IN THE DARK BACKWARD
377
description of a reverie, to be judged on philosophic or aesthetic
grounds.
Accept for a moment the conventional figure, Civilization. Ac–
cording to Toynbee, a civilization comes into being through an un–
usual response to a challenge from the physical or human environ–
ment, grows when each such response produces new stimuli evocative
of further responses that steadily extend the area of self-articulation
.and self-determination, until a point of crisis when a breakdown
occurs. Thereafter disintegration, sets in, marked by failures of self–
determination, or loss of command over the environment. Disintegra–
tion may be accompanied by a rapid expansion of productive tech–
niques, by a flourishing of the
arts
and the development of science,
philosophy, and religion. But these are incidentals, irrelevant to the
central issue, which is loss of control.
We must ask, however, control by, for, whom? Western civiliza–
tion's period of growth ended in the fifteenth century, says Toynbee.
He sees no difficulty in the circumstance that the great mass of human
beings who then lived in Europe had acquired no marked degree of
self-determination meast].rable by standard of living, life expectancy,
or access to the channels of culture. For him growth is relevant only
to a few: "All acts of social creation are the work either of individual
creators," or, at most, of creative minorities which drag the people
"of common clay'' along in a "sluggish rearguard." A civilization is
essentially the relationship between the creative few and their human
and physical environment. It grows through a succession of
tours de
force
by heroes who thereby increase the degree of their control over
the masses who follow in a movement of drill-like imitation. It flags
when the heroic capacity for response to challenges fails and the
creative minority, which then loses its attractiveness, must resort to
violence to hold control.
We cannot discover historical evidence to confirm this view of
the docile relations of the masses to their leaders. Certainly force was
inherent in the social system of the period of growth of Western
Civilization, whether in the roles of master and serf or lord and vassal.
And the later exhibitions of creative skill cited in
A Study of History
were ha,rdly the outcome of the application of charm. The develop–
ment of English parliamentarianism of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and the balance of power in Italian city states of the four–
teenth and fifteenth were consummated by violence and coercion.
Indeed Toynbee's exposition of the nature and role of the cre–
ative minority and creative personality rests primarily upon refer-
