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Cultural pessimism arises with the conviction that the culture of a nation, a civilization, or humanity itself is in a process of irreversible decline. It is a variety ofpessimism formulated by acultural critic.
It has been significant presence in the general outlook of many historical cultures: things are "going to the dogs", theGolden age is in the past, and the current generation is fit only fordumbing down and cultural careerism. Some significant formulations have gone beyond this, proposing a universally-applicablecyclic model of history—notably in the writings ofGiambattista Vico.
The pessimistic element was available inArthur Schopenhauer's philosophy andMatthew Arnold's cultural criticism. The tide ofWhiggish optimism (exemplified byMacaulay) receded somewhat in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.
Classical culture, based on traditional classical scholarship inLatin andGreek literature, had itself been under attack externally for two generations or more by 1900, and had produced, inFriedrich Nietzsche, a model pessimistic thinker.
Cultural pessimism of theOswald Spengler epoch might be seen as a refusal of the rather intellectual and secular choice betweennihilism andmodernism. Politically this tended to squeezeliberal thought.
Specific criticism of the West, in the first years of the twentieth century, is usually taken as of the Old World ofEurope, excluding therefore North America in particular. The classic source for this is Spengler'sThe Decline of the West (1918–1923), often cited in the years following its publication. The tone of much of the critical writing, for example, ofT. S. Eliot, and the historical writing ofArnold J. Toynbee from the 1920s onwards, is identifiable. It was fashionable to say that Spengler had at least formulated some truths about the cultural situation of Europe afterWorld War I. Eliot's major early workThe Waste Land (1922) was commonly and directly interpreted in those terms.
Towards the end of the 20th century, cultural pessimism surfaced in a prominent way. The very title ofJacques Barzun'sFrom Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000) challenges the reader to be hopeful. OnMatthew Arnold, a major cultural critic of the Victorian era, Barzun writes:
According to Arnold, the behaviour of the English social classes was touched neither by spiritual nor by intellectual forces; the upper orders were barbarians, the middle classes philistines. (op. cit. p.573)
The end of the millennium saw in the United States concerns rather specific to the conservative view on theculture wars anduniversity education.[clarification needed] Western Europe, on the other hand, struggled towards self-definition in the face of limitingdemography, andpostmodernism as at least journalistically predominant—the difference primarily lying in the political prominence of the issues.
