Newt Gingrich, circa 1995

What the heck (again).

Newt Gingrich, from his 1995 book To Renew America.

Newt Gingrich		Arthurian

Toynbee's thesis was called "challenge and response." He argued that every civilization sooner or later encounters a challenge that threatens its very existence. At that point, the key question becomes how its leadership elites respond and whether they are adequate to the task.

How the leadership elites respond? But what if some yokel has the right response, and the leadership elites have the wrong response?

Late in the life of a civilization, things likely work as Gingrich describes. But early on, maybe the leadership is more flexible. And before the society has advanced far enough to be a civilization, maybe there are not yet any "leadership elites". Maybe the yokel finds a way to do irrigation in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin and just starts doing it. Maybe his neighbors see his success, and imitate him. The word spreads. Then maybe that yokel and his neighbors become the leadership elite.

I don't know. For sure, I don't know. But I know it is late-stage thinking to describe things as Gingrich does, so that only the existing powers would be able to develop a response. Cutting off your options like that seems to me a good way to reduce your chance of success.

Toynbee ranged widely, noting that solving one generation's challenge did not necessarily mean the civilization would rise to the next one. It was quite possible for a civilization to be successful for a long time and then suddenly fall apart. The challenges also might change dramatically. One generation could face military challenges while the next would be challenged by religion, politics, economics, or technology.

Ranging across history, Toynbee proposed an antidote to the insular complacency of the time, which said that having beaten Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, we were bound to be successful in the long run. In Toynbee's view, Han China had been the dominant economic and cultural system on the planet for nearly two thousand years until it failed to modernize in the nineteenth century and ended up collapsing in the face of Western European economic and technological progress. (To Toynbee, European military advantages were almost entirely a function of political, economic, and technological advantages.)

The short view of two hundred years of American history was rapidly put in perspective by an analysis that noted that the Roman domination of the Mediterranean world lasted about six hundred years. Even Rome's seeming endurance faded next to the additional thousand years of Byzantine survival. So broad was Toynbee's sweep that he could mention the three great Mesoamerican civilizations (Maya, Inca,and Aztec) and include them in an analysis with pharonic Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley.

A Study of History liberated me from any sense that we inevitably know how to keep America strong. It also engendered in me a deep sense that every generation faces the potential of serious challenges and that failure to respond effectively could mean the end of your civilization in a remarkably short period of time.

"A remarkably short period of time." For sure. But I'm not sure I like taking the "challenge" from "challenge and response" and turning it into "serious challenges". Hey, everybody has problems. But that's not the same thing as a challenge that threatens civilization. Yes, I'm criticizing the writing here. What they wrote, Gingrich and his cowriter Bill Tucker, between the two of em you'd expect to read something that feels right. And "serious challenges" just doesn't feel right.

...
In proposing an Americal Renewal, I do so after having spent a long time thinking about the challenges we are facing and the responses we need. If the proposals I outline in this book seem ambitious, it is because I believe they reflect the magnitude of the challenges that face us. We are certainly not the first civilization to confront moral decay from within. But we are definitely the first generation in American history to face such a challenge.

Again, "challenges", plural. Enough problems for everybody. This is not what Toynbee's Study of History was about.

You know, if you go to Chapter One in the Gingrich book, it starts out good:

... our civilization is decaying, with an underclass of poverty and violence growing in our midst and an economy hard pressed to compete with those of Germany, Japan, and China.

Actually, he presents our "economy" as some kind of performance measure, unrelated to growing poverty and violence. He's got that wrong. But whatever; if he could fix the economy and poverty and violence and jobs and a few other things all at once, let him call it whatever he wants.

But those are not, you know, six different things. It's all the economy, and if we fix the economy we fix almost everything.

The title of Chapter One is "The Six Challenges Facing America". Here are the things Gingrich had in mind to fix:

1. "reestablish a legitimate moral-cultural standard"
2. "grasp the true significance" of the "scientific and technological changes going on around us" so that we can "lead the world into the Information Age"
3. "rethink our competition in the world market"
4. "replace the welfare state with an opportunity society"
5. "replace our centralized, micromanaged Washington-based bureaucracy with a dramatically decentralized system"
6. "balance the federal budget"

I don't know what his Number 1 means. The rest of them except number five are all aspects of the economy, or at least are related (or said to be related) to improving economic growth.

Number five probably would not be seen as a problem if the economy was good. And number one would probably go away with number five.

What's left? The economy. Fixing the economy. Improving economic growth and income. You know the drill. I'm just trying to point out one thing: The thing we need to fix is the economy.

Gingrich wasn't talking about fixing the economy. He was talking about fixing particular aspects of the economy, some that have been talked about for decades now, and some maybe he thinks sound good.

But here's the thing: If you make a list of problems and try to solve them, you may not have THE problem on your list. Maybe you took THE problem and broke it up into pieces, and you look at each piece and you try to solve each piece separately. In my view, there is little to no chance that your solutions will solve THE problem. Breaking up the problem works when you do computer programming; but for an economic problem the challenge is to correctly identify and describe the problem.

So here's the question: Where's the analysis that identifies and describes the problem? When did we sit down, put our heads together, and figure out what made the economy go bad? It's like the way it works these days is, whatever news stories gets the most attention are treated as the problems to be solved. That's not analysis of the problem.

See also: Challenge and Response

Bishop Bossuet

Oh what the heck, I'll put this one up today.

A.J. Toynbee:

The last great Western exponent of this Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern of history had been Bishop Bossuet.

Who?

Bishop Jack-Benign Bossuet:

• fervent defender of absolute monarchy:
  

  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) was a theologian at the court of the French "Sun King" Louis XIV; Bossuet was one of history's most fervent defenders of absolute monarchy. For him, only God stands above the person of the king, and the king's authority cannot be challenged by any other human being.

• influential spokesman for the rights of the French church:
  

  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, (born Sept. 25, 1627, Dijon, Fr.—died April 12, 1704, Paris), bishop who was the most eloquent and influential spokesman for the rights of the French church against papal authority. He is now chiefly remembered for his literary works...

• royal authority comes directly from God:
  

  When Bossuet was chosen to be the tutor of the Dauphin, oldest child of Louis XIV, he wrote several works for the edification of his pupil, one of which was Politics Derived from the Words of Holy Scripture, a discourse on the principles of royal absolutism. The work was published posthumously in 1709.
  
  The work consists of several books which are divided into articles and propositions which lay out the nature, characteristics, duties, and resources of royalty. To justify his propositions, Bossuet quotes liberally from the Bible and various psalms.
  
  Throughout his essay, Bossuet emphasizes the fact that royal authority comes directly from God and that the person of the king is sacred. In the third book, Bossuet asserts that "God establishes kings as his ministers, and reigns through them over the people."

What sort of man was Jack-Benign Bossuet? Not so benign.

• Bossuet vs. Jouarre's Women

The abbey's privileges were not authentic, he claimed. Even if authentic, he argued (incorrectly), the councils of Trent and Vienna had revoked such privileges. Jouarre defended itself vigorously, showing that as late as 1631 Parliament had confirmed its rights. But Jouarre argued in vain...

• The Gallican controversy:
  

  In the Gallican controversy, Louis XIV maintained that the French monarch could limit papal authority in collecting the revenues of vacant sees and in certain other matters, while the Ultramontanists held that the pope was supreme. An extraordinary general assembly of the French clergy was held to consider this question in 1681–82. Bossuet delivered the inaugural sermon to this body and also drew up its final statement... The articles asserted the king’s independence from Rome in secular matters and proclaimed that, in matters of faith, the pope’s judgment is not to be regarded as infallible without the assent of the total church.
  
  They were accepted by all parties of the assembly, and his role in this controversy remained perhaps the most significant of Bossuet’s life.

The king gets his power from God, his subjects must obey him, and even the Pope often plays second fiddle.

"The last great Western exponent of this Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern of history."

Links:

• Extracts from Bossuet's work on kingship
• Bishop Bossuet's Politics
• Bossuet, Divine Right of Kings

Sit and have a beer with A.J.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)

Toynbee and History (1956), a collection of essays edited by Ashley Montagu, includes three pieces by Arnold Toynbee. The first of these is A Study of History: What I Am Trying to Do.

In it, Toynbee tells the history of history -- something that was in the back of his mind while he was writing the "3½‐million word, 12‐volume story of mankind" we looked at yesterday -- and he gets a few zingers in along the way.

I've shortened the essay and added paragraph breaks. It's still long for a blog, but if you don't drink too fast one beer should be enough:

The particular generation into which I was born happens to be a revolutionary one. In less than one lifetime the face of the World has changed almost out of recognition, and the West’s position in the World has undergone the greatest change of all.... As soon as one looks at the new panorama of history, one sees that it bursts the bounds of the current framework within which our Western historians have been doing their work for the last 250 years...

The traditional pattern in the West down to the end of the seventeenth century had been the Israelite pattern, which Christendom and Islam had taken over with modifications in their own favour. In this Jewish-Christian-Muslim view, history had appeared to be an act of God beginning at the Creation and destined to end in the Last Judgement, while Israel (or Christendom or Islam) had been singled out as being the people chosen by God for carrying out His purposes.

The last great Western exponent of this Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern of history had been Bishop Bossuet. His eighteenth-century successors made the Late Modern Western pattern of history, on which we have been working since Bossuet’s death, by cutting God out of the picture and dealing with the Christian Church as the Church had dealt with Israel.

Bossuet’s successors appropriated the role of being ‘the Chosen People’ from the Christian Church, as the Church had appropriated it from Israel; and they transferred this role, partly to ‘Europe’, but mainly to the particular West European nation to which a particular historian happened to belong: to France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and so on, as the case might be.

This eighteenth-century Western view of history as a movement in a straight line, leading up to a twentieth-century ‘Europe’, ‘Britain’, or ‘Nicaragua’, instead of leading up to a future Last Judgement, simply cannot take in the new panorama that the twentieth century has now opened out before our eyes. In that antiquated Late Modern Western picture there is no room at all for China or India, and hardly any room even for Russia or America. And where are we to find in it so much as a niche for the Mayans or for the Hittites? In the light of our new knowledge, we are compelled to discard this pattern, as our eighteenth-century predecessors discarded Bossuet’s. Once again, we have to look at history with new eyes, as our eighteenth-century predecessors did.
...
In this age our Western Civilization has collided with all the other surviving civilizations all over the face of the planet — with the Islamic civilization, with the Hindu, with the Chinese, with the Aztec, and so on, — and we can take a comparative view of the effects of these simultaneous collisions upon the parties to them. This comparative treatment can be extended to the whole of history; and it is, in fact, the method of the human sciences: the theory of knowledge, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics. The human sciences like the natural sciences, make a comparative study of their data in order to discover the structure of the facts and the events; and I believe that here the historians ought to take their cue from the scientists.
...
Some Western historians in the post-Bossuet age have denied that there are any regularities in the course of human affairs and have declared, with evident sincerity, that they have no such patterns in their own minds. Yet the use made by these very historians of such patterns as ‘Europe’ and ‘Britain’ shows that they are mistaken in their belief about the nature of their own mental operations. A pattern is still there; it is, as we have seen, the classical Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern thinly disguised in secular modern dress. The difference between these post-Christian Western historians and their Christian predecessors is that the moderns do not allow themselves to be aware of the pattern in their minds, whereas Bossuet, Eusebius, and Saint Augustine were fully conscious of it.
...
One of my aims in A Study of History has been to try out the scientific approach to human affairs and to test how far it will carry us. Of course, no one would seriously contend that there are no patterns at all in historical thought, for thought itself is a mental pattern, and no historian could think one thought or write one line without using such mental patterns as ‘society’, ‘state’, ‘church’, ‘war’, ‘battle’, and ‘man’.

The real question at issue is not whether mental patterns exist but whether they cover the whole field of human affairs or only part of it; and my own belief is that there are some things in human affairs that have no pattern because they are not subject to scientific laws. One such thing, I believe, is an encounter between two or more human beings. I believe that the outcome of such an encounter would not be predictable, even if we had a complete knowledge of all the antecedent facts.

Text captured from the "full text" version and checked against the "See other formats" version.

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

Myth and metaphor

Encyclopaedia Britannica:

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 ...

In an upcoming post I evaluate some of the criticisms of Toynbee's book A Study of History. I quote that bit from Britannica, and respond, saying I don't see why the use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data would be a problem. Economists do it all the time, I say.

Am I defending the use of myth and metaphor? Of course not. I'm criticizing economists. This is the econ crit blog, remember?

Here, Gavin Kennedy dealt with metaphor:

In treating a metaphor as a real entity which they believe actually operates in society you end up with fantasies. When these fantasies are believed by economists, including Nobel Prize Winners, you leave reality and belittle claims to economics being a science.

See also Dijkstra on unwarranted analogies.

Okay, that's metaphor. What about myth?. Do economists use myth on an equal footing with factual data?

Yeah, but they don't call it myth. They call it "models".

The perfect model

Back in 1975, in a collected volume entitled International Trade and Finance: Frontiers for Research, an economist named Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro wrote: “by now any bright graduate student, by choosing his assumptions ... carefully, can produce a consistent model yielding just about any policy recommendation he favored at the start.”

- Boston Review: Economics After Neoliberalism

The wall

Considering the Roman Empire, Arnold J Toynbee wrote:

Why did the Barbarians ultimately break through? Because, when a frontier between a more highly and a less highly civilized society ceases to advance, the balance does not settle down to a stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in the more backward society's favour.

Seems relevant today, as we find ourselves building walls to keep barbarians out.