Toynbee's history I would consider to be dialectical. I chose that term given my familiarity with Jean Paul Sarte's dialectical philosophy, which one contrasts from analytical social philosophy. The basis of this dialectic is praxis, which he defines as "the negation of negation." That usually takes the form of some action, by a reflexive individual to correct some environmental condition that one finds unpleasant. The unpleasant condition (e.g., cold room) in some way negates the desire to maintain comfort, and in that way, it is a negating condition. The individual then acts to correct this condition, which in effect negates this negating condition. Hence, praxis is the negation of negation. Moreso, human society is held together by some ritual observance of this praxis, the initial conditions that set it in motion are often misunderstood by the very nature of its memorialization in this ritual. Therefore, Sarte's social theory seems to pine for the revolutionary moment when a new praxis is enacted for forming new social bonds and organization. But the key is that the newness wears off, genuine connections between each other become mired in the greasy patina of old and forgotten habit and these social relations become more technical. In fact, the momentum of that praxis, which sets some kernel of society in motion in fact turns those who carry it out into merely reacting agents who maintain often impersonal connections to others in a long chain of serial relations. This is the basis for human organizing and impersonality the constitutive conditions of which are forgotten by its practitioners. The energy of praxis to form relations is inversely related to the inevitable force of decay. This changes the character of praxis from genuine relations (I-Thou) to more technical serial relations (I-It). Technology and technique are key components of social praxis and mark some of the very forces of its undoing.
Therefore, there are stimuli in the environment that force us to act. In forcing us to act, we move some form of human endeavor forward. For Toynbee, society progresses by being constantly challenged by the environment, either physicial or social. Therefore, war can be the stimulus, enslavement can be the stimulus, or fear of starvation, and lack of resources for living in general can be the stimulus to progress society forward. He cites numerous examples where the stimulus, such as the poor farmland of the Rhineland, the challenging weather of Scandanavia, or other such conditions which give rise to great invention and flourishing of the human spirit. The challenge can also break us, and he cites the case of the Appalachians to prove it. But the challenge can and will be the very thing that moves us to act and in ways that better us. This establishes a kind of algorithm, a boolean statement, from which software programmers like Sid Meier created the growth and interaction engines that underly his game "Civilization." That much became very clear to me as I read Toynbee's development of the basic elements of civilization: internal and external proletariats, universal church, creative minorities, uncreative majorities, the radiating effect of civilization through mimesis, etc. All of these point to some underlying functional criteria for how human society forms, develops, and eventually perishes. Toynbee is a great systems thinker who charted a complex map of human civilization based upon a complex network of relations between individuals operating within the undeniable cycles and patterns that occur in the historical record.
Now let me get to the elements that I wanted to address:
Democracy, mass education and total war:
Here Toynbee sees the seeds of totalitarianism. When education is used to standardized the masses to a national history, one sprinkled with pride in achievements and reasons to join in identifying with the nation's origins, it becomes a tool for training the masses. It will ultimately prepare them for waging total war on other national history adopters. He sees this pearl often put to poor use. Here is an example:
"The bread of universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children's bread under the educator's very eyes.. In the educational history of England the dates speak for themselves. The edifice of universal elementary education was, roughly speaking, completed by Forster's Act in 1880; and the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later--as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had scquired sufficient purchasing-power--by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational philanthropist's labour of love could be made to yield a royal profit to a press-lord." (pp. 339-340)
The uses of education for totalitarian ends seems fairly evident from this example. It's just a matter of educating the masses to the ends of the politician. Therefore, instilling political ideology in the form of some facts that must be accurately reproduced on a test is where the ideological rubber hits the popular road. The lesson, education is not a panacea; it is neutral but gains its valence with regard to the ends it is employed. The extensions to democracy follow.Toynbee sees democracy through a similar light, in that it brings about total war, whereby the whole populace of a country is arranged to have a stake in that country's destiny while that country's leaders are the one's who actually have some control and choice in that stake. Democracy paves the path toward total war by first attacking the parochialism that comes natural to a country not wired through communications, where what happens in one's immediate town and countryside constitute worldly matters. What happens in a city hundreds of miles away is of no consequence. By dissolving this association democracy gives countries a larger resource, a national population, which brings with it certain responsibilities. Therefore, education, health care, decent working hours, and other such forms of welfare should be ensured by the nation in order that it has a ready resource for equipping with guns and training for waging war at its whims.
Machines "The triumph of matter over life"
We find this in a number of places in his study. One case is in the arrested civilization. Here, the human and the auxilliary, be it an animal or some technique (e.g., marksmanship) or technology (e.g., the kayak) become fused where the auxilliary is half humanized through its partnership. Consequently, the human is half dehumanized through the human's trained incapacity to be more flexible. By training in horse riding and giving this technique a central place in the life of the society or by learning how to build and row a kayak and conferring this a central place in the life of the society that society forfeits its human capacity to cultivate the depthless variety of human nature for the purposes of integrating singularly important technique into the very fabric of the individual and the society that is maintained through this technique. Therefore, by insinuating itself into a particular niche, this society and the individuals who exemplify it doom themselves to obsolescence given the dynamic nature of the environment and the various challenges its poses. Therefore, the arrested civilization has invested too much in its technique and has lost something uniquely human in the process. It's fate is sealed for this commitment to its technique will be its very undoing.
The preoccupation with technique and conferring them into machines for translating power into some effect reveals the paradox of growth. If we consider that these machines and techniques are the mode and means of reproducing civilization in the banality of its many operations then those very components have a number of consequences: the loss of free will and the loss of individual diversity. The loss of individual diversity is noted above. When the individual member commits to a specific set of techniques and invests them with the survival of self and people, the individual loses the foresight to flexibly adapt. This loss is equated as a loss of humanity. The loss of free will is another consequence of the mechanization of techniques. The outcome societies organized in this way leads, as Toynbee notes in the case of Sparta, to 'war robots.'
The current condition, what Toynbee calls the traffic problem par excellence is the fear of annihilating each other with the machines we have put to use for travelling places. The automobile has annihilated space, but the problem of killing each other through the very means of travel, the fast propelling engine, enters into the system. With speed comes the need to train one's body to react and react fast. Therefore, we mechanize ourselves for the purposes of saving life, driving defensively, and surviving the transit. And the investment in the automobile has transformed society around that thing. Kids can't play in the street, pedestrians need separate spaces for walking, a vast network of roads and traffic regulation technology must be employed. This becomes the face of a society completely mechanized. Government is not realized in this regulatory mechanism; free will is not realized in it either. It's the mechanization of human conduct for observing stop, go, green, red, and yellow that allow organization to be the product of the smooth operation of millions of people employing potentially dangerous technology to carry out some activity. While the goal might be to then carry out one's free will, all the time spent there challenges any use of free will. Because that causes error to creep into the system, which carries dire consequences: death, traffic jams, chemical spills, and the disruption of millions of lives who rely upon the smooth operation of this traffic system. Our investment in this traffic system gives rise to suburbia; it introduces inefficiencies into urban areas, swallows up countless acres of land suitable for commerce, industry, and residence. The character of a nation is changed, and that very character is often denied a place in the action of the population when it considers its political choices. Society stands in denial of this very thing, considering it outside the scope of one's personal life. Perhaps because one is in mechanized mode while one is operating here, and regardless of the time spent navigating the mechanized space, life begins after leaving and ends before entering it. It's a big dark spot on the society's consciousness.
And finally the consideration of the war on terrorism:
Toynbee considers one of the challenges of civilization to be that of the external proletariat. As long as the fruits of the creative minority are copied, via mimesis, by the uncreative masses, the internal structure of that civilization is intact. As these wonders radiate out, those members of the external proletariat, the non-member barbarian groups who employ some of the civilization's techniques, in effect, extend the scope of the civilization. They are, in effect, charmed by the culture of the civilization's creative minority. Toybnbee notes that the growth of the culture of the civilization ceases while its economic and political elements can still grow even faster than ever. But the economic and political components of the civlization are only trivial, and without the cultural element, these two are perceived as threatening. At this point, the external proletariat uses these very techniques it adopted in its charmed mimesis of the civilization to defend themselves against that civilization. Now we are in a stage of warfare with the frontiers.
At this stage, the civilization wins over its neighbors through force, and it does perhaps a good job owing to its technical superiority. But it will reach a point, "where the dominant minority's qualitative superiority in military power is counterbalanced by the length of its communications" (p. 465). Toynbee continues:
"When this stage is reached it brings with it the completion of a change in the nature of the contact between the civilization in question and its barbarian neighbours. So long as the civilization is in growth, its home territory, where it prevails in full force, is screened, as we have seen, from the impact of unreclaimed savagery by a broad threshold or buffer zone across which civilization shades into savagery in a long series of fine gradations. On the other hand, when a civilization has broken down and fallen into schism and when the consequent hostilities between the dominant minority and the external proletariat have ceased to be a running fight and have settled down into trench warfare, we find that the buffer zone has disappeared. The geographical transition from civilization to barbarism is now no longer gradual but is abrupt. To use the appropriate Latin words, which bring out both the kinship and the contrast between the two types of contact, a limen or threshold, which was a zone, has been replaced by a limes or military frontier, which is a line that has length without breadth. Across this line a baffled dominant minority and an unconquered external proletariat now face one another under arms; and this military front is a bar to the passage of all social radiation except that of military technique--an article of social exchange which makes for war and not for peace between those who give and take it.
The social phenomena which follows when this warfare becomes stationary along a limes will occupy our attention later (in a proceeding volume). Here it is sufficient to mention the cardinal fact that this temporary and precarious balance of forces inevitably tilts, with the passage of time, in favour of the barbarians."
I'm going to avoid any discussion of the parallels that this passage has to the current war on terror, but the lesson is clear. No measure of force will break the will of the barbarians aside from total annihilation, something that is only theoretically possible. We've already lost this war. The social phenomena which follows when this warfare becomes stationary along a limes will occupy our attention later (in a proceeding volume). Here it is sufficient to mention the cardinal fact that this temporary and precarious balance of forces inevitably tilts, with the passage of time, in favour of the barbarians."
Some notables:
Alberti bass - Examples of this musical accompaniment are found in Mozart's Piano Sonata number 16. Toynbee uses this as a metaphor for what remains in a dying civiliation as those two opposing movements that define the civilization's rhythm. Alberti bass is the left-hand accompaniment to 18th c. keyboard music. I can recall it in classic children's tunes none of which come to mind. So, like our friend Sartre, there remains in the decaying civilization something practiced by rote until its meaning is lost as well as the very thing that it accompanied, the society. The original movement to organize a people becomes the mere mechanical set of relations that sustain the group.
No comments:
Post a Comment