So some languages die and are replaced by other languages that are more successful because they are more suited to the overall environment, and this strikes you as unDarwinian...? This is simply Darwinism on the level of memes (if language isn't too large to count as a meme).

What's unDarwinian is the general hysteria about "extinction" by people who claim to believe in "evolution" as described in the books by St.Darwin. How can you have one without the other? Yet these people believe that a process that's worked for several billion years suddenly stopped for no apparent reason when homo sapiens appeared. The same people who make fun of those who believe in Divine Intervention and miracles. Guess it all depends on which deity is doing the intervening.

(Actually , it could be argued that that is the case, but only if you are willing to admit that evolution by blind chance has been replaced by human "intellegent design". (see: dogs, cattle, wheat, corn, etc.) But Darwinists are anything but rational, or willing to follow their arguments to any conclusion once they lose their utility for use against non-believers.)

"The death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless generations whose lives no longer can be remembered, for no living being will sing their songs or tell their stories."

What the heck does this even mean? Cultures die every day, whether or not "their songs" are still sung. The culture of America (as if there was/is only a single one, rather than many distinct cultures with many commonalities) in 1900 is as dead as that of the aborigines in the Amazon rainforest of the time.

Pap:

No.

Raoul:

Bingo. Darwinists are actually Designists. Like E. O. Wilson insisting that every species be preserved.

What in the would is being talked about here? Oj's closing is most clear, almost as if it had been written by some admiring student of 19th Century evolutionary Sociology. The Spengler article, in it entirety, cold have lept from the pages of Herbert Spencer.

Cultures, systems of thought and action, evolve, that is, change over time, as their bearers, adapt, or fail to adapt, to their environments. Languages are an important aspect of culture, being so closely related to thought processes.

As this or that culture fails, its language fails with it and follows it into the great dustbin.

Take the German language, for example. Repeated cultural failure has resulted in loss of colonies, loss of land, loss of population, and, ultimately, loss of language.

Old Europe is failing, how much more the radically surpassed ways of the primitive peoples who have gotten stuck in various evolutionary dead-ends? I call to mind an episode in the PBS presentation of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs,and Steel. A resident on New Guinea was shown asking a question about the comparative virtue of cultures, which Diamond's thesis was purported to answer.

The significant lesson, we may be sure, not the one intended by either Diamond or PBS, was that the questioning blackfellow had provided his own answer as to why "You whites have all the cargo." The gentleman was wearing pants and shoes, moving about an enviroment of steel tools and motor vehicles, and, of course, speaking passable English.

There is is. The conquering folkways have found favor with humanity, the conquered wink out, one by one.

Ah, would that it were so clean, so simple. For one thing, the entirely natural process of cultural evolution was hijacked by racist delusions, again and again. Thus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, cultural evolution was run together with gross bilogical competition, with the result of murderous wars of annihilaton.

Then a racist reaction to the first racism set in, causing even more mischief, evil we are not yet done with. Boxer-Leninism, nostalgiac hatred of the ways of reason and real progress, has been self-indulgent self-distruction.