The Outstater

May 13, 2024

A Forgotten Man and a Forgotten History

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” — Hegel

I AM NOT A BIG SOCIAL MEDIA GUY (too old), but last week I ran across a Twitter thread that is the most succinct description of Arnold Toynbee’s great “A Study of History.”

The thread was posted by Thinking West, a group that promotes the study of the western canon, classical approaches to education and commentary on history, philosophy, culture, education and religion. I offer it to the membership, hoping that some of you will print it out and save it in your binders.

First, some background. Post-modern academia canceled Toynbee when it realized that he did not divide all history into the oppressed and the oppressors. Today, you would have a hard time finding anyone under age 50 on a university campus who has ever heard of him.

That is too bad for us because Toynbee’s work, published from 1934 to 1961, based on his survey of 29 civilizations in a 12-volume set of three million words and about 7,000 pages plus 412 pages of indices, has proven both definitive and prescient. “Toynbee was eerily right about what has happened in the West after his death,” said the political scientist Charles Murray recently. “But his kind of history wasn’t fashionable by the 1960s.”

You can judge for yourself from the Thinking West outline below. If you dare, check the points that particularly apply to 2024:

• “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” according to Toynbee. He claimed every great culture collapses internally due to a divergence in values between the ruling class and the common people.
• Through his study, he developed a model of how cultures develop and finally die. Toynbee argued that civilizations are born primitive societies as a response to unique challenges — pressures from other cultures, difficult terrain or “hard country,” or warfare “Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges.” 
• But each challenge must be a “golden mean” between excessive difficulty, which will crush a culture, and ease, which will allow it to stagnate. He believed civilizations continued to grow so long as they meet and solve new challenges, one after the other, in a cycle he calls “Challenge and Response.” 
• Thus, each civilization develops differently because each confronts and overcomes different challenges. But societies do not respond to challenges as a whole; rather, it’s a unique class of elites within a society that are the problem-solvers. 
• He calls them the “creative minorities” who find solutions to challenges, and inspire — rather than force — others to follow their lead. The masses follow the solutions of the creative minorities by “mimesis” or imitation, solutions they would have otherwise been incapable of discovering on their own. This synchronicity between the creative minorities (which can emerge or reemerge at any time) and the masses brings civilization to its height.
• Toynbee did not attribute the breakdown of civilizations to environmental forces or external attacks by other civilizations. Rather, it is the decline of the creative minority that leads to a culture’s downfall.
• Through moral decay or material prosperity, the creative minority degenerates. They are no longer the great men who solve society’s problems but are simply a ruling class intent on preserving their power. They become what Toynbee calls the “dominant minority.”
• Toynbee points to a kind of self worship that takes hold of the dominant minority. They become prideful about their positions of authority yet are wholly inadequate to deal with the culture’s new challenges.
• Ultimately the dominant minority, incapable of solving their culture’s actual problems, form a “universal state” in a gambit to shore up their power, but it stifles creativity and subjugates the proletariat (common people). Toynbee used the Roman Empire as a classic example.
• “First, the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force — against all right and reason — a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence.”
• As society deteriorates, four sentiments exist within the proletariat: archaism, idealization of the past; futurism, idealization of the future; detachment, removal of oneself from a decaying world; and transcendence, confronting the decaying world with a new worldview.
• From the disunity between the dominant minority and the proletariat, and between the different proletariat dispositions, a unified culture is impossible, and the civilization eventually ends. — tcl

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