Notes & Comments: March 2001.

The tendency of our culture

By the time the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee died in 1975, he was world famous. His multivolume magnum opus, A Study of History (which began appearing in the mid-1930s), had secured his place as an intellectual celebrity--part sage, part scholar. Purporting to demonstrate how civilizations begin, develop, and, inevitably, disintegrate, A Study of History is a curious mixture of recondite learning and moral admonition. Bold, lofty, adventurous, it is an immensely ambitious book. It is also, in many respects, an immensely silly one. In this it resembles its author. For Toynbee, history had the structure of a Greek tragedy. It was the story of Hubris ineluctably calling forth [[Alpha][Tau][Eta]] --infatuation, blindness, delusion--which was followed in turn by Nemesis and ruination. This story has a certain poetic appeal. What it has to do with real history is another matter.

Toynbee epitomized a certain type of modern anti-secular, left-wing intellectual. The product of an elite English education --Winchester and Oxford--he harbored a special loathing for the social and political institutions of the West. In the 1950s he assured his readers that "Western imperialism, not Russian Communism, is Enemy no. 1 for the majority of the human race." A decade latter he observed that "Madison Avenue is more of a danger to the West than Communism." If Toynbee was at various points in his career well-disposed to Communism, he felt no compunction about ignoring its fundamental hostility to religion. Whatever Toynbee's personal ambivalence to religion, A Study in History sits in a veritable aspic of religious sentimentality. Indeed, that glaze of religiosity doubtless helps explain the book's extraordinary popularity. Toynbee caters to all those who like their spirituality plush but indeterminate, ubiquitous but without the inconvenience of specific beliefs. For Toynbee, Nirvana and the beatific vision describe more or less the same thing; in his view, "every higher religion" aspires to the misty vagueness of "the universal church."

Toynbee's syncretism only went so far, however. His defenders deny he was anti-Semitic. But as Elie Kedourie pointed out, Toynbee did not hesitate to describe the Jews as a "fossil" civilization or, in 1948, to equate the Palestinian Jews, battling to establish the state of Israel, with the Nazis. When he finally got around to reconsidering his position on Judaism, it was in the context of celebrating the idea of world government and insisting that the Jews lead the way in demonstrating to mankind the folly of capitalism, nationalism, and territorial attachment. (Perhaps it was to encourage such leadership that, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, Toynbee wrote the Syrian minister of defense to convey his "heartfelt wishes for an Arab victory.")

We air these reservations to provide a context for the praise we feel is due, not to Toynbee's work, exactly, but to the use made of it recently by the social commentator Charles Murray. In "Prole Models," a remarkable op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal that appeared on February 6, Mr. Murray drew on some of Toynbee's thoughts about how civilizations disintegrate to reflect on the situation in the United States circa 2001. Toynbee was never happy unless he was dealing with a pattern he believed fit two or three millennia. That is part of what gives his writing such sweep. It is also one reason to take his prognostications with a grain of salt: a history that finds the same plot recapitulated in ancient China, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, and modern Europe and America is a story in need of nuance, qualification, and correction.

Nevertheless, whatever hesitations we may have about Toynbee's theory writ large, there can be no doubt that he had many perceptive and illuminating things to say about some of the forces operating in our civilization. Mr. Murray's reflections have to do in particular with Toynbee's observations, in a section called the "Schism in the Soul," about how the dominant elite in a society succumbs to "vulgarity and barbarism in manners" by "merging itself in its own proletariats." Toynbee distinguished between "internal proletariats"--what we might call the underclass--and "external proletariats," by which he meant culturally less sophisticated military rivals.

It is a curious process. When a society is robust and self-confident, Toynbee suggested, the influence travels largely from the elites to the proletariats. The proletariats are "softened" (in Toynbee's phrase) by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners: Toynbee spoke in this context of a growing "sense of drift," "truancy," "promiscuity," and general "vulgarization" of manners, morals, and the arts. The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to "go native" and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes. As Mr. Murray notes, "That sounds very much like what has been happening in the U.S."