Toynbee: Handle With Care!

[James Brody]

Arnold J. Toynbee tried to capture 6000 years of human history in twelve volumes, published in clusters: three volumes in 1934, three in 1939, four in 1954, one in 1959 and the last in 1961 when he was 72. Thirty-nine years passed between his first outline in on half sheet of paper in 1922 and the distribution of Volume 12.

It might be argued, however, that Toynbee, instead of capturing the essence of civilized history, was captured by his own idea of that history, an idea that, to define and defend its own nature, recruited him to be a talented servant but still a servant. Toynbee's family tree, however, his susceptibility to an obsession, and his erudition got him noticed by the general public and in trouble with mainstream historians.

Not a new thing --- "stories" are a risk in histories and Arnold J. Toynbee may have told us one as evolutionists did before the sciences and methods of quantitative genetics. On the other hand, Toynbee's remarks appear to fit almost exactly the current situation in Europe and the United States where invasions from two directions resemble those that once occurred to Rome.

What He Wrote:
(D. C. Somervell abridged Volumes I-VI in 1946 and Volumes I-X in 1960. The 1960 abridgement required only 49 pages! I am grateful to both Somervell and to Wikipedia.org)

Toynbee offered a grand theory for the growth, maturation, and decline of more than twenty civilizations. 1) An environmental challenge requires innovation and innovation, once discovered, becomes a habit but only for a little while. 2) The innovators, a "creative minority," attempt to solve future challenges with the same tools that solved past ones. These tools no longer work. 3) The "creative" minority becomes the "dominant" minority, making rules instead of inspiration for the majority of the population. "Internal religions" replace former loyalty to a culture with loyalty to God or gods. From outside, marauders and invaders breach former walls and take command of whomever still lives in the culture's husk. A key notion: civilizations are not toppled from outside attacks but from internal vulnerability to those attacks. A Roman emperor, for example, invited in the barbarians who later killed him. (Sounds a bit like George and Ted but I didn't say that, Pat Buchanan did. Indeed, Buchanan's assessment of Western Culture might have been coauthored with Toynbee! Bush's conduct is fresh in all of our minds. Kennedy's betrayals occurred in the mid-60s with his sponsorship of reforms to the Immigration and Naturalization Act. See Bremelow, 1995))

My Own Fascination:
I'm a "pattern guy" as are many Asperger's types. For example, Feynman's dad, convinced that mathematics was based on patterns, made up problems with colored tiles for Richard to solve. Spengler was a pattern guy, Toynbee was a pattern guy, so is Ed Wilson who, quoted by Bob Wright, said "I've always wanted to transform messy subjects into scientifically orderly subjects...To put things right, so to speak." (1988, p. 138).

Toynbee, like Jared Diamond and some of EP's players, however, found they could account for patterns without reference to genes. Wilson and MacArthur found patterns that resembled Toynbees but described them with terms such as "r selection" and "K selection." And I, poor seeker, find that the idea of a gene helps me make sense of how dynamic ecosystems, on an island, in a culture, or within the stages of a single mind, might work. You see, there is some probability that environments work by turning some genes on or off and they may well exert these effects through the reproductive tactics of females. But that secret is mine...

And the clue that K/r theory offers to historians and to other ecologists is that of birthrate. I hope that one of you get your masters degree overlapping some of Toynbee's observations with whatever you can find about birthrates! That is, in settled times, females opt to have fewer children and spend more on each of them rather than fewer children that they cast to the winds and rains.

Toynbee's Troubles:
Dreamers encounter problems when skeptics capture them in print. Write a book that suggests a paradigm change and get shot. Write a dozen and get shot "12 taken to some power! As Kuhn might have predicted, Ashley Montagu assembled works from thirty essayists, nearly all of them historians, who found problems with what Toynbee proposed. Montagu's gang gathered around Toynbee to praise, kill, and bury him or perhaps mostly to sell a book of their own. Most of them, unfortunately, for their target, wrote well and needed less ink than he did.

Most of the Slings and Arrows:
1) Toynbee sold his books to the general public rather than to his peers. Oh my...
2) "True" historians assemble stories about a particular people, tribe, or nation. They don't look for cycling and reasons for it. They don't look for universals. Those are the concerns of philosophers and sociologists.
3) Toynbee said too much, quoting his favorite characters at length and when there was not particular reason to do so. Several reviewers complained about having to sit and read it all, perhaps before the Reader's Digest version by Somervell (included in the Toynbee reference below)
4) Although few critics challenged Toynbee on generalities, nearly all of them challenged him on details. The China specialist concluded that Toynbee knew nothing about China, likewise for experts on other civilizations.
5) Toynbee, convinced of the demise of the West, is accused of becoming the orator at its funeral. As one keen mind observed, Toynbee found that "the last worthwhile joke was cracked by Aristophanes." Several critics, however, found no reason to pray, grieve, and perform autopsies because they could find no corpse.
7) He pretended to attempt a science but had neither operational definitions, blind raters, nor measures of what was reported. (Sounds too familiar!)
8) As Toynbee neared his 70's, he did the religion thing: that is, Toynbee found (or wanted to find!) that religion and secularism alternated their dominance across time. He eventually concluded that secularism's role was to get us from one religion to the next higher religion until there is a world faith. (My hunch is that Arnold-the-younger would have disagreed with Arnold-the-older: young guys break heads for gold, girls, and empire, old guys do the same thing but like younger women, by making rules for young guys to obey!)
9) All in all, his imagery is rich but not of the right stuff. He, classically trained, learned about his Greeks, glued the habits and failures of Roman citizens on top, and considered the two as one culture. The folks, however, who know best about Egypt, China, the Mayans, the Middle East, or the Eskimo, refuse to picture them in togas or in temples with Ionic, Doric, or Corinthian columns. Again, no surprise. Anyone has to start somewhere and, if a theory is inclusive and valid, then any component should be a fractal in which one segment substantially duplicates a different segment. The Greeks should be as good as anyone!

Final Thoughts:
First, emergent networks in biology and history are spun from many characters, many of them making a small contribution that, if missed, the assembly would not be substantially different. Plomin and the behavior genetics crowd also wrestle with it. Toynbee, like the civilizations he studied, has the same quality: There is "Toynbee for this right now" and "Toynbee for that once upon a time." Second, Toynbee responded to his critics with one page at the end of Montagu's collection, asserting his right to think and write as he pleased! No point to arguing with Brutus and his crowd! As for MacArthur and Wilson's contributions to consilience, they describe a mechanism for cycles in ecosystems that may apply to the life of a civilization or nation, one that might be abundant in nature and "each a piece of the continent, a part of the main," but one that Toynbee could not possibly recognize. After all, M&W did it without God. And the paradigm shift that might emerge from ecology and demographics could morph into the foundations of traditional histories.

Time for Drudge, gotta' shut down. The Art Institute of Chicago has unveiled to huge applause a statue of Obama as Jesus, a week or two after a chocolate, nude Jesus, meant to be nibbled by museum visitors, was put on display but later put away in New York. How weird...

JimB

References:

Brimelow P (1995) Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster. NY: Random House.
Buchanan P (2006) State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. NY: St. Martin's Press.
Toynbee, Arnold (1958) Civilization on Trial and The World and the West. NY: Meridian. (Includes Somervill's abridgment!)
Montagu, Ashley (Ed.), 1956, Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews. Boston, MA: Porter Sergent. (A masterful display of 40 different ways to murder by pen)
MacArthur, Robert & Wilson, E.O. (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Gleick, James (1992) Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. NY: Vintage.
Wright, Robert (1988) Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in a Age of Information. NY: Times Books.