PARTISAN REVIEW
for the enrichment of human experience, whose centers and carriers are
always persons. Its data in any culture are the needs, as well as the
limitations, of human natures as they have developed in history, the
.possibilities of material and sociaf production, and the values tested by
time and intelligence which have contributed to human experience. It
can see no guide to human perplexity, no hope for the oppressed and
anguished, no spur to moral freedom in the alternative position of
Augustine, whose words are echoed with approval by Mr. Toynbee:
"What gives happiness in life to a human being is something which does
not proceed from human nature but which is above human nature."
In
A Study of History
there are many pages of illuminating historical
detail which are in no way related to the author's theological prepos–
sessions. But, unfortunately, in his
Civilization on Trial
this bias ob–
scures recognition of where the real center of gravity lies in the issues
which constitute civilization's trials. This is manifest in Toynbee's dis–
cussion of the conflict between the United States in which "an undiluted
[!]
regime of private enterprise still prevails," and the Soviet Union.
The totalitarian despotism of the Soviet Union is presented as a kind
of Christian heresy, a historical hangover from the Greek Orthodox
Christendom of the Byzantines. Western democracy, despite and because
of its secularism, is a degenerate expression of Christianity. With sublime
faith he assumes that the expanding dynamism of Soviet Communism
can
be
contained within the U.N.-provided, of course, the secular
"super-culture" of our culture is rebuilt on religious foundations.
There is no indication whatsoever that Toynbee is familiar with
Stalinist doctrine and organization, which he uncritically identifies with
Marxism. He speaks as if the United States were expanding in the same
way as the Soviet Union-gobbling up territories and people against
their will. To him the defense of the Western world against the Stalinist
crusade is a struggle between free enterprise and collectivism rather than
between representative democratic institutions, which permit nations to
choose freely the degree of collective control they wish to introduce
into their economy, and a world-wide totalitarian police state. He sees
rightly that a Persian conquest would have destroyed completely the
civilization of the Greek city-states but he has no realistic conception
of what would happen to Western civilization if it came under the Soviet
yoke. He suggests that a mildly socialistic Western European union
might mediate the conflict between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
despite the evidence that there is little which Stalin detests more than an
independent
democratic
socialist movement.
The reason for this uncertain, fumbling touch to all the great ques-
698
