11. The Apex
or, What Goes Up … Must Come Down
On Sunday, July 20, 1969, at 8:17 PM Greenwich Mean Time, the lunar module of the Apollo 11 spacecraft set down upon its destination. And then, six hours and thirty nine minutes later, astronaut Neil Armstrong descended to the Moon’s surface, to become the first man in history to step onto another world.
In the record of human endeavor it was an unparalleled and momentous achievement – but it might also have had another, even more consequential meaning of its own. For it may have marked the high point – the apex – of Western civilization.
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In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler held that history had seen a series of what he called “high cultures”, each having its own particular spirit or worldview that permeated it in the aggregate; with the Western culture, which had originally sprung up in the tenth century, being one among these. If this is accepted, it implies that each such culture may have had its own “apex”, or high point of greatest accomplishment, as considered in its own terms.
Thus the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu during the Fourth Dynasty might be said to constitute the apex of ancient Egypt. It was not only the most colossal structure ever erected by the Egyptians, but the mightiest artifact connected with their obsession with the afterlife, and their concept of time as an eternity stretching into past and future. Likewise, the development of philosophy in the age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle might be regarded as the apex of Classical culture, with its examination of the fundamental meaning of human existence in an immanent present. On the other hand, for the Western culture, with its consuming passion for technology, the Moon landing represented a spectacular development of such technology – but also an expression of the West’s Faustian desire for limitlessness, in a journey into the infinite reaches of space. And it would seem appropriate, given its concept of time as an arrow progressing from the past into a transformed and perfected future, as measured with clocks, chronometers, and even fantastically precise atomic devices, that the apex of Western culture could be accurately established to the very minute of its accomplishment.
However, the achievement of Apollo 11 was not the only event of importance to occur in the months around the moon landing. December 9, 1968 saw the Engelbart demonstration, which gave the first public presentation, to an audience of a thousand computer professionals, of an integrated system that combined windows, hypertext, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, and dynamic file linking – in other words, the prototype of what would eventually become the personal computer. And on October 29, 1969 there took place the first communication over the ARPANET, predecessor of the modern internet, from a computer at UCLA to another at Stanford, using the new technique of packet switching. Thus, over a period of less than a year, the basis of a revolutionary advance in future technology had been established.
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However, the concept of an apex carries with it an ominous implication – for a high point, by the very fact of its existence, means that the rise to its summit must necessarily be followed by a decline. And indeed, in the years following the West’s postulated apex, a decline in many pivotal sectors began to be seen, particularly in the United States, the hegemonic power of the West.
Since the end of the Second World War wages for workers in the U.S. had closely tracked gains in productivity, but in the early 1970s this relationship began to break down. Productivity, and per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product) continued their upward trend, but workers’ wages, adjusted for inflation, did not increase in step – to the extent that by 2010 such wages were less than half of what they would have been, if they had grown at the same rate as productivity and GDP. In other words, resources that would have been available to workers were instead appropriated by the upper reaches of the income distribution, in a society increasingly top heavy with elites.
Other economic indicators for the United States also began to take a turn for the worse in the 1970s. Energy consumption per capita leveled off, after a remarkable rise since the turn of the century; the goods surplus in world trade that the U.S. had enjoyed for many decades began to disappear, and in coming years turned sharply negative. In a wave of financialization, the ratio of financial assets to GDP has more than doubled since 1970, and assets of non-bank financial institutions increased from less than 50 percent of GDP in 1980 to almost 200 percent by 2020. On the other hand, the share of GDP contributed by manufacturing is now considerably less than half of what it had been in 1970, while the West has become increasingly dependent on the industrial production of China, India, and other rapidly developing nations.
In the face of such changes in the economy, the personal finances of common Americans have faced serious challenges. For example, home prices since the early 1970s have more than doubled in inflation adjusted dollars, increasing four times faster than median income. In the mid 1970s the U.S. began to diverge from the rest of the advanced world in health care spending as a percentage of GDP, doubling from 8 percent to 16 percent by 2008 (whereas Canada, a similar nation which adopted a single payer system, saw a more modest increase to less than 11 percent). The cost of higher education – encouraged as an essential ticket to a “better life” – has skyrocketed, with tuition and fees for four year colleges tripling, in constant dollars, since 1970. Thus any increases in income have tended to be eaten up by increasing expenses – or worse.
The challenges faced by the populace are reflected in deteriorating health and social conditions. The rate of obesity has more than tripled since 1970. Further, the rate of death by drug overdose has grown more than ten times. Meanwhile, life expectancy in the United States has largely stopped increasing since 2010 (and actually decreased during the recent epidemic), while it has continued to increase for other advanced nations. On another grim note, the percentage of the population incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons has more than tripled since 1970.
The decline in conditions for the people of the United States would seem to have caused a corresponding decline in their opinion of public institutions. The Pew Research Center reports that the portion of people who trusted the government “to do what is right most of the time” peaked at 77 percent in 1964, before falling to 54 percent in 1970, and since has plummeted to the vicinity of 20 percent. In a Gallup poll, those who mostly trusted mass media declined from 72 percent in the mid 1970s to 31 percent by 2024.
Even progress in the field of technology, so vital to the Western worldview, appears to be faltering. It is true that the advent of the personal computer and the introduction of internet have been profound developments, but their basis had already been established by 1969, as described above. What followed was facilitated by constant incremental improvements, miniaturization, and mass production – but no fundamental breakthroughs; for instance, the so-called “smartphone” is simply a hyper-miniaturized combination of existing technologies. Indeed, the electronic foundation for all these developments, the transistor and its evolution into the integrated circuit, were pioneered years before 1969. In the realm of space flight (the essence of the proposed apex itself), it might be noted that the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was unprecedented in its attempt at technical accuracy, extrapolated what seemed to be established trends to predict a huge base on the Moon and a manned voyage to the vicinity of Jupiter by the year of its title – predictions which obviously did not even come close to being fulfilled.
The most recent attempt to advance technological innovation involves so-called “artificial intelligence”. This development does appear to have uses in amalgamating information and automating repetitive tasks. However, it is by no means completely reliable (in spite of voraciously consuming energy), has produced a huge financial bubble, and in the end relies on knowledge (including spurious knowledge) previously produced by human beings – for it possesses no real intelligence.
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The wholesale decline in so many aspects of Western society would seem to be particularly disturbing to what Spengler called its Faustian spirit, which seeks limitless growth and innovation, to in turn produce improvement in conditions from one generation to the next – but instead that spirit is now confronted with stagnation or actual deterioration. Given the question “are you better off than your parents?”, the answer for very many is no. This crisis in its worldview may be an overlooked but important factor in the increasing political polarization, restiveness, and darkening outlook of the West. There is a growing sense of desperation, reflected in attempts to recapture past glories; for example, to regain the summit of the earlier apex with another landing of a man on the Moon (more than a half century later), or even to surpass it with vague plans of a landing on Mars, though the contribution such achievements would make toward dealing with the acute problems faced by our society would appear to be negligible.
Of course, according to Spengler, the decadence of Western society was actually its inevitable destiny, for he viewed high cultures as “organic” entities, and all that is organic must eventually wither. In The Decline of the West he proposed that after the creativity of the West’s Kultur died, it might continue for many centuries as a creatively sterile Zivilisation, with money and power pursued under a hegemonic Caesarism. However, with the publication of Man and Technics in 1931 he produced an even darker prophecy: that the West would not undergo a gradual decline, but rather a rapid and catastrophic downfall, due to relentless exploitation of the planet’s resources and the fouling of its environment, while enslaved by the dream of limitless growth and technological development. And indeed, many decades after 1931, it would seem that these final revelations may have begun to be fulfilled. As Spengler put it in Chapter V of Man and Technics:
“Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing.
“Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Aeschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him – forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not – to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.”
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Sources
The Decline of the West: Sketch of a Morphology of World History, by Oswald Spengler; Volume One: Form and Actuality originally published 1918, revised edition 1923; Volume Two: Perspectives of World-History published 1922; English translation and notes by Charles Francis Atkinson, Volume One published 1926, Volume Two 1928.
Man and Technics: a Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, by Oswald Spengler, published 1931; English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, published 1932.
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A Personal Afterword
If the apex of the West was truly achieved on July 20, 1969, then I, like millions of others, had the opportunity to witness it first hand, for it was televised as it happened. Further, having been born in the mid 1950s, I personally experienced something of what came before that achievement, and then what followed.
Actually, there was another pivotal event that burned itself in my memory before the Moon landing: that of the Kennedy assassination, an event so shocking that afterward, the world seemed to have changed … and not for the better. Nevertheless, there was still a general feeling of hope at that time, of trust in the future, that in spite of all the problems afflicting the nation, in coming years everything would be bigger, and better. The Star Trek Future beckoned.
It was in the 1970s that trust in the future seemed to begin slowly breaking down. The rotting end of the war in Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon’s fall, the Church Committee’s revelations of abuses by the security state, the energy crisis and gas station lines, Three Mile Island’s shadow on the future of nuclear energy, soaring inflation and the severe recession that followed – all these seemed to betray the promise of FDR’s New Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Johnson’s Great Society. After Jimmy Carter put the blame on “malaise”, the Reagan administration declared a “Morning for America”, but in retrospect this seems to have been closer to a dawn of the dead. Thus, though the fall of the Soviet Union supposedly heralded an “end of history”, its results were squandered during the complacent Clinton years, and soon followed by a return of “history” with the destruction of the World Trade Center, a sinister expansion of the security state, and pointlessly destructive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Unbridled speculation and fraud then ended in the crash of 2008, which was remedied by a general bailout of big finance (accompanied by an amnesty from prosecution for criminal misconduct), while struggling homeowners were rewarded with foreclosure, betraying Obama’s message of “hope”. Again and again, any “hope” for real change has since been betrayed by aging leaders of deteriorating mental, executive, and/or moral competence, in the form of Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2.
Of course, it is possible that my perception of events may be colored by my own situation, which in the 1960s was that of naive youth coming of age. Nevertheless, I am not alone in what I experienced, as brief excerpts from a couple of interesting anecdotes from the Naked Capitalism website confirm. From the post “The Mills of Providence Were Ground Up Slowly”, by “Lambert Strether” on September 1, 2018:
“I had made a list of jobs from the Classified Ads in the Providence Journal — there were pages of them – and this place was first on the list. They hired me, despite my long hair, immediately, for $2.25 a hour. (The ad said “will train,” which I would have needed for any job except shelving library books.)
“That wage was more than sufficient for me to reproduce my labor power: I could afford an apartment of my own, close to the East Side, if not on the East Side proper, and could cook for myself, take the bus to work, get morning coffee, buy plenty of books, and even the occasional beer. I was then, I suppose, 22 or 23. After a year, they raised my wage to $2.35.”
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“Reading over these little anecdotes, it strikes me how much is gone. There are no classified ads. Firms don’t train. You can’t rent a decent apartment on a factory worker’s wage. If there are casting machines, now, they’re computerized. The Venetian blind cord business, I am sure, went off to China, or Bangladesh, or Cambodia (and who has Venetian blinds now, anyhow?) At none of these jobs was I tracked or monitored or measured in any way; I’m sure that’s gone, too. And of course the whole Woonsquatucket area is far less dense, much more unkempt, and not as crowded and vibrant now, as it was when I was coming up. It looks poor. It didn’t look poor then. When I became a braider mechanic, one of the ladies said to me – they made much of me, and would give me sandwiches for lunch – “Now you’ll always have a job!” How wrong she was. Creative destruction, surely. But for whom?”
Also, from the post “Reflections on the War on Work as a War on Workers”, by “KLG” on August 14, 2024:
“I began my working life at the end of the Great Compression (GC) in the United States that lasted from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s. Thus, my working life is coextensive with the Neoliberal Dispensation, which began in earnest when President Jimmy Carter turned Alfred E. Kahn of Cornell loose on his idea of the “regulatory state.” For personal reasons, I date the end of the GC to the Gerald Ford Recession of 1975, when my 4-months-per-year job that paid very good wages in a unionized heavy chemical plant disappeared.
“That loss of my “scholarship” led to the very long and productive apprenticeship I served in two biochemistry laboratories in my university plus two degrees and a rewarding career as an academic scientist and professor who has finally become an administrator/teacher.”
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“As a high school graduate in the mid-1970s, my annualized wage in the chemical plant not so far away was $8,145, including a 10% “bonus” for overtime. Using the handy Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, that translates into $57,894 (before taxes) in June 2024. Remember, I was a lowly G-2 who recently graduated from high school (that diploma was the only essential credential to get through the gate). A G-12 in the plant made $25,064, or $178,156. Both jobs came with paid vacation (3 weeks for the young G-2, 6 weeks for the G-12, plus eight other holidays for everyone; shift workers received double-time on holidays), defined benefit pension, and health insurance that was sufficient – absolutely nobody worried about a medical bankruptcy. And just as important, these jobs came with a sense of worth and permanency.”
So yes, things were different then. And remember, from the time under discussion, things were supposed to get better, according the worldview of the West. Much better.
Is it possible, then, for the current pattern of decline to be ended, or even reversed? Perhaps. Strangely enough, it may be that the most encouraging signs can be seen abroad, in two regimes so often reviled by our own established order: a self-resurrected Russia, which has emerged from the ruins of the Soviet collapse, and a surging China, which has produced a truly spectacular advance in the wake of its Communist revolution. These examples aren’t necessarily templates, but may demonstrate what is most needed: awareness of the necessity to sacrifice old interests and attitudes to begin anew, supported by a determination to survive in the face of any and all adversity. Will such be possible for the West? Presently, the signs are not promising; but only time will tell.