Encountering Toynbee

I’ve finally gotten around to following up my study of Spengler by reading though his companion heavyweight, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. I will reiterate that I started this blog to investigate where and how civilization nurtures the life of the mind. Almost all serious inquiry on this topic in the last hundred years has been touched in one way or another by Spengler and Toynbee — not because any of us necessarily agree with them and their frequently brazen omissions or misunderstandings, but because their audacious perspective has effectively defined the intellectual terrain we now traverse.

Since A Study of History has now become a point of departure for several of my thoughts, I found it helpful to write my preliminary review here of how Toynbee has helped me progress my own thinking. In very brief, Toynbee:

1. Provides a believable response to Spengler’s gloomy predictions about the impossibility of cultural succession or exchange;
2. Gives some description of many societies that never quite rose to the same prominence as the great civilizations, thereby providing a satisfying explanation about all the possibilities that never quite flourished;
3. Accounts for the India and China problem in Spengler’s thought;
4. Falls short in Africa for strange reasons, and reveals his own lacunae that modern archaeology is still filling in as we discover more remnants of societies in South America and Africa;
5. Provides a compelling account of what role the concerned intellectual and citizen may adopt in the interest of preserving civilization through periods of decline.

This is a long post with no cohesive conclusion other than the following: overall, I find many of his points to be hopeful retorts to Spengler. Since, as Galbraith laments, we are so often ruled by ideas, it’s a relief to let myself be ruled by something a bit less drab than Spengler’s laments.

Toynbee’s Genealogy, Spengler’s Morphology

Toynbee takes a similar approach to the segmentation of civilizations as Spengler does. He defines civilizations in terms of the institutions they produce: a universal state and a church, but approaches the issue more genealogically than Spengler.

Explicitly, Toynbee comes out swinging at Spengler. He would have done well to hit the German with a powerful Nietzschean rejoinder: Spengler had fallen into the classic trap of confusing a cause with an effect. Spengler, the Nietzsche admirer, had become precisely the kind of German — resigned to technical society and unable to get outside of his own scientism — that Nietzsche himself reviled.

Specifically, Spengler falls for the intellectual fad of analyzing society in terms of some analogy to the biological sciences — the social organism with a lifecycle — instead of taking the plunge and defining his own, non-naturalistic categories. This is the conceit that allows Spengler to be such a pessimistic determinist. Instead, Toynbee argues, you have to let institutions properly be institutions and you have to be a proper empiricist when you analyze them. (I’m left wondering if this kind of Humean retort is what allowed the Anglophone world to be the ones who developed real management theory when Germans after Bismarck could only stare at spreadsheets and closed models.)

Where Spengler believes in the cyclical rise and setting of civilizations according to the exhaustion of their primitive organizing rhythms, the so-called prime phenomena, Toynbee sees civilizations really in terms of their institutions. Civilizations have a universal state and an accompanying chuch. Unlike Spengler, Toynbee believes in a meaningful succession of civilizations through the continuity of the church. Thus, his analysis of civilizations is actually a genealogy, whereas Spengler would believe that the succession of civilizations is more like the analogy I used above. Spengler’s civilizations move like the succession of different species of tree in a forest canopy: a new species grows in to occupy the same resources and might have to fit itself into the same pattern, but it has no commonality in its internal organization. For Toynbee, the metaphysics of cultural organization are not important, but rather the continuity of their ruling classes and their customs. I can’t help but see in this disagreement a classic intellectual rivalry between British mercantilism and German metaphysics.

Toynbee will say, then, contra Spengler, that Western Civilization is the successor to Classical Civilization specifically in the sense of the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church. He will agree with Spengler that Orthodox Civilization is not Western, and for the reason that the Orthodox Church has split off to become its own institution imbricated within the Byzantine-Russian model of a universal state. Spengler, as a refresher, emphatically did not believe that late Romans were actually Classical because they had completely changed their cosmological commitments and lifestyles. He would also say that institutional analyses are too shallow, and that the difference between Russian and Western civilization lies at the prime phenomena: the Westerner sees the world as a Cartesian space and the Russian sees the world as a grand plane with no borders. The distinction is one between on one hand, analyzing the genealogies of ruling classes, and, on the other, analyzing the metaphysical cores of their worldviews. Making the schematic comparison, I suppose, is an important lesson in the difficulty of doing serious work in the social sciences.

More Factions in the Expansion Pack

My favorite development reading Toynbee is the allowance of more “minor civilizations.” These come in a few varieties:

• Proper dead civilizations that failed to transmit their church to a successor civilization;
• “Abortive” civilizations that appeared as legitimate contenders but found themselves stamped out by the competition;
• “Arrested” civilizations that never developed into a state despite having cohesive churches;
• “Fossilized” civilizations that live on as relict pockets in the matrix of other civilizations.

This is a typology that I find totally compatible with Spengler’s work and one that really fills out a lot more of the complexity of world history. If civilizations succeed each other like trees fighting for canopy space, surely there must be a bunch of losers we don’t hear about. Spengler doesn’t talk about them, but modern archaeology keeps finding them. I have to allow myself one more crass psychoanalytic comment: it seems that this kind of evolutionary thinking allows for more uncertainty than the pessimistic German convictions of Spengler would tolerate. And that’s relieving!

First, dead civilizations. These include primarily the Egyptians and the Minoans, and archaeology during and after Toynbee’s time would proceed to find Elamites and more information about the Indus Valley Civilization and so on. These civilizations lived, existed as real civilizations, and died out without transmitting their universal churches. We know this from, you know, the Old Testament, and Toynbee doesn’t have much more to say on this point. Modern archaeology should probably add civilizations like Norte Chico in Peru and possibly the Mound Builders of the Mississippi basin to this list. Importantly, it’s an open class of possibilities simply waiting for us to find more ruins.

Second, and I think most satisfyingly, there are many civilizations that could have taken the place of the ones we have. Toynbee astutely points out that Irish Christianity (under e.g. Pelagius) was building a new and different church and a new and different form of state on the Emerald Isle and could very conceivably have started trying to export that if it had not been outcompeted by the productivity of the Saxon lords and the Benedictine order and the heavy plow and so on. Similarly, the Vikings had a go at it and conquered really quite a lot of Europe and Russia as part of their own thalassocracy. They even formalized sagas in Iceland, indicating that they were really building a church to run their universal state. They, too, were beaten by the Saxon Christians, but there’s no reason it had to be this way. Both of these nascent civilizations had a shot: one as the potential successor to Classical civilization; the other, a sui generis formation of Northern Europeans. I highly recommend watching Episode One of Kenneth Clark’s documentary series on civilization, as it seems to have been deeply inspired by this chapter of Toynbee.

What’s so emancipating about the idea of abortive civilizations is that they could be all over the place. Spengler never really bothers to entertain this idea and it’s lost on me why. I’d love to get the dour explanation as to how he never goes into this, but it adds so much vibrancy to our picture of things: was there no abortive Austronesian civilization in maritime Southeast Asia? How about in Madagascar? Zululand? Ethiopia? (I’ll talk about Africa specifically below.) Or how about in Tibet, which Samuel Huntington genuinely considered to be part of a “Theravada civilization” in the late 20th century? Haiti, also highlighted by Huntington? Japan, highlighted in a weird footnote by Spengler himself? Pekka Hämäläinen argues that the Comanche actually formed a contender themselves. Simply put, the civilizations we have seen have been the children of the grand accidents of history and even Spengler can’t give us great reason to believe otherwise.

Third, the civilizations that couldn’t ever really form states. His examples here are the nomads of the world — Berbers, Maasai, Turks, Mongols, Scythians — as well as the Polynesians and the Inuit. I was excited to read this because I had a particularly striking experience with Inuit art while I was reading Decline of the West last year. Clearly the Inuit have a Spenglerian prime phenomenon: the circular drums, the shape of the igloo, the circular motif all across their aesthetics. He never gave any attention to them, but Toynbee correctly articulates the situation. The Inuit, despite having sophisticated and cohesive spiritual and cultural practices, never formed a universal state before being subjugated by Western and Russian civilizations. Much the same is true of the Polynesians: despite creating Rapa Nui and possibly even reaching the shores of North and South America, it was too technologically daunting to turn a Pacific thalassocracy into a universal state.

Again, this is an exciting category because we can imagine a number of other civilizations could be tossed in here. Front of mind for this Portland boy, of course, are the peoples of the Far West: the thalassocracies of the Chinook and the Salish Sea and the Northwest Coast form a whole civilizational mosaic that never became a universal state. Ditto with the Pueblo civilization of the American Southwest. This does, of course, start opening the more contemporary question of why we privilege the category of “universal state” when talking about a pre-Columbian North American world with no beasts of burden and so on. Nonetheless, Toynbee’s schema establishes the clear bounds of his analysis while leaving open a variety of other categories that Spengler seemed to disregard.

Finally, the “fossil” civilizations help Toynbee account for minorities among larger civilizations. Jews, Nestorians, Monophysites, Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Tibet all fall into this category. I have a bit of a problem believing, as he implies, that Ethiopia is a “fossil” civilization. It’s not clear where the line is drawn between a minority surrounded by another civilization and where a church has actually set itself up to succeed and produce a new civilization. Surely we have to see contemporary Myanmar and twentieth-century Tibet as actual attempts at non-fossilized Buddhist civilization. But the point is taken that there are minorities out there who are very small.

Overall, Toynbee makes a strong case for his institutional analysis compared to Spengler. It’s how he can actually analyze and explain societies that do have their own prime phenomena but that don’t actually rise and fall on Spengler’s schedule. Perhaps it needs to be stretched even further to account for not-totally-agricultural forms of social organization, but it’s a generous start.

Asian History

Toynbee enjoys one happy consequence of his analysis: he can explain what happened in India and China after the 12th Century CE! (This was a primary lacuna I complained about when I first wrote about Decline of the West.) Simply put, there have been multiple civilizations in India and China. They have managed to demonstrate continuity of their respective “churches” through periods of collapse.

Specifically, these periods are:

• In India, the Hunnic incursions of the 6th Century CE met by the revitalization of Hinduism in the 12th Century CE; and
• In China, the fall of the Han Dynasty in the 4th Century CE met by the incorporation of Mahayana Buddhism in the Tang Court of the 7th Century CE.

Toynbee allows for the distinction between a “Sinic” and an “Indic” civilization both of which emerged in the Axial Age and their successors, the “Chinese” and “Hindu” civilizations that emerged later on. He also allows that the Japanese-Korean civilization constitutes its own branch off from the Sinic civilization, allowing a satisfying genealogical answer to the “what about Japan” question raised in Spengler (and Huntington).

Beyond this, however, we don’t get a ton more schematic analysis from Toynbee. He has some remarks about contemporary India and about Gandhi, and he has a few things to say about the role of the Chinese magistrates demonstrating the collapsed creativity that accompanies the creation of a universal state.

Isn’t it devilishly easy for Westerners to see China as perpetually stuck in the formation of a universal state, though? Is Toynbee getting it right when he says that Chinese society emerged with the Tang, broke down after only two hundred years, faced a time of troubles, established a universal state under the Mongols, and has been in a grand interregnum ever since? This seems to be a lacuna that has motivated scholars like Scheidel and Pomeranz and Spence to investigate. Much as we drift off into wondering about whether it makes sense to expect North American societies to form states, there’s a similar question about how much we really understand for ourselves about what a Chinese “universal state” or lack thereof really looks like after the collapse of the Han Dynasty.

Considering the state of affairs by the 1920s when Toynbee was writing, it does make some sense why he was unable to directly engage with East Asian historiographical traditions. In the spirit of optimism about creative work in Western civilization, it’s great to remind oneself that there’s still a ton of exchange to be done with the annals of Chinese history. (And Persian history, and so on.)

African History

Africa, according to Toynbee, has no civilizations except (apparently) for the Berbers and the Maasai. Other than the nomads of the Sahara and East Africa, not even an attempt at forming a society. This seems like a weird oversight and is highly convenient for him to have believed as a public intellectual beneficiary of the British Empire of the 1920s.

The Berbers and Maasai get lumped into the category of “arrested nomadic civilizations” along with the Scythians and the Mongols. Toynbee has little to say about this form of life other than basically echoing Ibn Khaldun — praising it as a “triumph of skill” but pointing out that it fails to form a history or overcome the caloric and social constraints imposed by the way of life. He comments that with the arrival of Islamic, Russian, Chinese, and Western civilizations, the world has no place for nomads anymore. The Englishman was certainly right about this a hundred years hence.

When it comes to the sedentary societies of Africa, Toynbee is convinced there’s nothing. He seems intentionally oblivious to organized religious systems such as the worship of minkisi in Central Africa — a system so organized that the King of Kongo was able to convert the whole flock to Catholicism and to personally correspond with the Pope. This type of system seems like it would expressly conform to his idea of a “universal church” and qualify Central Africa to be considered as some kind of society. Instead:

The Mayan Civilization emerged amid the tropical rain fall and vegetation of Guatemala and British Honduras, hut no such civilization ever arose out of savagery in the similar conditions on the Amazon and the Congo.

As I discussed above, Toynbee considers the Inuit and the Polynesians to be “arrested civilizations” which, despite cohesive and widespread spiritual practices, never developed polities that could constitute “universal states.” Surely the Central Africans would qualify for this as well, but inexplicably he leaves them out.

(I know significantly less personally about West Africa, since I only had time to study Bantu languages, but there’s no reason not to believe that social systems in the Niger Delta reached a similar spiritual or cultural concurrency that should demand Toynbee’s attention. And yet there’s not a peep.)

I should recall, however, that Spengler is no better with Africa. Despite the fact that we could clearly identify a prime phenomenon within the Central African worldview — where they explicitly talk about seeing the world as an island separated by the ocean from the land of the dead, where time progresses as a river where humans sit on our island facing backward, and so on — this is all lost on Spengler, who can’t seem to entertain the idea of a nascent Bantu society consumed by a hegemonic Faustian one. There’s no great answer to this fact from either thinker.

This, he believes, in spite of explicitly talking about Ethiopia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity against the tide of Islam. He also implies that it’s a Monophysite “fossil” civilization. (Wouldn’t he like to see their Grand Renaissance Dam and their military thrust toward the sea today!) He uses it as an example of a place where the will of civilization thwarts the overall current of history (in this case, the expansion of the Dar al-Islam that only stalled by the time of the famous Ottoman Siege of Vienna) and yet it’s not clear what civilization we’re supposed to believe Ethiopia belongs to. The Orthodox one that rules Russia? Is there no way to believe that the Ethiopians, with their idiosyncratic kingdom and church, could have formed their own branch of Christian civilization the same way we consider the Russians to have one?

I could also get into a bunch of stuff about the Zulu and modern South Africa, but the point is made. He doesn’t really seem to want to get Africa, and it’s disappointing.

The Role of the Intellectual

When it comes to the apparent decline of civilization, Toynbee basically agrees with Spengler’s empirical observations (even if he detests the biological analogies): the challenges faced by civilization become increasingly environmental products of its own activity. That’s the nature of expanding in finite space. For Toynbee, the muse here is Bergson instead of Spengler’s Nietzsche, but the observation is basically the same: as the challenges of civilization become less “outward” and more “inward,” the focus of civilization’s behavior becomes directed inward. Spiritual challenges become relevant. Christians, Sufis, psychoanalysts, and so on start to appear to answer the challenges of simply being a member of a society so complex and so self-imposing.

But, in keeping with his analysis of civilizations that don’t actually make it from dawn to decadence, Toynbee thinks that the role of intellectuals is existentially important in every chapter of the life of a civilization. Institutional innovation is required for civilization to take its course, and this innovation is only ever accomplished by the creative minority. For instance, he (predictably) credits the Elizabethan court for figuring out how to transfigure an aristocratic national monarchy into a pro-industrial and pro-mercantile state without federating into the weakness of a mere coalition like the Netherlands or Switzerland. The creative minority persists even between civilizations, which is what allows for his genealogical succession. Scholars of the Roman classics maintain a lineage between Western and Classical civilization and so on.

The decline, then, comes as a cause and not an effect — to side with Spenger and assume, as Toynbee says, that society must have a certain pseudo-biological lifetime is similar to the assumption that every play must contain the same number of acts. As long as civilization has its creative minority, the play has more acts. Toynbee seems to think that Egyptian civilization in particular managed to keep its genius for much longer than the Spenglerian lifetime.

I’m brought back to the observations of Peter Brown about the Desert Fathers of Late Rome — it was enough for them to simply turn inward and fight the demons of the era. For Toynbee, the role of the intellectual seems tobe kind of a non-question: those treasures that civilization has produced have to be worthwhile in themselves, and there’s nothing to be said or done other than to cherish, protect, and refine them. Decline is a choice and an effect, not a preordained cause.

Conclusions

A Study of History is as audacious as the Late Victorian mind can offer. There’s a lot going on in there and far more things to comment on than I can fit in a blog post. It’s specifically gotten traction on my thinking whe it comes to actually fitting a schema to the lives of civilizations, and it’s furnished a bunch of categories that I find very productive for my own thoughts.

Toynbee’s epistemological outlook is, perhaps, the most morally valuable thing I’ve been able to take away from the book. His response to Spengler for being an imperfect Nietzschean is a powerful rejoinder, and his assertion that society has only ever been a collection of relations between individuals has clearly resonated for decades. (Most notably, of course, with its paraphrase by Margaret Thatcher.) Toynbee offers a reminder as old as Aristotle’s politics: human affairs are always larger than any of us could ever fit in our heads, and the existence of a social science is owed to the importance of tuning in, and not the tractability of the political world.

In Toynbee, a serious and (at least better-) informed scholar, one can find the courage to look up from Spengler. Good stuff.