Arnold Toynbee, from 'Civilisation on Trial' (1947)

The writer’s mind runs back fifty years, to an afternoon in London in the year 1897. He is sitting with his father at a window in Fleet Street and watching a procession of Canadian and Australian mounted troops who have come to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. He can still remember his excitement at the unfamiliar, picturesque uniforms of these magnificent ‘colonial’ troops, as they were still called in England then: slouch hats instead of brass helmets, grey tunics instead of red. To an English child, this sight gave a sense of new life astir in the world; a philosopher, perhaps, might have reflected that, where there is growth, there is likely also to be decay ... They saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed that it was there to stay— without their even needing to give it the magically compelling word of command which Joshua had uttered on a famous occasion.

The author of the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua was at any rate aware that a stand-still of Time was something unusual. ‘There was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man.’ Yet the middle-class English in 1897, who thought of themselves as Wellsian rationalists living in a scientific age, took their imaginary miracle for granted. As they saw it, history, for them, was over. It had come to an end in foreign affairs in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo; in home affairs in 1832, with the Great Reform Bill; and in imperial affairs in 1859, with the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. And they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them. ‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.’

Viewed from the historical vantage point of a.d. 1947, this fin de siecle middle-class English hallucination seems sheer lunacy, yet it was shared by contemporary Western middle-class people of other nationalities. In the United States, for instance, in the North, history, for the middle class, had come to an end with the winning of the West and the Federal victory in the Civil War; and in Germany, or at any rate in Prussia, for the same class, the same permanent consummation had been reached with the overthrow of France and foundation of the Second Reich in 1871. For these three batches of Western middle-class people fifty years ago, God’s work of creation was completed, ‘and behold it was very good.’ Yet, though in 1897 the English, American, and German middle class, between them, were the political and economic masters of the world, they did not amount, in numbers, to more than a very small fraction of the living generation of mankind, and there Were other people abroad who saw things differently— even though they might be impotent and inarticulate.

...All over the world, in fact, though at that time still under the surface, there were peoples and classes who were just as discontented as the French or the Southerners were with the latest deal of history’s cards, but who were quite unwilling to agree that the game was over. There were all the subject peoples and all the depressed classes, and what millions they amounted to!...

The subterranean movements that could have been detected, even as far back as 1897, by a social seismologist who put his ear to the ground, go far to explain the upheavals and eruptions that have signalized the resumption of history’s Juggernaut march during the past half-century. To-day, in 1947, the Western middle class which, fifty years ago, was sitting carefree on the volcano’s crust, is suffering something like the tribulation which, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, was inflicted by Juggernaut’s car on the English industrial working class. This is the situation of the middle class today not only in Germany, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Great Britain, but also in some degree in Switzerland and Sweden, and even in the United States and Canada. The future of the Western middle class is in question now in all Western countries; but the outcome is not simply the concern of the small fraction of mankind directly affected; for this Western middle class— this tiny minority— is the leaven that in recent times has leavened the lump and has thereby created the modern world. Could the creature survive its creator? If the Western middle class broke down, would it bring humanity’s house down with it in its fall? Whatever the answer to this fateful question may be, it is clear that what is a crisis for this key-minority is inevitably also a crisis for the rest of the world.

It is always a test of character to be baffled and ‘up against it,’ but the test is particularly severe when the adversity comes suddenly at the noon of a halcyon day which one has fatuously expected to endure to eternity. In straits like these, the wrestler with destiny is tempted to look for bugbears and scapegoats to carry the burden of his own inadequacy. Yet to ‘pass the buck’ in adversity is still more dangerous than to persuade oneself that prosperity is everlasting. In the divided world of 1947, Communism and Capitalism are each performing this insidious office for one another. Whenever things go awry in circumstances that seem ever more intractable, we tend to accuse the enemy of having sown tares in our field and thereby implicitly excuse ourselves for the faults in our own husbandry. This is, of course, an old story. Centuries before Communism was heard of, our ancestors found their bugbear in Islam. As lately as the sixteenth century, Islam inspired the same hysteria in Western hearts as Communism in the twentieth century, and this essentially for the same reasons. Like Communism, Islam was an anti-Western movement which was at the same time a heretical version of a Western faith; and, like Communism, it wielded a sword of the spirit against which there was no defence in material armaments.

The present Western fear of Communism is not a fear of military aggression such as we felt in face of a Nazi Germany and a militant Japan. The United States at any rate, with her overwhelming superiority in industrial potential and her monopoly of the ‘know-how’ of the atom bomb, is at present impregnable against military attack by the Soviet Union. For Moscow, it would be sheer suicide to make the attempt, and there is no evidence that the Kremlin has any intention of committing such a folly. The Communist weapon that is making America so jumpy (and, oddly enough, she is reacting more temperamentally to this threat than the less sheltered countries of Western Europe) is the spiritual engine of propaganda. Communist propaganda has a ‘know-how’ of its own for showing up and magnifying the seamy side of our Western civilization and for making Communism appear a desirable alternative way of life to a dissatisfied faction of Western men and women. Communism is also a competitor for the allegiance of that great majority of mankind that is neither Communist nor Capitalist, neither Russian nor Western, but is living at present in an uneasy no-man’s-land between the opposing citadels of the two rival ideologies. Both nondescripts and Westerners are in danger of turning Communist to-day, as they were of turning Turk four hundred years ago, and, though Communists are in similar danger of turning Capitalist— as sensational instances have shown —the fact that one’s rival witch-doctor is as much afraid of one’s own medicine as one is afraid, oneself, of his, does not do anything to relieve the tension of the situation.

Yet the fact that our adversary threatens us by showing up our defects, rather than by forcibly suppressing our virtues, is proof that the challenge he presents to us comes ultimately not from him, but from ourselves. It comes, in fact, from that recent huge increase in Western man’s technological command over non-human nature— his stupendous progress in ‘know-how’— which was just what gave our fathers the confidence to delude themselves into imagining that, for them, history was comfortably over. Through these triumphs of clockwork the Western middle class has produced three undesigned results— unprecedented in history— whose cumulative impetus has set Juggernaut’s car rolling on again with a vengeance. Our Western ‘know-how’ has unified the whole world in the literal sense of the whole habitable and traversable surface of the globe; and it has inflamed the institutions of War and Class, which are the two congenital diseases of civilization, into utterly fatal maladies. This trio of unintentional achievements presents us with a challenge that is formidable indeed.



War and Class have been with us ever since the first civilizations emerged above the level of primitive human life some five or six thousand years ago, and they have always been serious complaints. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit. While they have been able to destroy individual specimens, they have failed to destroy the species itself. Civilizations have come and gone, but Civilization (with a big ‘C’) has succeeded, each time, in re-incarnating itself in fresh exemplars of the type; for, immense though the social ravages of War and Class have been, they have not ever yet been all- embracing.

When they have shattered the top strata of a society, they have usually failed to prevent the underlying strata from surviving, more or less intact, and clothing themselves with spring flowers on exposure to the light and air. And when one society has collapsed in one quarter of the world it has not, in the past, necessarily dragged down others with it. When the early civilization of China broke down in the seventh century b.c., this did not prevent the contemporary Greek civilization, at the other end of the Old World, from continuing to rise towards its zenith. And when the Graeco-Roman civilization finally died of the twin diseases of War and Class in the course of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of the Christian era, this did not prevent a new civilization from successfully coming to birth in the Far East during those same three hundred years.

Why cannot civilization go on shambling along, from failure to failure, in the painful, degrading, but not utterly suicidal way in which it has kept going for the first few thousand years of its existence? The answer lies in the recent technological inventions of the modem Western middle class. These gadgets for harnessing the physical forces of non-human nature have left human nature unchanged. The institutions of War and Class are social reflexions of the seamy side of human nature— or what the theologians call original sin— in the kind of society that we call civilization. These social effects of individual human sinfulness have not been abolished by the recent portentous advance in our technological ‘know-how,’ but they have not been left unaffected by it either. Not having been abolished, they have been enormously keyed up, like the rest of human life, in respect of their physical potency. Class has now become capable of irrevocably disintegrating Society, and War of annihilating the entire human race. Evils which hitherto have been merely disgraceful and grievous have now become intolerable and lethal, and, therefore, we in this Westernized world in our generation are confronted with a choice of alternatives which the ruling elements in other societies in the past have always been able to shirk— with dire consequences, invariably, for themselves, but not at the extreme price of bringing to an end the history of mankind on this planet. We are thus confronted with a challenge that our predecessors never had to face: We have to abolish War and Class—and abolish them now— under pain, if we flinch or fail, of seeing them win a victory over man which, this time, would be conclusive and definitive.

The new aspect of war is already familiar to Western minds. We are aware that the atom bomb and our many other new lethal weapons are capable, in another war, of wiping out not merely the belligerents but the whole of the human race. But how has the evil of class been heightened by technology? Has not technology already notably raised the minimum standard of living— at any rate in countries that have been specially efficient or specially fortunate in being endowed with the riches of nature and being spared the ravages of war? Can we not look forward to seeing this rapidly rising minimum standard raised to so high a level, and enjoyed by so large a percentage of the human race, that the even greater riches of a still more highly favoured minority will cease to be a cause of heart-burning? The flaw in this line of reasoning is that it leaves out of account the vital truth that man does not live by bread alone. However high the minimum standard of his material living may be raised, that will not cure his soul of demanding social justice; and the unequal distribution of this world’s goods between a privileged minority and an underprivileged majority has been transformed from -an unavoidable evil into an intolerable injustice by the latest technological inventions of Western man...

In a society that has discovered the ‘know-how’ of Amalthea’s cornucopia, the always ugly inequality in the distribution of this world’s goods, in ceasing to be a practical necessity, has become a moral enormity.

Thus the problems that have beset and worsted other civilizations have come to a head in our world today. We have invented the atomic weapon in a world partitioned between two supremely great powers; and the United States and the Soviet Union stand respectively for two opposing ideologies whose antithesis is so extreme that, as it stands, it seems irreconcilable. Along what path are we to look for salvation in this parlous plight, in which we hold in our hands the choice of life or death not only for ourselves but for the whole human race? Salvation perhaps lies, as so often, in finding a middle way. In politics, this golden mean would be something that was neither the unrestricted sovereignty of parochial states nor the unrelieved despotism of a centralized world government; in economics it would be something that was neither unrestricted private enterprise nor unmitigated socialism. As one middle-aged middle-class West European observer sees the world to-day, salvation cometh neither from the East nor from the West.

In a.d. 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union are alternative embodiments of contemporary man’s tremendous material power; ‘their line is gone out through all the Earth, and their words to the end of the World,’ but in the mouths of these loud-speakers one does not hear the still small voice. Our cue may still be given us by the message of Christianity and the other higher religions, and the saving words and deeds may come from unexpected quarters.