Decline of the West? Spengler Reconsidered
Adda B. Bozeman
The passage of time has never been taken for granted in the West. Rather, and as we know from the culture's rich records in philosophy, religion, history, and biography, it has challenged the thoughtful in all generations to explain time's ineluctable movements, come to terms with time's boons and ravages, and, above all, to account for man's proper use of his allotted span of life. In this general context few questions have preoccupied Western minds as insistently as those which probe the reasons for the rise and fall, or the progress and decay, of all man-willed ventures on earth, including nations, states, and cultures. One religious medieval thinker (4th century A. D.) thus concluded that
God looked in the future and set the first man in that place (i. e. Paradise, in the East) in order to cause him to understand that, just as the light of heaven moves toward the West, so the human race hastens towards death.
Another, writing in the 12th century A. D., held that
