It's as simple as that.

Indeed, it's even simpler than that. The complete edition of The Decline of the West (in English) appears in two thick volumes which together come to upwards of 800 pages, plus charts and indices. Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer, on the other hand, is essentially embodied in four program lines, which read:

If E$ = "China" then let H = F + 2300
If E$ = "Egypt" then let H = F + 3547
If E$ = "Rome" then let H = F + 2127
If E$ = "Islam" then let H = F + 626

For each of these cases, the lines specify the number of years between the time something happened in a given civilization, and when you might expect something analogous to happen in the West. They were arrived at, frankly, by picking prominent personalties from the histories of these societies who seemed to play roles similar to those of Caesar in Classical times. The climaxes of the careers of the four "Caesars" are therefore deemed to be contemporary. The identification of Alexander with Napoleon, of course, is the lynch-pin of the whole system. (China has a figure rather like Alexander, too.) The Western Caesar can be expected to live as long after Napoleon as Caesar did after Alexander. The rest is history.

Perspicacious readers will note that the algorithm lines do not take into account the fact there was no year zero. Thus, the assignment of all events that happened before the beginning of the Christian era to corresponding dates in the Western future is off by a year. At least.

Not a moment too soon, the computer screen cautions:

A note of warning.

Haven't there been detailed refutations of both Spengler and Toynbee since almost the time their works first appeared? Certainly both have been subjected to telling factual critiques by experts in the places and times of which the two historians take such an imperial overview. Toynbee was more susceptible to this kind of criticism, since he set out far more facts than Spengler. However, the chief argument usually raised against comparative history of this kind, and particularly as practiced by Spengler, is that it rests on an organic metaphor. Civilizations (tricky things to define in the first place) are said to "grow" and "mature" and "die." How this sort of poetic diction explains the way event "A" gave rise to "B" in any given civilization is necessarily mysterious; to ask "why does this happen?" of Spengler is to be answered, literally, "that's life."

Many worthy commentators have remarked that this is not an explanation at all. The explanations for real events in history, such as why General McClellan refused to advance against inferior forces during the Peninsular Campaign in the American Civil War, or why the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in October of 1929, lie in specific, causal relationships. The explanation for historical events is never some generality like "Magian Culture" or "It was Autumn in China," or even something like "class conflict" or "the next step in evolution." An explanation is who talked to whom, what resources were available and what techniques were known to make use of them. The outcome of many battles can be explained by nothing more mysterious than the weather. It is possible to do comparative history of different cultures and different times without waxing mystical. The Annales school in France, and the American historian, William McNeill (a great admirer of Toynbee, by the way), have long shown that a historical narrative can link China and Europe and India, say, over a period of centuries without departing from the types of proof that would satisfy a hardheaded, empirical sociologist. The generalizations such historians admit to are small, but well-founded, and they all deal with the description of the past, not the prediction of the future.

This is an old dispute, and not one that can be settled in the introduction to a video game. However, for whatever it may be worth, it does appear that the physics of the late twentieth century is turning against the view of causation on which this anti-organicist critique were based. The critics assumption seems to have been that the behaviors of complex systems (such as a society of millions of people) are determined by the fundamental elements of which the system is made. Thus, systems that are made out of fundamentally different stuff, or that operate under greatly different conditions (such as societies with widely different levels of technological development might be thought to do) ought to behave in radically different ways. Two very different human societies, therefore, ought not to have similar histories, or even analogous ones.

Though perhaps cited in too many unlikely contexts already, it does seem that chaos theory puts all this into question. We now know that the same patterns will show up in complex systems of wildly different composition, from the growth of algae in ponds to the behavior of the stock market. In a way, of course, this is nothing new: it's not a revelation to be told that the same basic market patterns governed "tulipmania" in 17th century Holland as brought about the fall of the "junk bond" market in the 1980s in the United States. Can similarly analogous patterns hold for the behavior of whole societies over the course of centuries? Maybe; let's see. Even if they do, however, the program moves on to wisely observe:

The output of Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer should be taken in a purely heuristic sense.

The data lines entered into the computer were necessarily chosen within the limits of the author's own biases and level of historical sophistication. They lean heavily toward political and military events, simply because such things are easy to date to a single year or range of years. They disproportionately make use of dates from the Classical world because that information is most readily available in the United States in the early 1990s.

Further, they deprive the reader of one of the great excellences of The Decline of the West, the attempt to identify the special spirit of each civilization. From the earliest hymns of the Age of Faith to the abdication edict of the last emperor, there will be a certain continuing style in the way a culture and its civilization do things, a style which will infect its mathematics and politics, its music and its idea of money.

Some anthropologists have been greatly taken with this idea. Ruth Benedict's famous study of four small non-Western societies, Patterns of Culture, even uses some of Spengler's terminology. The Hopi people of the American southwest are said to possess an "Apollonian culture," that is, a society which supposedly values limits and clarity above all else. This use of the term Apollonian (derived from Nietzsche) is essentially Spengler's. Indeed, Spengler's characterization of the Classical world as Apollonian, with its mathematics of solid bodies, its politics based on the citizen-assembly which could be seen at a glance in the city agora, its high art of the human form, is one of the most compelling arguments in the Decline. It was because of his characterization of the West, however, that the program gives you this final warning:

Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer should be kept out of the hands of gullible undergraduates, German revanchists and recovering Logical Positivists.

According to Spengler, the West is a "Faustian" civilization. Readers will recall that Faust was a legendary Renaissance scholar-magician who sold his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power. To be Faustian is to be impatient of limits, to seek the hidden, to take terrible risks. Benedict identified certain Indians of the American northwest as Faustian. Their otherwise well-ordered lives centered around ceremonies which deliberately created the setting for some dreadful excess. The potlatch is supposed to be characteristic of this kind of society, the ultimate in conspicuous consumption, in which great men give away or destroy a fortune in goods or money in order to gain prestige. (Actually, profligate benefactions by the rich to the poor were also the stuff of Classical Greco-Roman politics; in Roman history, the practice was called "bread and circuses.") In one rite, a horrible anthropophagous god would possess the celebrant, and participants were in danger of losing flesh to his bites. These were not the excesses of indiscipline; the culture acknowledged the limits of normal behavior by deliberately transcending them. It was the same spirit which made them the only Amerindian people to develop ocean travel.

Spengler's Faustian West, of course, is a being of immensely vaster scale and subtlety. Its science quite literally seeks the infinite and its technology is contemptuous of the human scale. It alone developed a mathematics which can deal with invisible forces, by means of which the West has probed the regions of the earth and of near space that have heretofore been closed not only to man, but to life itself. Its political and military power has stretched all around the world. In its Spring, it developed forms of Christianity to which all human beings were to be compelled to submit, while in its early Winter it dreamed of ideologies of reform and revolution which would end the need for further social change once and for all, everywhere in the world. Its art is music, just as the art of the Classical world was sculpture. Music is based on harmony, the invisible force which operates between notes, and mathematical time, the clockwork of the Faustian soul.

This, at least, is how Spengler looked at his own culture. The description is cold, sinister, suggestive of limitless ruthlessness. Actually, this kind of deliberate self-diabolization is one of the recurrent themes of Western history. It is scarcely merited. The West was the only major civilized society to abolish slavery, or to develop the eccentric, St. Francis-like interest in the well-being of the natural world which stands behind all conservation efforts. Most claims by non-Western societies to have traditions of oneness with nature and equal respect for all human beings turn out on examination to be restatements of 19th century romanticism by local patriots. Even more curious, the West is the only major civilization to try to make a science of "getting inside the skin" of other societies. One of the most bizarre features of the world in the twentieth century is that there is no important critique of the West which is not of Western origin. As V.S. Naipul once so cruelly put it: when you listen to Gandhi, you are not hearing ancient India, but Tolstoy with a bit of Ruskin.

Spengler himself realized that, while there was a streak of Viking ruthlessness throughout Western history, there is also a peculiar carefulness. Many societies have had comprehensive and draconian legal codes, designed to cover all aspects of life. What is typically Western is the idea of meticulous official planning of life with the intention of making everybody safe forever. Spengler identified this characteristic with "Prussianism," and maybe he had a point. Certainly the good, gray, Social Democrats who ruled Weimar Prussia carried on a tradition of community paternalism which may be necessary to operate any effective modern state.

Still, perhaps there is another dichotomy in the West more important than that between Social Democracy and the Viking Spirit. The archetype in the Western soul of the search for the ultimate was fixed long before Doktor Faustus had his shady dealings with the Evil One. The Quest for the Holy Grail requires all those qualities of deep thought and hard work which the search for mere power requires. The difference is, those who go on the Quest have the hope of becoming what human beings are supposed to be as the adventure proceeds, whereas Faust disintegrates as his power grows.

The characteristic enterprise of the West is not the war of conquest, but the Crusade. The peculiarly Western desire is not to dominate, which is common to many times and places; rather, it is the desire to be the instrument of universal redemption. The Crusaders have an ill-name in the Islamic world and the merits of the case cannot be decided here. However, though the Crusaders turned greedy and the sack of Jerusalem was an atrocity, the whole affair cannot be reduced to simple unprovoked aggression. It was sparked, after all, by a plea for help from the Byzantine Empire, which seemed to be about to expire in the face of a renewed Muslim offensive.

Consider how extraordinary a spectacle it was. In the early Crusades, at least, it meant that an appreciable portion of the governing class of a no-longer primitive civilization went on a fantastic mission to the edge of the known world to rescue God ( as represented by the holy places that were filled with His presence). Historical analogies are hard to come by.

This type of enterprise tells you as much about Western art and culture as it does about Western politics and military ambitions. The effrontery is breathtaking. And sometimes, as with International Style architecture or the music of Richard Wagner, it may express itself as the will to crush the audience. In its most corrupt form, it is the desire to shock and to destroy traditional sensibilities. The culture of the Weimar Republic was far more "Faustian" in this sense than that of its Nazi successor. Still, it is important to recognize that these things are corruptions, parodies of the spirit of the West.

Perhaps, one way to put it is that there is a quixotic, Celtic streak in the West which has been at least as important to it as Spengler's allegedly Germanic Faustianism. On good days, it is King Arthur who rules in the West (including Germany), not Doktor Faustus. C.S. Lewis once suggested something along these lines in his novel, That Hideous Strength:

"...something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Modred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell...Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites?"

The future suggested by the commentary to the program is more Faustian than Arthurian. This is because it is easier to imagine modified forms of old evil than to conceive of new good. In this the commentary is certainly misleading; if good luck did not outbalance bad in the world, the human race would never have evolved.

And so, with that happy thought, we come to the final menu:

If you would like a survey for a particular year, please type '1' and press 'return.' If you would like a survey for a range of years, please type '2' and press 'return.' If you would like Dr. Spengler's Temporal Analogizer to tell you everything it knows, please type '3' and press 'return.'

Not without some trepidation, you pick option "3."