My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleygoverned above the waist by Marx, below the waist by Freud, but no part of you byStrachey'; he was a good-humoured fellow. Some of these references to Marx andFreud—who at least were serious people worthy of serious study—have something ofthe flippancy of Disraeli's intervention in the Darwinian controversy at Oxford: 'Thequestion is whether man is descended from angel or ape; I am on the side of theangels'. I should have more now to say on these subjects, but truth is not necessarilylacking from pithy expression.At the end of Tomorrow We Live I returned to the answer politics and science couldtogether give to the doom which threatened yet another civilisation: 'So man emergesfor the final struggle of the ages, the supreme and conscious master of his fate, tosurmount the destiny that has reduced former civilisations to oblivion. He advances tothe final ordeal armed with weapons of the modern mind that were lacking to anyprevious generation in the crisis of a civilisation. The wonders of our new scienceafford him not only the means with which to conquer material environment, in theability to wrest wealth in abundance from nature, but in the final unfolding of thescientific revelation probably also the means of controlling even the physical rhythmof a civilisation. Man for the first time carries to the crisis of his fate weapons withwhich he may conquer even destiny. But one compelling necessity remains, that heshall win within himself the will to struggle and to conquer. Our creed and ourmovement instil in man the heroic attitude to life, because he needs heroism. Our newBritons require the virility of the Elizabethan combined with the intellect and methodof the modern technician. The age demands the radiance of the dawn to infuse thewonder of maturity. We need heroism not just for war, which is a mere stupidity, butheroism to sustain us through man's sublime attempt to wrestle with nature and tostrive with destiny.'This way of writing is very different from the flat statements of contemporary fashionby writers whose only discernible ambition is to make the world as dull as themselves,precisely because it aimed at expressing the inspiration of men with a dynamicpurpose who were determined to play a decisive part at a turning-point in history;style can reflect both vitality and fatigue, and I prefer the former if it retains clarity."What really interested me in Spengler was his realisation that at certain points inhistory the fact-men, supported by popular but realistic movements, always emergedto arrest the decline of a civilisation. This aspect of Caesarism had fascinated me longbefore I read Spengler, and the possibilities of modern science had equally engagedme over a long period. It seemed clear to me that this conjunction was the instrumentwhich had never before been available to the architects of state, and it could give thenew fact-men at last the means to build a civilisation which could endure when theyand their revolutionary impulse had passed. The modern age therefore presented apossibility which the world had never known before, and this could transmute themassive pessimism of Spengler's theory into an enduring and achieving optimism.Spengler also gave new impulses to my thinking because he accentuated the sense ofimpending disaster if effective action were not taken. His theory was foreign toBritain and rejected by German government for reasons already described. Hisapproach to history later became familiar to the British in the outstanding contributionof Arnold Toynbee, who acknowledged his debt to Spengler but added much in his'challenge and response' theory with the picture of civilisations which had achievedrenaissance by vigorous responses to the challenge of disaster, even without the aid of276 of 424