52
PARTISAN REVIEW
3.
From the evidence of the twenty-one "intelligible fields of study,"
Toynbee concludes that a civilization breaks down when it is unable
to meet the crucial challenge of its career. Civilizations are hounded
by the "nemesis of creativity," the tendency,
~at
is, of those who
l
create to fall victim to their own tools and to render themselves unfit
to meet new problems by having over-specialized their method of
dealing with old ones. By a kind of "reversal of roles," they become
the reactionaries. They now frustrate newly creative individuals, and
the crucial challenge, presenting itself again and again in the same
fprm and forcing the civilization into a more and more rigid pattern
of response, is never successfully met. The once "creative minority"
1
rigidifies itself into a "dominant minority," which can rule onl by
force, since it no longer attracts the emotions of the masses. The
mimesis of the people, once poetic and pliable, now becomes me–
chanical, as an Orpheus, the ideal mimetic leader, turns into a Xerxes,
"the drill sergeant with his whip," who rides herd on the masses. The
dominant minority commits "the sin of Idolatry," i.e., infatuation
tJA-'
with ast techniques and institutions. The infatuation of Orthodox
Christendom with the g os of the Roman Empire and the: self–
idolization of Athens as "the Education of Hellas" are examples of
this artificial stasis in the flux of time.
The "schism in society" between the dominant minority and the
people is aggravated by further schisms as the civilization declines.
Two small "proletariats," the internal and the external, break away
from the civilization. The internal proletariat
is
the new creative
?
minority; it "withdraws" from the world in order to create a universal
~'
which is the lifeblood of the civilization of the future. The
externa~
proletariat forms itself into barbarian war bands on the
periphery of the dying civilization. The dominant minority pur–
chases a reprieve from its fatal sentence by creating a universal state
'-–
in the "Indian Summer" of the civilization; the universal state, besides
achieving a temporary stasis by imposing a
Pax Oecumenica
on the
world, also functions in the future by providing an
institutio~al
frame-
~
work for the universal church of the future. Toynbee finds a great
deal of evidence among his twenty-one societies to support
this
scheme,
but its close correspondence to the disintegration of the Roman Empire
and the birth of Western Christendom is apparent.
