life (the latter covering, roughly, philosophy and religion). To put all the possible periods together, he makes mention of:

A precultural period, when people are essentially barbarians, as was the case in what is usually called the Dark Ages of Europe;

Spring, an age of faith like the High Middle Ages in Europe;

Summer, like the Renaissance and early Baroque, when the culture develops its distinctive arts and sciences;

Autumn, when the fundamental insights of the culture reach full maturity (if not necessarily final form), as in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe; and

Winter, when the creations of the past in art and science and spiritual life are perfected and elaborated, but not fundamentally extended. Technology flourishes here, rather than fundamentally new science. For Spengler the science of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not essentially new, because it was in the characteristically Western style of science established by people like Newton and Leibnitz. This final age is the time of increase in quantity, not quality. Spengler called Spring, Summer and Autumn "Culture," while Winter was the era of "Civilization" in his special sense of the term. The computer program, and so this book, are concerned exclusively with Winter.

Keep in mind that this outline distorts Spengler's ideas because it mentions only Western examples. His method was to find examples of the art or political life of the "Spring," for instance, from a variety of peoples and cultures. Thus, the pyramids of the Old Kingdom period in Egypt and the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages in Europe are both characteristic products of the Spring. He treated these illustrations as all of equal significance in their own stories, not as part of a great story leading up to the modern West.

Perhaps the most disconcerting premise of Spengler's for many readers will be his assertion that "modern times," roughly the early Winter of Western civilization beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, is not unique. Other civilizations have also experienced comparable periods of secularism and aggressively individual art and revolutionary politics, though each in its own form. Perhaps Spengler owed a lot of his popularity to the prediction that this kind of thing does not go on forever.

Neither, thankfully, does the program, which can now become more specific about how it operates:

When a person occupies the same place in the life cycle of one civilization as someone else does in another civilization's cycle, these people are said to be 'contemporary.' For instance, Spengler (and other historians) say that Alexander the Great in Classical times and Napoleon in the modern West are 'contemporary.'

There are several "other historians" who might be mentioned in this context, since Spengler has not had this kind of history all to himself, even in the twentieth century. His chief competitor as a comparative historian was the English scholar, Arnold Toynbee. The latter's great work, A Study of History, began to appear in 1934 and ultimately reached twelve volumes by the time it was completed in 1961. Toynbee, like Spengler, was convinced that the modern West was repeating, in its own style, much of the behavior of the ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Toynbee, however, did not see the cycles as in quite the same relationship as Spengler did. Toynbee believed that the First World War in the West was "contemporary" with the Peloponesian War between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece, which occurred more than 200 years before the Punic Wars which so impressed Spengler. More generally, Toynbee did not believe in the fairly rigid cycles of Spengler's imagination. Toynbee's Study was explicitly intended as a British empiricist's correction of the German's dogmatic Decline. Among other things Spengler never attempted, the Study made a serious, indeed earnest, effort to cover the whole world. Toynbee would note the parallels and common patterns in the lives of different civilizations when they could be documented, but he refused to believe that history had ever been predestined, or that the fate of the West was already sealed. Events could always be traced to some individual or collective act of will.

The result was that Toynbee's history was built around certain loose sociological generalizations, notably his notion that historical change was a matter of "challenge" and "response." Since counter-examples to Toynbee's illustrations of these principles were always available, historians since the late 1950s (when Toynbee was the most famous of their number in the world, thanks to the patronage of Henry Luce at Time magazine) have been able to dismiss Toynbee because his explanations did not quite hold up, even if no one ever succeeded in explaining away the empirical historical parallels he described.

Toynbee's efforts can be considered a real advance on Spengler's, since Toynbee recognized that the different civilization cycles were obviously related to each other and fell into certain classes. Both historians recognize Greco-Roman (or "Classical") civilization as distinct from the more properly so-called "Western civilization" which arose in Western and Central Europe during the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Spengler said that the two societies had nothing in common but a partial coincidence of territory and some inessential technology. Toynbee, on the other hand, insisted that Western Culture was obviously a successor to ("apparented by") the Classical world. He also pointed out that, while the Classical world was the creature of a certain limited geographical region, the West was at least in principle a "universal" civilization, a characteristic it shared with China (which also had a "classical" forerunner followed by a Dark Age) and with Islam. In comparison to both these latter generations of civilization, the earliest civilizations, which in Eurasia arose in river valleys, were really very local developments. Egypt, to take an example employed by the program, was never more than a small country. Still, even these early societies seemed to manifest many of the crises and phases which their later regional and universal descendants also experienced.

Finally, it must be noted that one of Toynbee's chief preoccupations was what he called "universal states." This is the final political form into which civilizations tend to fall. While Spengler was also keenly conscious of this final stage of his Winter phase of the historical cycle, he did not discuss the universal states in great detail. The program, on the other hand, deals primarily with the universal state phase of the West's cycle. After all, the program was designed to foretell the future, and almost the only part of the West's cycle still left to be played out is its destiny as a universal state.

Another slight delay, and the screen further explains:

Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer selects events from the histories of past civilizations which will be "contemporary" to events in our future.

Which civilizations are we talking about? The ones from which data lines have been entered are ancient Egypt (from the Hyskos to the XXII Dynasty), China (from the Hegemony of Chin to the end of the Latter Han Dynasty), the Classical world (from Alexander to the end of the Roman Empire), and a peculiar hybrid creature called "Islam." Spengler held that by the beginning of the Christian Era, the Middle East was the home of an awakening new culture which he called "Magian," after the Magi of ancient Persia. Spengler's idea was that the culture was composed of religious communities the way that the later West would be composed of "nation states" (an idea suggested, perhaps, by the ethnically-based administrative practices of the Ottoman Empire). Thus, the Jews, the Christians of Syria and Anatolia, and the Zoroastrians of Persia were all "Magian" communities. The birth of this new culture was masked, however, by the accident that the Romans had political control over much of its territory.

The distortion was as great as if the Arabs had conquered Merovingian France, imposing Arabic culture and art on people who had not yet had time to create their own. (Spengler calls this kind of distortion "pseudomorphosis," and says that much the same thing happened to Russia.) The new society had to express itself in alien forms; it pretended to be Greek and Roman. The Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire of the East, was in reality a Magian polity. It was not essentially different in spirit from its long-time foe, Sassanid Persia, or more importantly, from the Islamic "Reformation" which ultimately destroyed it. This culture reached its final form in the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed as recently as the end of the First World War.

You do not have to accept Spengler's hypothesis of a "Magian culture" to see why the Ottoman Empire was included as one of the four sample civilizations: like Han China, the Roman Empire, and the Empire phase of Egyptian history, it lasted roughly 500 years and went through many of the same crises which these other empires also experienced. It was arguably a "universal state," since it swallowed a whole international system when it conquered the Middle East. The question is whether it can really be said to represent the final form of a single, mature "culture."

The program, however, can proceed undaunted by this kind of reservation to assure you:

[In order to be reassured, please click here for the rest of the Introduction.]