Conveying Toynbee

Madame:

It is good to be back in the blogging saddle!

Talk about presaging my thunder!  You have jumped to how I was going to begin formulating my concluding comments on this chapter.  Your questions hold intricate complexity!  I won’t respond to them all (or fully) this week, but we can make a beginning!

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Time and again Arnold Toynbee brought up how civilizations are challenged, and how they respond.  Or, sometimes, how they fail to, at least adequately and realistically. Civilizations begin their suicidal progression, in Toynbee’s view, when the moral backbone of the society or societies within that civilization begin osteoporosis. That is, when the elites who supposedly lead the culture care more for themselves than their society and become visionless parasites, sucking out the resources in a take-take-take exploitation, while giving very little.  The classes below the upper class are essentially only exploited in one fashion or another.  This was common in the (later) Roman elites.  It has also become all too common in ours. 

Toynbee would also consider empires to be signs of present and future decay, another manifestation of the parasitic elites.  They create inflexible bureaucratic structures doomed to fail.   Hedges tries to remind us of all this as well: “Imperialism and democracy are incompatible. The massive resources and allocations devoted to imperialism mean that democracy inevitably withers and dies.  Democratic states and republics, including ancient Athens and Rome, that refuse to curb imperial expansion eviscerate their political systems” and only make those systems tools of totalitarianism, whether classic or inverted. (147)  Our Framers, well educated in the classics of Rome and ancient Greece, knew this well—and feared it greatly.

Toynbee said the “elites” in declining civilizations stifle dissent or true solutions, and instead only perpetuate confusion and obstruction to weaken and suppress those who, although they might change things for the better, in the process might upend the elites’ status.  It is obvious to many, even a majority, of the educated that the civilization is declining, although the privileged elites will come to the wrong conclusions or go into denial about the why (because a prime reason is them).   This means alienation for an increasing number of people who would otherwise be productive, because they do not feel loyalty to the power structure anymore, a power structure they feel is exploitative of them without letting them have any meaningful measure of influencing their futures.

Toynbee often spoke in the language of Marx (gasp!), even though he wasn’t really talking about Marxism per se.  In our post-Marxist language, Toynbee would say that the working classes and (shrinking) middle classes within the civilization become jaded, apathetic, resentful.  At the same time, an increasing number of the poor residing outside the civilization—poor people who often only see a system that is exploitative and arrogant—become envious, angry, and desperate.

Instead of meaningful and effective response, Toynbee says, “elites” in declining civilizations manipulate emotion to appeal to a past that didn’t really exist, or at least, not in that fashion, and certainly the perceived change is little fault of any of the scapegoats shoved forth.  This evasion, denial, and deflection can also help foment cults or other instances of radical fanaticism, both within and outside the civilization. 

Just because civilizations are subject to internal and/or external pressures does not mean they have to fall.  Indeed, it may even strengthen them, by bringing to the forefront great untapped energies, belief systems, creativity, and determination.  Once again, to Toynbee, it is all about the response.

SOMETIMES, Toynbee says, a new unified perspective arises and creates the seed of a new civilization.  Sometimes, however, the civilization just disintegrates, often with help from external entities that absorb its remnants or the parts of the civilization’s views they find appealing (of course, those entities erase those parts they do not find appealing).

Civilizations are often arbitrary concepts. Criticisms of Toynbee tend to center on disagreements over what he considered civilizations, and what he didn’t, and where dividing lines were, and some of the criticisms appear valid to me.  However, what critics don’t do well, in my opinion, is criticize his central concepts.

More on Toynbee (and Hedges!) next time.  My challenge will be to not veer too off the book path as we briefly explore this very rich mine of ore! :)