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Cultural PessimismCultural pessimism is a significant presence in the general outlook of many historical cultures: things are going to the dogs, the Golden age is in the past, and the current generation is fit only for dumbing down and cultural careerism. Some significant formulations have gone beyond this, proposing either a universally-applicable cyclic model of history — notably in the writings of Giambattista Vico — or specific criticism of the West, in the first years of the twentieth century usually taken as the Old World of Europe. The classic source for the latter variety is Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918 - 1923), which was often cited in the following years. The tone of much of the critical writing, for example, of T. S. Eliot, and the historical writing of Arnold J. Toynbee, is identifiable with the thought that Spengler had at least formulated some truths about the cultural situation of Europe after World War I. The pessimistic element involved was in fact already freely available in Schopenhauer's philosophy and Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism. It might be more accurate to say that the tide of Whiggish optimism (exemplified by Macaulay) had receded. Classical culture, based on traditional classical scholarship in Latin and Greek literature, had itself been under attack externally for two generations or more by 1900, and had produced in Nietzsche a model pessimistic thinker. Cultural pessimism of the Spengler epoch could be seen as a refusal of the rather intellectual and secular choice between nihilism and modernism. Politically this tended to squeeze liberal thought. Towards the end of the 20th century, in a global situation that was much changed, cultural pessimism surfaced again. This time the West as a whole was implicated. The very title of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000) challenges the reader to be hopeful. The end of the millennium did see in the USA concerns rather specific to the culture wars and university education, which were not really the same as Western Europe's self-definition in the face of limiting demography, and postmodernism as at least journalistically predominant — the difference primarily lying in the political prominence of the issues.
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