A Clockwork Toynbee

How long is a business cycle? It varies. But I hear tell, on average 5½ years.

How long is the Kondratieff wave? It varies, but "about 40 to 60 years" according to Google.

How long does a civilization last? "340 years," Google reports boldly. That's not what I was thinking. I tried one of the search results, from Larry Freeman at owlcation:

Recently, I was talking with a colleague at work and I mentioned that civilizations usually only last 500 years. The only problem was that I couldn't remember where I had heard that. In fact, I wasn't all that sure that I was right. I know that the Roman Empire lasted roughly 500 years but how about the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Ottomons, etc...

Yeah, no, without looking I'll say the Roman empire lasted near 500 years. The Roman civilization lasted much longer. The Roman empire was the "universal state" phase of the Roman civilization. Just a phase. If I remember right.

To be fair, the title of Freeman's post mentions "the empires of ancient civilizations" and so does the text of the link address. But let's not confuse empires with civilizations.

One more search result: Luke Kemp's The lifespans of ancient civilisations at BBC Future. According to his graphic, "The average lifespan of a civilisation is 336 years". Maybe they're short like that if you spell it with an "s"...?

"In the graphic," Kemp writes, 

I have compared the lifespan of various civilisations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure.

There it is. I bolded it: "a continuous political structure". In other words, Kemp sees the Roman Monarchy, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire as three separate civilizations. Good grief.

Hey, figure it however you want. But don't ignore Arnold J Toynbee who said, as I remember it, that civilizations rise out of a Dark Age, and fall into the next Dark Age. Doing it Toynbee's way you can get civilizations lasting 2000 years. That's a big difference from 336 or 340.

Monarchy, republic, and empire are different stages in the government of civilization. Plato said something like that too, I hear:

From The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

 
I read something one time where the General asked for a long-term weather forecast so that he could plan his military strategy. The weather people told the General that a long term forecast would be too unreliable to be useful. The General acknowledged this, but said "I need it anyway, to plan my strategy." Sorry, can't remember where that story comes from.

Stephen Blaha has studied Toynbee's Study enough to be able to develop a sort of mathematical approximation of the pattern of civilization described by Toynbee.

I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of setting Toynbee to music like that (though others -- Peter Turchin comes to mind -- similarly set civilization to music). But I figured Blaha's summaries of Toynbee's descriptions should be quite excellent. So here we are, at the Google Books version of Blaha's The Life Cycle of Civilizations, which includes links to the text of several chapters.

I took the link to Chapter 8: General Considerations on the Theory of Civilizations, where under the subheading "The Length of a Cycle" we read:

Our initial selection of 267 years as the approximate period of oscillation was based on Toynbee's observations that the time of troubles of a civilization was roughly 400 years as was the time interval of the universal state that typically followed a time of troubles. Toynbee also pointed out that in this 800 year time interval there were oscillations normally amounting to three and a half beats. The time of troubles was not entirely a downward move. It usually had a rally within it. The universal state was most often not just a rally. It often had a rout within it. Consequently Toynbee's basic picture of a time of troubles was rout-rally-rout, and of a universal state as rally-rout-rally...

Just one stage of civilization as described by Toynbee, the Time of Troubles, lasts longer than the 336 to 340 years that I find on the internet. So does the stage that comes next, the Universal State. So does the Dark Age that follows the Universal State, I want to say; but now we're treading on the thin ice of my memory.

I have no use for definitions that treat the different governments of a people as different civilizations. It's like killing an animal so you can study it.

It's like taking our unsustainably massive public and private debt, breaking it up into a bunch of small pieces -- household debt, nonfinancial business debt, financial business debt, the federal debt, and state and local government debt -- and saying "Where's the problem?"

Everywhere, apparently.

 

I use the numbers, Blaha's and Toynbee's both, as examples that allow me to think through the pattern of civilization, somewhat like the General's use of a long-term weather forecast.

Notes on the Biden Inaugural

Quotes from the Inaugural transcript at Politico, followed by my remarks.

President Biden:

I understand that many Americans view the future with some fear and trepidation. I understand they worry about their jobs, about taking care of their families, about what comes next. I get it.

But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don’t look like you do, or worship the way you do, or don’t get their news from the same sources you do. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.

I understand that Biden's main theme was unity, and I certainly acknowledge that unity is a high priority. I'm not sure, from reading Biden's speech, if the people he wants to bring into the fold will be enticed by what he's offering. I don't think I'd be comfortable with it, if I was one of them.

But in the words quoted above, Biden says people are worried "about their jobs, about taking care of their families, about what comes next." These are economic concerns. You're not going to solve our economic problems be being unified. You need a plan. More than that: You need some version of the right plan. You can only solve our economic problems if you understand what's causing them and if you shut down the problem at the source. 

For the record: the federal debt isn't the problem. It's a consequence of the problem. It will be easy to keep the federal debt in check if we solve the real problem, which is the rest of the debt -- debt other than federal. It's the private sector that needs to grow, so it's private sector debt that has to be reduced, by hook or by crook. 

Most especially by policy. We just need a little creativity. Look at it this way: They make laws that encourage borrowing, but they don't make laws that encourage repayment of debt. So debt accumulates. That's the problem that must be fixed.

What, you thought the problem that created the Financial Crisis was solved?

 

Again, Biden:

Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now.

Not sure how long a period of time Biden has in mind when he says "the one we're in now." Short, probably. Since 6 January? The last four years, perhaps? Surely not decades.

We'd be lucky if it's only decades. Ian Hall writes of Arnold J. Toynbee:

The modern West, he believed, was past its genesis and growth phases, and was now in breakdown—indeed, it was now in a ‘Time of Troubles’ from which only a resurgence of ‘creativity’ could liberate it.

Not sure about this; I'm no expert on Toynbee. But it occurs to me to wonder if perhaps the "Time of Troubles" of our civilization is the whole of the "capitalism" phase of the cycle of civilization. The timing is right: 

Toynbee argues that our own time of troubles began during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Ian Hall writes: "the most obvious symptom" of a Time of Troubles is "persistent, unlimited war"; the kind of war that "threatened the existence of the civilization." World wars; nuclear weapons; chemical weapons; biological warfare. 

Ian Hall on the Time of Troubles:

The causes of this development, Toynbee argued, were many and varied. First, there was a palpable loss of creativity, of the ability to respond to new challenges. 

Loss of "the ability to respond to new challenges": Our inability to solve perennial and long-term problems such as economic depression and the decline of growth.

Second, he observed that each civilization had seen a [schism] between the ‘dominant minority’ and the ‘internal proletariat’. 

Came to a head on the sixth of January, didn't it. Turns out Trump's people are the internal proletariat.

Third, he noted the presence in each case of an ‘external proletariat’ of barbarians or foreigners from a different civilization, which threatened the civilization from beyond its walls. 

Osama bin Laden and Iran and all that, and the Islamic civilization.

Last, Toynbee detected a ‘Schism in the Soul’ of each civilization which led to such social evils as a longing for a lost past or an unattainable future, a loss of individual or collective self-control, a rise in ‘truancy and martyrdom’, a tendency to fatalism, and an upsurge in cultural, sartorial, linguistic and sexual promiscuity.

A longing for a lost past? Perhaps like "Make America Great Again"? As for the rest, you probably know better than I.

Ian Hall on Toynbee's 'Time of Troubles'

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century by Ian Hall, at ResearchGate; and from there, downloadable as a 15-page PDF.

I'm fascinated by what Toynbee wrote. Now, having read Ian Hall's paper, I'm fascinated by Toynbee the man as well. Here's a paragraph from Hall's paper:

While Toynbee worked away at narrating events on the world stage, he was also at work on what he called his ‘Nonsense Book’, A study of history. A hugely ambitious, sprawling book, the Study tried to put contemporary politics and international relations into context and to provide nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of the history of the modern West. Toynbee took aim at almost all the accepted verities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography: that modern history was a story of unrelenting and unstoppable progress; that the nation-state was the highest political form to which humanity could aspire; that the West had ‘won’ and that its values, ideas and institutions—especially democracy and industrialism—were thus superior to others. He even attacked the way in which his fellow historians worked—that ‘industrialisation of historical thought’ which valued learned articles on ever more narrow and obscure topics more than bold, broad and book-length interpretations of the past.

If that doesn't fascinate you, maybe you need to read some Toynbee. Hall's last sentence (above) is footnoted; the reference is to page 5 in volume I of Toynbee's "nonsense book". A perfect place to start: the beginning.

Volume one (of 12), unabridged, is available online at archive.org. Start at page one. I'm betting that by the time you get to page five, you won't want to stop.

A Study of History

"History in the objective meaning of the word, is the process of change; in the subjective meaning, it is the study of how and why one situation changes into another."

- Arnold J Toynbee

Few works of history had such a precise and romantic origin as Arnold Joseph Toynbee's “A Study of History.” The 3½‐million word, 12‐volume story of mankind, which took 40 years to complete, was begun on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1921, when the author was traveling west from Istanbul on the fabled Orient Express. He had spent the day watching the awesome Thracian countryside slip by and pondering the region's glorious and gory past.

“That evening I was still standing at the window, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Bela Palanka Gorge in the light of the full moon, as our train bore down upon Nish,” he recalled, adding:

“If I had been cross‐examined on my activities during that day, I should have sworn that my attention had been wholly absorbed by the entrancing scenes that were passing continually before my outward eye. Yet, before I went to sleep that night, I found that I had put down on half a sheet of notepaper a list of topics which, in its contents and their order, was substantially identical with the plan of this book as it now stands.”

- New York Times (obituary)

Toynbee began his Study of History in 1922, inspired by seeing Bulgarian peasants wearing fox-skin caps like those described by Herodotus as the headgear of Xerxes’ troops. This incident reveals the characteristics that give his work its special quality—his sense of the vast continuity of history and his eye for its pattern, his immense erudition, and his acute observation.

- Encyclopaedia Britannica

I love that opening from the New York Times. "Precise and romantic" indeed.

Britannica says 1922. A rounding error. I wish today to convey not the importance of nitpicking details to death, but the general tenor of Toynbee's work. I will say little and quote much, as that seems appropriate.

Oh, and I checked:

At 10:48:12 EDT* Saturday 17 September 1921 the moon’s phase was
FULL

TOYNBEE'S APPROACH

Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified civilizations according to cultural rather than national criteria. Thus, the "Western Civilization," comprising all the nations that have existed in Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the "Orthodox" civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and from the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it.

With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline.

- New World Encyclopedia

Key point: Toynbee described the growth of civilizations in terms of "challenge and response": As long as a civilization responds successfully to the challenge, it grows. An unsuccessful response leads to decline, and the challenge repeats. Seems like almost a truism. Contrast Spengler:

Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.

- New World Encyclopedia

Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges.

- Encyclopaedia Britannica

Again: "challenge and response".

DESCRIPTION of the WORK

A Study of History (1934–61) put forward a philosophy of history, based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations

- Encyclopaedia Britannica

Instead of narrating episodes or telling the story of this or that nation or people, Mr. Toynbee ranged over all recorded history in dazzlingly erudite detail. Taking a panoramic view, he was fascinated by the rise and fall of civilizations, of which he counted 26 from ancient times to the present.

- New York Times

He suggested that spiritual rather than material forces controlled the course of history and that individuals played a creative (or destructive) role in the unfolding of events.

- New York Times

A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In it he traces the birth, growth and decay of some 21 to 23 major civilizations in the world. These are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumeric, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern (Korea/Japan), Orthodox Christian (main body), Far Eastern (main body), Iranic, Arabic, Hindu, Mexic, Yucatec, and Babylonic. There are four 'abortive civilisations' (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian , Abortive Syriac) and five 'arrested civilisations' (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan); thirty in all.

Toynbee applies his model to each of these civilizations, painstakingly detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.

- New World Encyclopedia

You'll find discrepancies in the count of civilizations. It's not critically important. If you remember the five stages of civilization, and "challenge and response", you've got the outline of the grand story Toynbee told.

CRITICISM of the WORK

By the time the war broke out, he had achieved his first burst of fame for his masterwork, six volumes of which had been published by 1939. Oddly, that fame began in the United States, for Mr. Toynbee was virtually ignored by professional historians in Britain. Indeed, The English Historical Review, the major journal, did not review “A Study of History” until 1956.

One explanation for that coolness was the author's attack on parochial histories and on the prestigious “Cambridge Modern History,” a joint Work of Many specialists. A further explanation was that Mr. Toynbee's one‐man attempt at a historical synthesis was thought presumptuous.

- New York Times

Toynbee has been severely criticized by other historians. In general, the critique has been leveled at his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data and at the soundness of his general argument about the rise and fall of civilizations, which relies too much on a view of religion as a regenerative force. Many critics complained that the conclusions he reached were those of a Christian moralist rather than of a historian. His work, however, has been praised as a stimulating answer to the specializing tendency of modern historical research.

- Encyclopaedia Britannica

Volume XII was occasioned by the clangorous disputation that was set off by “A Study of History” virtually from the outset, for Mr. Toynbee had ventured what few historians dared: an interpretation of history as well as a chronicling of it. He had, moreover, sought to recount the events of thousands of years in an unconventional fashion.

- New York Times

Defending himself and his views on his 75th birthday in 1964, he said:
“I have never made the choice between being a historian of politics, economics, religion, the arts, science and technology: my conscious and deliberate aim has been to be student of human affairs studied as a whole, instead of their being partitioned into the so-called ‘disciplines.’”

- New York Times

The Times obituary makes it sound as if Toynbee was snubbed by British historians, his work ignored from 1934 to 1956. That's hard to imagine, if you've read as little as two pages of the Study.

Toynbee does say that historians "generally illustrate rather than correct" the ideas of their times. I guess you could take offense at that, as a historian, if you tried.

The rise of the "would-be self-sufficient national sovereign state has led historians to choose nations as the normal fields of historical study," Toynbee writes. I guess you could consider that an "attack on parochial histories", if you chose not to be open to Toynbee's ideas.

Toynbee says that "the conversion of the English from the religion of the so-called Heroic Age to Western Christianity" was "an act which merged half a dozen isolated communities of barbarians in the common weal of a nascent Western Society." In other words, it was the start of Western Civilization. I might be put off by that, if I was a historian born and raised on the continent. But I think not. I think I'd have turned and looked for similar rudimentary beginnings in the nation of my birth. I expect I'd have found them.

Take another look at that long paragraph on page two of the abridged Study. Toynbee touches on the conversion, the barbarians, the Feudal System, the Norman Conquest, the Danish invasions, France, the Renaissance, Northern Italy, the Reformation, and the new worlds overseas. All of that is the stuff of history. The paragraph takes almost the whole page -- and it's the abridged version! Toynbee is not taking potshots at other historians; he's assembling history into one big picture. How could anyone take offense at that? How could anyone not be fascinated?

It was thought presumptuous? Come on! And there seems to be a problem with "his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data". But I don't see why that would be a problem. Economists do it all the time.

Another criticism of Toynbee's Study is that it "relies too much" on religion. I can see that. I remember just skimming over a lot of the religion stuff. But it was easy to keep the picture of history that Toynbee had so painstakingly assembled, and just ignore the "Christian moralist" crap. I had no trouble keeping the bathwater and tossing that baby.

What I was left with was a full picture of human civilization that I could use in toto as a background for the massive business cycle that I call the Cycle of Civilization.

LINKS

Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell
Full Text of A Study of History, Abridgement Volumes I-VI

Theodore A. Sumberg, Toynbee and the Decline of Western Civilization, 1947

Ashley Montagu, editor. "Toynbee And History: Critical Essays And Reviews", 1956
Full text of "Toynbee And History: Critical Essays And Reviews"

The New York Times, "Arnold Toynbee, Historian, Dies at 86", 23 October 1975
Full text of The New York Times, Thursday, October 23, 1975
The New York Times, Headliners, 26 October 1975

Krishan Kumar, The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee?, 2014
Krishan Kumar, The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee?, PDF

Greg Lewicki, Return of Toynbee. European Union as universal state, Muslims as internal proletariat, 2017

Losing the American Dream

From A Study of History by Arnold J Toynbee, the two-volume abridgement by Somervell:

... proletarianism is a state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance... The true hall-mark of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth but a consciousness--and the resentment that this consciousness inspires--of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society.

But a world gorged with the wealth ground out by the magic industrial machine is at the same time overshadowed by the spectre of unemployment. Every time the urban proletarian draws his 'dole' he is reminded that he is 'in' a society but not 'of' it.

These excerpts can be found in context on pages 377 and 397-398 at this link.

The consensus is dangerously wrong, Palley says

Following up on Palley's latest:

NIRP has quickly become a consensus policy within the economics establishment. This paper argues that consensus is dangerously wrong, resting on flawed theory and flawed policy assessment...

If the consensus is wrong, it means our solution is part of the problem.

If the consensus is dangerously wrong, it means the problem is bigger than we think.


"In a growing civilization," Arnold J. Toynbee wrote, "a challenge meets with a successful response which proceeds to generate another and a different challenge which meets with another successful response."

"There is no term to this process of growth" -- there is no end to it, he says -- "unless and until a challenge arises which the civilization in question fails to meet--a tragic event which means a cessation of growth and what we have called a breakdown. Here the correlative rhythm begins. The challenge has not been met, but it nonetheless continues to present itself. A second convulsive effort is made to meet it, and, if this succeeds, growth will of course be resumed."

The depressions and great recessions of the capitalist era are the "rhythmical challenge" that we have failed to meet. Our economic troubles will defeat us unless we rise to the challenge. And, by "they will defeat us" I mean civilization dies, as Toynbee said. It's on us.

People who speak of "the end of the American century", people who express concern about the rise of totalitarian governments, they see it coming.

The Breakdown

"The nature of the breakdown can be summed up in three points," Toynbee wrote:

• "a failure of creative power in the creative minority, which henceforth becomes a merely 'dominant' minority;"
• "an answering withdrawal of allegiance and mimesis on the part of the majority;"
• "a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole."

Losing its creativity, the creative minority becomes a merely dominant minority. Government becomes more oppressive. A common complaint today, government is more oppressive.

Everybody complains about government, these days. "Withdrawal of allegiance", that is. But we can't solve our problems by focusing on government. What's missing is the "creativity". To fix the problem, we need the right solution to the right problem. Changing the government doesn't necessarily do it. Toynbee thought creativity solves the problem.

By "creativity" Toynbee meant the problem-solving ability.

If it sounds like circular argument when I say it, then I'm not saying it right.

Where we are now is late in the process. Things now are so bad that we see government as the problem. But that's a cascade effect. When "a challenge meets with a successful response", civilization continues to grow. But when there is no successful response, there are consequences. These consequences we call problems.

They are problems. But they are consequences. They are "cascade effect" problems. They are results, and you can't solve results. You have to solve the problem. Identify and solve the problem.

We have to solve the original problem, the one that keeps coming back. "Here the correlative rhythm begins," Toynbee said. "The challenge has not been met, but it nonetheless continues to present itself."

What causes depressions and great recessions? Thomas Palley identifies the problem:

... the flawed model of growth, based on debt and asset price inflation, which has already done such harm.

It is a problem of our own making. That's what makes it so difficult to solve. We think of it as our solution.

Our solution is part of the problem, and the problem is bigger than we think.