Marx didn't quite manage to be completely wrong about everything. America is the farce version of Rome.
I think when America goes down, the world will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and discard Western philosophy. The Athenian tradition will perish for good. I have no proof, merely a strong and steady hunch. Maybe in some dozens of millennia it will be rediscovered, I suppose.
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America is to Faustian civilization what Time was to Classical civilization
"So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact--which can only be disputed by vain phrases--that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul--Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and every "late" period. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic or dead."
Although it is true that the Romans stood between the Greeks and annihilation, nothing stood between the Romans and nothingness, and thus they met nothingness. Now there are no Romans, only Romish/Moor hybrids.
"Civilization" has never been civilized. It is not surprising to me that slightly less disorderly barbarians cannot hold back the night.
Here is my take, call it pessimistic if you will. Inspired of course, by the man that wrote the quote above, but also by a certain post-moral German of the 19th century.
Just as there is nothing of Cultural significance left of the Classical, Mesomerican, Indian, etc. Civilization (leftists have a gay term - cultural appropriation, but they don't see that the project of appropriation is already thoroughly complete and that it rendered everything non-Faustian into an amusing laughing stock, a carnival-museum of an 'exotic' culture eg. Black Nationalism in the US), there will be nothing, aside from machine technology, of significance left of the Western civilization. The only reason the shabby foundations of 'moral realism' holding up this civilization haven't collapsed is due to the intellectual laziness of the average person. The issues concerning the average 'highly esteemed' academic philosopher of the Western world today are worth less than nothing.
And who knows, will it be environmental issues, moral nihilism (more like realism tbh) coupled with anarcho-tyrannical tendencies of these states, or plain old running out of resources that finishes it off?
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