A Kind of Climate Change

Reading Toynbee’s A Study of History again, closely, after a number of decades shows, even in my highly abridged version (which takes twelve volumes down to two), how detailed Toynbee’s work was and therefore how fine-grained the historical patterns from which he built up his theories of change. Toynbee’s work appeared beginning 1934. Oswald Spengler’s first work became visible in 1918, Pitirim Sorokin’s sociology dates its start to 1937. These works of cyclic history therefore appeared in a period of Western culture Toynbee would have characterized as a Time of Troubles. Toynbee’s language, like that of the others, is scholarly, very dense. The ideas expressed are ultimately quite incapable of being made use of in any meaningful, collective, practical, purposive way even if the people could internalize the meanings presented. The great patterns in history are more akin to climate change than anything else. It’s possible to build up a clear-enough picture of what is happening and what has happened in the past, but moving vast masses of humanity to respond intelligently to the challenge is too daunting a task even for the occasional stellar figure that appears in the realms of action.

The Professional Soldier

One of the characteristics of the professional soldier—as my late friend and comrade-in-arms Al Coger used to say—is respect for the professionals on the other side. Both are simply doing a job that, alas, has become necessary enough to make war a calling. Hate is not an aspect of it—nor is war something elevated. It isn’t about ideology, much less about adherence to a cosmic faith. It’s organized violence to be managed as efficiently as possible, and as Sun Tzu, who belonged to this profession, wisely asserted in his The Art of War, the most efficient handling of war is to win it without an actual battle.

Elections, to be sure, are somewhat more efficient ways of resolving conflict than war. Unity frays over time, and at right regular intervals it needs to be restored by the force, in the case of politics, of superior numbers. Ballots are more efficient than bullets. And once the matter is decided, civility should rapidly return. It should return if both sides recognize the underlying issue. That issue is that conflict may be unavoidable but isn’t some kind of good in and of itself. Unity is. And conflict must be ended as soon as ever possible—not when the other side has been absolutely annihilated. Compromise, therefore is part of it.

The presence of a sense of unity, even in the midst of the conflict, is what matters. And when it’s absent, real trouble looms. War between nations must be hallowed by an understanding on both side that each is part of humanity—and humanity is the higher good. Within a nation the unity of its people as one community must be the fundamental assumption that renders elections legitimate. Demonization of the other side has been a feature of elections at their emotional heights throughout our own—and in other countries’—history. But after the election is decided, normalcy returns again. Indeed it has been a feature for the winner to embrace those who opposed him and for the looser to pledge his support.

Quite visible cracks have appeared after this year’s election. They may just be a residue of the pain of loss on the right. The right, of course, will triumph again, just give it time, but one of the signs of a loss of effective unity is that every loss today is Doom Forever, and every victory the Triumphal Arrival of the Everlasting Future. One radio host, for instance, Dennis Prager, has elevated political stances into religions. He sees three such competing for humanity’s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism (link). That’s the sort of thing I mean. It reminds me of Toynbee; he saw “end times” characterized internally by the rise of Futurism (read leftism), Archaism (read Americanism), and externally by the eventually successful pressure of an External Proletariat (read Islamism). The secessionist talk, largely only symbolic although it is, also indicates that even great and successful unions of people become, eventually, too big to hold together.

To whom does the future really belong? Toynbee suggested that those in charge of really shaping the future are the people who are looking up, transcending all these battles, and finding  solutions in the spiritual realm—where no “divisions,” in Stalin’s sense, are even discernible. They are too few in number to be clearly seen yet. They’re not agitating in the public square; that square is down there, not up. They’re not thirsting for power, either; they only long to do a good job—like any decent professional soldier. I’m waving to you, Al. You never thought you’d end up in heaven—or that such a place even existed—but there you are now.

A Note on Technology

I did not undertake to play the book meme that went around a while ago (here and here), but my own habit is to read multiple books at the same time. Of those, very frequently, some will be re-reading books once more. Just recently I read again Arnold Toynbee’s Christianity Among the Religions of the World, a worthwhile venture at any time. It dates back to 1955 when Toynbee presented the contents of this book in a lecture series in the United States. What struck me this time, reading this book (the last time was in 1965) is Toynbee’s linkage of post-Christian western civilization with technology. The two are linked over and over again. The subject of technology is always present somewhere in my current thought. In fact I’d just read about the sputtering sort of appearance of it during the Hellenistic era in The Forgotten Revolution, on which more here. Years ago now, reading Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, I’d come to the conclusion that—to the contrary of our common view—technology was present, changing, improving, and evolving as far back as we can see. And, indeed, as I was reading Toynbee I was also reading an essay by Sir Steven Runciman titled “Constantinople and Baghdad: Cultural Relations” in an essay collection titled Cultural Encounters. In that essay (here we go again!) there are several mentions of technological innovations, both on the Byzantine and on the Muslim side, dating back to the ninth, tenth, and later centuries, all of them considered pre-technological.

Why then, in these later centuries—say the eighteenth or nineteenth and thereafter—does technology suddenly begin to throw so great a shadow that an eminent historian chooses it as defining our times? The reason for that, it seems to me, is that the massive expansion of technology is very visible, its technical complexity and the engineering ingenuity is easily linked to advances in science (even though the two are not at all invariably linked), but the cause of this expansion is not. And the cause of that expansion has been the discovery and exploitation of fossil energy—coal and then petroleum.

The age of technology is also the age of metals. But humanity has worked metals as far back as the Bronze Age (3000 BC). Why the recent expansion of the use of metals beyond weaponry? Again. Same answer. Massive metalworking requires enormous amounts of cheap energy. We might say that technology, viewed over millennia, is the consequence of human ingenuity. Its expansion is the consequence of the Age of Oil. But this has important implications. We are approaching Fossil Sunset now. And while our technological optimism is high (but itself caused by the free wealth we discovered underground) when oil runs out and coal is used up rapidly—minimally within a hundred years—the remaining ways of generating energy will yield vastly less usable power. Hence, therefore, technology cannot be viewed as a permanent gain—except in the millennial view, thus at low levels of use. In the not too distant future, our technology will be better. Technology as always improved and will continue to do so. But it will no longer be pervasively present in everyday life and major re-adaptations are in the offing. The consoling thought is that we are extraordinarily adaptive, and when that time comes, those of us now who have an existential crisis when the Internet fails will no longer be alive.

The Third Stance

One of the intriguing patterns Arnold Toynbee thought he had discovered in the late stages of a civilization was that its elite elements polarize into archaists and futurists, thus into those who seek solutions in the past and those who seek them in a radical break with the past. But this sort of view was not particularly original even in the mid-1930s when the first volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History appeared: the left and right were clearly visible and painted in appropriate colors already. Toynbee’s discernment showed itself because he suggested that neither of these orientations had much of a future. Futurists and archaists would engage in a more or less meaningless battle until disorder finally triumphed. But Toynbee also saw emerging at late stages of mature civilization a third element: neither of the left nor of the right—neither of the West nor of the East, to echo the Koran’s Niche of Lights (24:35)—but an elite that looked up, as it were, detached itself and turned its sight toward the transcendental, rose above the battle yet in the midst of life, in but not of the world, and, from this curiously immaterial but yet fixed point, it begins the process from which a new culture can eventually arise. Toynbee called this third position “transfiguration,” and “etherialization.” He saw it as a detachment from the macrocosm and a return to the microcosm—put very simply: “Stop fixing the world and start improving you.”

This was not merely an abstract codification of historical fact. Toynbee wasn’t merely looking back, discovering Christianity in the rotting womb of a decadent Rome, and rendering this picture as a general historical rule. But he did see, beginning around about the turn of time from B.C. to A.D. the rise of multiple original religious impulses. These included Gnosticism (before it became Christianized), the revived cults of Isis and Cybele, and, most notably, Mithraism. Indeed those times were very similar to ours beginning around the early 1960s. All manner of old religions were invading the Roman realm in new guises, including Eleusinian, Dionysian, Orphic, and neo-Platonic cults and groups, and—among them—a new Jewish religion. One element—that third element—of the society supported them all. Christianity eventually emerged as the victor and, in the process, also absorbed features of others. Rome became Christendom, a new culture.

This is a divergence from my theme but interesting in the context. Toynbee also noted the behavior of two proletariats, as he called them: the masses. The internal proletariat, thus within the limits of the civilization, tends in the late stage to become alienated from the dominant (read governing) minority—the turn-off. And the external proletariat (read third world) becomes antagonistic to the Imperium and, rather than striving to be included in it, begins to fight it.

I’ve often wondered what it might really have been like in old Rome—knowing full well that big abstractions almost completely lose the meaning that they try to synthesize. What does "archaist" actually mean in daily life? The answer, I find, is three-fold: study history, look around, and look inside. At my birth in 1936 the zillion cults of this latter day, not least weird religions from abroad, were not even faintly visible either in Hungary or in the United States. Hare, hare, hare! There was neither culture war at home nor yet its equivalent that we call the War on Terror now. And my own personal history has been a gradual detachment from the macrocosm, if you like. With the passing of the decades, I’ve come to see more and more clearly that the big battles aren’t worth fighting. You win today, but in the see-saw the other side will triumph tomorrow and think that a new epoch has begun. And so it shall be until a new dispensation eventually gives meaning to the whole again. That will take place when we are once more properly oriented to the greater reality.

Orienting Ourselves in Time

In my childhood a three-fold structure dominated history. It divided into ancient, medieval, and modern. Prehistory formed a shadowy fourth but wasn't really history at all, just background. It was left to anthropologists. I was nineteen or thereabouts (1955) when I discovered that some people saw a different pattern. Three scholars had emerged in the early 1930s in Europe; they offered a cyclical view of history. History was not, repeat not, a progression from the primitive to the enlightened, a latter-day fellow-traveller of Darwin's. It was rather the story of closely-knit social groups. They formed cultures and, for a time, gave meaning to the meaningless succession of social change.

The three scholars were Arnold J. Toynbee (A Study of History), Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), and Pitirim Sorokin (Social and Cultural Dynamics and, in a shorter version, The Crisis of Our Age).

These men did not always agree. They gave variable interpretations to what they saw. Nevertheless they saw the same pattern. Spengler saw cultures as living entities, no more intelligible than living individuals: they're born, mature, and die. Toynbee saw elites meeting challenges until they failed. Sorokin saw a succession of cultural forms always in the same sequence—inward, mixed, and outward in orientation, corresponding to periods of religious faith, "renaissances," and secular-materialist eras. The last stage, according to Sorokin, always falls into chaos. From the chaos then rises another religious culture.

The pattern common to all three? A denial of linear development. The assertion of a cyclical process in which either fate itself (Spengler) or human failure (Toynbee and Sorokin) lead to the termination of a vast collective enterprise.

Does it matter who is right? The linear historians who, since my youth, have augmented the classification by introducing yet another era, the Post-Modern? Their cyclical opponents? They were never warmly embraced in their own time and are today largely forgotten. Human life is very short. Most people don't feel a strong urge to be oriented in the vast ocean of time. Having at least two ways of assessing what transpired during my life was very helpful. And, looking around, I'm inclined to side with the cyclical historians.