[Marcus Marulus]

II. Socialism as a Way of Life

Six thousand years of higher human history lie before us. Amid the great mass of persons
and events that have appeared on the entire planet we can distinguish those elements that
make up history in the proper sense: the spectacle and destiny of the great cultures. They
appear to the eye of the observer as formal entities having a basically similar structure, as
visible manifestations of powerful forces of the human soul, as the real and vital
expressions of the most profound mysteries of human evolution.

In each culture there resides an immutable principle which gives it its particular features
of belief, thought, feeling, and action, of government, art, and social structure. This same
principle has brought forth what we know as the various "types" of man: the Classical,
Indic, Chinese, and Western. Each has had its own unity of instinct and consciousness, its
own "race" in the spiritual sense.

Moreover, each of these cultural units is complete in itself and independent of all others.
Traditional historiography has been interested solely in historical influences on cultures,
not realizing that such influences are in fact of the most superficial kind. Inwardly, all
cultures remain just what they are. They arise and flourish on Nile and Euphrates,
Ganges and Hwang Ho, in the Semitic Desert, on the shores of the Aegean, or on the
river-lined plains of Northern Europe. Each culture gathers together the human beings in
its locality and breeds them to form a people; a people, in other words, is not the creator
but the creature of its culture. [3] Dorians and Ionians, Hellenes and Etrusco-Romans, the
peoples of ancient China, Teutons and Latins, Germans and Englishmen—each people
has its own peculiar mentality and significance, each stands in passionate contrast to the
others. Seen from the outside and compared with foreign cultures, each assumes a unified
form: we speak of Classical man, Chinese man, and Western man.

(3. The Decline of the West, II, 165.)

At the base of every culture lies an idea that is expressed by certain words of profound
significance. In Chinese culture these words are tao and li; for the Apollonian Greeks this
cultural idea was contained in the worlds lógos and tò ón ("that which is"). In the
languages of Faustian man the basic cultural idea is expressed by the words "will,"
"strength," and "space." Faustian man differs from all others in his insatiable will to reach
the infinite. He seeks to overcome with his telescope the dimensions of the universe, and
the dimensions of the earth with his wires and iron tracks. With his machines he sets out
to conquer nature. He uses his historical thinking to take hold of the past and integrate it
into his own existence under the name of "world history." With his long-range weapons
he seeks to subdue the entire planet, including the remains of all older cultures, forcing
them to conform to his own pattern of life.

How long, we may well ask, will this striving continue? After a certain number of
centuries each culture is transformed into a civilization. What was formerly alive
becomes rigid and cold. Expansiveness of mind and spirit is replaced by a lust for
expansion in the material world. "Life" in the sense used by Meister Eckart becomes
"life" in the political and economic sense; the militant power of ideas becomes
imperialism. One sign of the onset of this transformation is the enunciation of ultimate
but very earthly ideals; a mood of ripeness, of age and experience begins to take hold
within the culture. Socrates, Lao-tse, Rousseau, and Buddha each presaged a downward
turn in his respective culture. [4] All of these thinkers are inwardly related. None
possessed a genuine metaphysics; each of them was the proponent of practical but
terminal ideas and attitudes to which we have applied such comprehensive titles as
Buddhism, Stoicism, and socialism.

(4. The Decline of the West, I, 351 ff.; II, 305 ff.)

Socialism, then, is not an instinct of dark primeval origin like the instincts that found
expression in the style of Gothic cathedrals, in the lordly mien of great emperors and
popes, or in the founding of the Spanish and British empires. It is, rather, a political,
social, and economic instinct of realistically-minded peoples, and as such it is a product
of one stage of our civilization—not of our culture, which came to an end around 1800.
And yet this instinct, totally directed to the outside world, still nourishes the old Faustian
will to power and the infinite; now it has become the direful will to absolute domination
of the world in the military, economic, and intellectual sense. It can be felt in the
historical fact of the World War and in the concept of a world revolution, the idea of
forging the swarming multitudes of humanity into a single whole. The imperialism of
Babylon aimed only at control of the Near East, while that of the Indic people was
limited to India itself; Greek and Roman imperialism was bounded by Britain,
Mesopotamia, and the Sahara, and China’s empire extended no further than the Caspian
Sea. Modern imperialism, on the other hand, aims at possessing the entire globe. We
recognize no borders or limits at all. By means of a new Völkerwanderung we have made
America a part of Western Europe. We have constructed on every continent our special
kind of cities, and have subjected the native populations to our own way of life and
thought. Such activity is the highest possible expression of our dynamic sense of world
power. What we believe, what we desire, is meant to be binding on all. And since life has
come to mean for us external, political, social, and economic life, all must submit to our
political, social, and economic ideal, or perish.

This drive toward universal domination is what I have termed "modern socialism." We
are now growing more and more conscious of its presence. It is what we of the Western
world have in common. It is active in every human being from Warsaw to San Francisco,
and each of our peoples is fascinated by the spell of its promises and potentialities.
Yet we are the only peoples who partake of it. Classical, Chinese, or Russian socialism in
this sense does not exist.

Still, at the base of this powerful collective consciousness there is inner hostility and
contradiction. Concealed within the soul of every culture is a single, irreparable fissure.
The history of each culture is a never-ending conflict between peoples, classes,
individuals, or tendencies within an individual—it is always the same awesome problem.
As soon as one historical element makes its appearance it immediately calls forth an
opposing element. Nietzsche has identified for us the great dichotomy of Classical life
which reappeared again and again in various forms: Apollo and Dionysus, Stoics and
Epicureans, Sparta and Athens, senate and plebs, tribunate and patriciate. With Hannibal
at Cannae, Epicurean Hellenism stood in opposition to the Rome of the Stoics and
senators. At Philippi, the Spartan element of Rome was defeated by the Athenian element
personified by the Caesars. Even in Nero’s matricide we can discern a triumph of the
Dionysian idea of panem et circenses over the Apollonian rectitude of the Roman
matrons. Throughout all the epochs of Chinese history, in Chinese life and thought,
battles and books, we can perceive the antithesis connected with the names of Confucius
and Lao-tse and the untranslatable concepts of li and tao. Similarly, it is one and the
same schism in the Faustian soul that has shaped our destiny through the Gothic and
Renaissance, Potsdam and Versailles, Kant and Rousseau, socialism and anarchism, and
which will go on shaping it right up to our last days.

Yet even so, this Destiny is unified. The discord and antithesis serve a higher reality.
Epicureanism is but another form of Stoicism; Aeschylus brought together Apollo and
Dionysus; Caesar combined senate and plebs; the Taoism of Lao-tse helped to create
Confucianist China. And the Western peoples whose instinct is anarchic are themselves
truly socialistic in the larger Faustian sense.