CITY OF GOD
53
As
for the fate of our Western Civilization, Toynbee is inclined
in
these first six volump; to suspend final judgment. In our history
since the sixteenth century, however, he perceives the "three and one-
half beats of Rout and Rally" which spell out the doom of a dying
society. The Rout of the religious wars of the seventeenth century was
followed by the eighteenth-century Rally of peace and toleration. The
more serious Rout of the war of Nationalism from the eighteenth to
the twentieth century will be followed by the Rally of a
Pax Oecu–
menica.
If
our civilization conforms to the others, the universal-state- ./
~
to-be
will
pass through another beat of Rout and Rally before the
·
final paroxysm of extinction.
We learned that during the process of growth, scientific control
over the environment can not be taken as a criterion of progress. We
are now told that science is a sign of failure. Indeed,
if
science is not
actually the cause of social disintegration, it is at least an illness which
"an ironic or malicious or retributive Providence is apt to bestow
upon a society in disintegration." We have heard this often in our
reli ·ous times. And Toynbee is making the common mistake of first
v
confusing the parochial techniques of industrialism and war with
the scientific method, and then convincing himself that the scientific
method mtust be responsible for the plight of the world.
Volume V of
A Study of History
contains a remarkable list of
the kinds of thought and feeling that appear in a declining society; but
I shall not describe them here. The two master tendencies of a declin–
ing society, however, are "Archaism" and "Futurism," terms which
Toynbee uses literally. Archaism appears in such various manifesta–
tions as the dairying activities of Marie Antoinette, the revival of the
Irish language in Eire, and the enslavement of the Greeks to the
memory of the ancient City of Cecrops. But the brittle world of the
archaist is doomed to be smashed by the elemental
elan.
Futurism,
per se, appears in the mechanical abolition of the past-for example
in the Westernization of Turkey, and in the classic Chinese case of
the Burning of the Books by the Emperor Ts'in She Hwang-ti. It is /
proof both of Toynbee's celestial, bird's-eye-view method and of the
mistiness of
his
thinking that after basing his theory of growth on
Bergson, he presents Bergson as an example of "the anti-intellectual)/
Futurism" of our time, and even shows that the "gentle" Bergson and
"violent" totalitarianism have a common animus. The futurist a.Ed
the archaist are predestined to fail because their utopias are mundane.
