Why Oswald Spengler's 'Man and Technics' Still Matters Today
How Faustian Civilization invited its own demise.
Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics originated as a speech at the Deutsches Museum, providing a brief overview of his perspective on prehistory. The speech was expanded into the book we know today, published in July 1931. Spengler planned to develop the ideas and concepts within Man and Technics into a complete account of prehistory. Although he did not finish this project, Man and Technics remains incredibly relevant today.
But how could a book about prehistory published before the Second World War have any relevance today? It is because, as the title suggests, Spengler gives a robust account of technology and its impacts that go unnoticed today.
The first half of this essay will give an overview of the core concepts in Man and Technics. The second half of the post will evaluate Spengler’s predictions in light of actual trends in technology and geopolitical economy.
Man as a Beast of Prey: Essence of Technics
Spengler critiques the romantics and materialists of the 19th century for not grasping the deeper essence of technology, which stems from the vital life force of each living organism. Spengler rejects the former as idealistic naiveté and the latter as a “progress-philistine” triviality that overlooks the soul’s involvement in technological pursuits.
The natural process of all living things is to survive, expand, and reproduce. From the smallest bacteria to the human being, every organism engages in struggle; technics are its tactics of survival and dominance. Technics are not the tools but the mental processes they serve. Technics may have no tools whatsoever, as is the case in most of the animal kingdom. However, animals possess fixed, instinctual techniques; man alone innovates.
Man possesses the unique ability to creatively transform his materials into new tools that will serve his tactics. But it is important to note that the tactics do not come from the tools. Tools and machines flow from thoughts about processes (washing, hunting), not vice versa. Man’s technical machinations are critical to his existence in an otherwise cruel and punishing world. His struggle against the external world has given rise (and fall) to the high cultural drama we call history.
In the best case, man contends in a Nietzschean will-to-power against a vast universe, but always as “men of a time, of a locality, of a race.” His actions are always contextual. His tactics and tools are expressions of his soul in the face of the particular challenges of his context. This kind of man encapsulates the spirit of the beast of prey.
Spengler argues that the denial of man’s predatory nature is ideological cowardice. He lauds the carnivore’s commanding gaze, superior soul, and responsibility for itself, over the herbivore’s defensive herd instinct. The spirit of the predator is expressed through heroic soldiers, daring explorers, and even creative innovators. The opposite of these men is the slovenly bug man who shirks responsibility and leeches off others. The herbivore’s herd instinct finds its most significant expression in Communist regimes, where those who seek to have without conquest or victory demand the life and possessions of the noble and responsible.
From First Tool to Grand Civilization
Man’s techniques liberate him from his genus-instinct, signaling culture’s rise. The human hand’s dexterity and the upright body emerge as a single “organic actuality,” inseparable from tool use. Spengler is sure that man’s hand, posture, and technical creativity must all be part of a simultaneous mutation because of how well they complement each other.
From the earliest solitary man arises a proud, warlike soul. As he develops technics, he engages in a war against nature. By combining his mental tactics with his physical tools, he erects barriers between himself and the life of the animal. This gives birth to high culture. But nature does not roll over kindly. All great cultures end in defeat. Culture is a tragic rebellion against nature, doomed to decay.
In the battle against nature, man expands his technical arsenal and his culture’s capability. Speech and collective planning co-emerge, enabling division of labor and large-scale projects. Language originally crystallizes around practical needs, specifically for giving and obeying orders.
As enterprise advances, men are divided into directors, who work with their minds, and executors, who work with their hands. This distinction is not identical to the distinction between predatory and prey-souled men. Those with the prey instinct can find themselves on either side of work. Driven by resentment, they seek to erode distinction and enforce crude egalitarianism. This egalitarian denial of natural hierarchy leads to decadence and is a critical part of the decline of every high culture.
As multiple parties engage in grand enterprise, conflict is bound to occur. The collision between competing aims dynamically creates territory, state, and law norms. Gangs, nations, and countries arise to enforce standards of commerce and conduct. However, even in peace, might makes right undergirds political, economic, and diplomatic technics.
End of Machine Culture
From 3000 B.C. onwards, High Cultures followed a predictable life cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death. Spengler labels Western Culture “Faustian” because of its determined ambition to reach new heights regardless of cost. This relentless pursuit gave birth to new understandings in all domains of science and major advancements in transportation and technology.
Faustian Culture universalizes itself through an unbounded will to power, harnessing the predator instinct and commanding space, force, and time in pursuit of infinite progress. Faustian science transforms religious myth into working hypotheses and techniques for harnessing nature's power.
This comes at a cost for Faustian man. The Machine enslaves its master: “The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.” Industrialization poisons nature, enframes the world as a standing reserve, and deepens the chasm between leaders and workers. The logic of machine culture dominates everything. Faustian culture’s technology is spread to the world's farthest reaches, with non-Western cultures fully embracing Western technology.
Machine culture shows cracks in many forms. Gifted individuals retreat from technology. Some embrace the wilderness, while others gravitate toward spiritual matters. Many prominent tech CEOs famously disallow their children from using devices. At the same time, alienated masses rebel from their status as machine cogs. Non-Western countries also grow resentful over colonialism and a history of exploitation, harnessing Western technology in an effort to get revenge on the West. Spengler predicted that the Far East would begin to compete with the West, which has come true as China relentlessly pursues Artificial Intelligence and other powerful technologies with little regard for American intellectual property laws.
Why It Matters
Spengler predicted that the East would embrace Faustian technology and rise to compete with the West. He has been vindicated in this prediction.
After the Cold War, the 90s saw complete globalization. China was already primed to benefit from this development. In the late 1970s, China opened its economy to foreign investment and technology. After joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, China benefited from reduced trade barriers and a flood of foreign capital to build factories. Western firms set up manufacturing operations across coastal China, attracted by affordable labor and special economic zones. The influx of Western capital and knowledge turned China into a manufacturing giant. Much of the Western world still relies on the country’s mass production capabilities.
A similar pattern played out elsewhere. Multinational companies outsourced textile production to South Asia, electronics assembly to East Asia, and call-center and software services to India. A byproduct of outsourcing was knowledge transfer. Many developing companies rapidly moved up the value chain and engaged in more complex manufacturing and innovation. Consequently, Western manufacturing sectors struggled to compete, leading to factory closures and job losses in advanced economies. Between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost 5 to 6 million manufacturing jobs due to outsourced industry. Spengler predicted that Western economic competition would lead to the decline of the West. Western firms did outsourcing to get a leg up on one another. Western High Culture has paid the price. Faustian.
By the late 2010s, many Chinese corporations had surpassed their Western competitors. China leads in 5G telecommunications, high-speed rail, nuclear power, drones, and fintech. Furthermore, the Chinese have embraced innovation, with China accounting for 38% of all patent grants worldwide in 2021, more than double the total granted in the U.S. However, this progress occurs amid China's flagrant disregard for protections around Western patents, which does not reflect pure innovation. It should be noted that Spengler argued that inventiveness was a uniquely Faustian trait. The Chinese lead in patent filings challenges this assertion.
Western Culture’s tendency toward universalism boosted the Far East's competitiveness by allowing foreigners to study in Europe and America. Since the 1970s, millions of students and professionals from China, India, and other developing nations have migrated to Western countries for education or work, only to bring the skills and connections back to their home countries. Consequently, Western scientific and managerial expertise is no longer confined to the West.
Japan’s postwar economic development is similar. Japan was the first major non-Western nation to industrialize successfully using Western technology. By the 1980s, Japan’s economy was the world’s second largest, although China has since eclipsed it. Japanese companies are world leaders in automobiles (Toyota, Hyundai), shipbuilding, and consumer electronics (Toshiba, Sony). By the 90s, many Westerners feared Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s leading economy. However, the 90s also saw the stagnation of the Japanese economy as the asset bubble began to burst.
India took a different path from China but has increasingly aligned with Spengler’s vision of the non-Western rise via technics. During the Cold War, India’s economy was closed and sluggish, hampered by state socialism and import substitution. This changed in 1991, when a balance-of-payments crisis forced India to liberalize and open up its economy. Since then, India has focused on developing its IT capabilities and competing with white collar tech workers in Europe and the United States.
Western nations no longer single-handedly dictate terms in manufacturing or high-tech innovation. Key industries like consumer electronics, shipbuilding, and semiconductors have shifted toward Asia. Western economies have hollowed out, with manufacturing sectors shrinking relative to GDP and employment. These trends over the past few decades confirm Spengler’s prediction and warning: the non-Western world, by mastering Western technics, has risen to unprecedented power and is increasingly confident in challenging the West’s historical dominance.
This has far-reaching implications for the West's future. Our weapons depend on uncertain access to rare earth minerals, and our semiconductors rely on the geopolitics in Taiwan. Our consumer goods and pharmaceuticals are produced in the same place as the fentanyl that ravages the United States. This is why Western civilization is Faustian: it pursues the heights with little regard for cost.
In Spengler’s model, high cultural decline is inevitable. In the winter stage of culture, civilizations choose a strongman to help them solve problems. They embrace a Caesar. Trump was elected with the hope that he would solve the issues of immigration, outsourcing, and Chinese competition. We are on track with Spengler’s predictions for the West. Man and Technics matters because it explains the context and accurately predicts the outcome of the technological trends that dominate the modern world.
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I think the historians of the far future will consider 1914 to have been the peak of our civilization.
Good poast, as per usual. Although I may push back a little on the level of mastery of western technics that the east has ostensibly achieved. To be sure, China has some great achievements under the belt (I am thinking of their quantum computation, key distribution with satellites, or teleportation along The Wall or perhaps their achievements in fusion, but this is, as always, 20 years away), but it seems to me that they lack the collective ability to consistently originate and implement these ideas as a culture. This is evidenced by the high rate of IP theft from the west, which is likely allowed them to conduct the aforementioned experiments successfully in the first place.