Spengler’s lack of respect for the phenomena has a twofold cause. It is due in part to his overweening conceit, in part to his lack of experience. Like Toynbee, he is truly familiar only with classical antiquity and its western descendant. His Urmensch, his “primordial man,” is the Greek or the Aryan Indian.[11] He ignores altogether the work of those who have ventured outside the familiar in order to meet an alien spirit on its own terms—the anthropologists, or, more precisely, the ethnologists or cultural anthropologists. These scholars have come up against behaviour defying every modern norm in their personal contact with primitive peoples, and in their encounters discovered an approach to the study of alien cultures which the historian of antiquity would be wise to make his own. The ethnologist will not take for granted savage customs and usages which seem comprehensible—even familiar—to him. For he has observed that cultural traits cannot be studied in isolation since they are integral parts of a whole—the given civilization—and derive their meaning from the particular whole in which they occur. Ruth Benedict, in her lucid Patterns of Culture, states the case as follows:
It is in cultural life as it is in speech: selection is the prime necessity.... We must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants and gutturals from voiceless to voiced, and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such a selection in its cultural institutions. Each, from the point of view of another, ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. One culture hardly recognizes monetary values; another has made them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life which seem necessary to ensure survival; in another, equally simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous cultural superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one upon afterlife.[12]
Hence—and as a warning to those who are partial to utilitarian explanations: “The importance of an institution in a culture gives no direct indication of its usefulness or its inevitability,”[13] for cultural behaviour is integrated and the whole determines the significance of the parts:
Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to these purposes each people further and further consolidates its experience ... and the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its peculiar goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society.[14]
We have seen that any society selects some segment of the arc of possible human behaviour, and in so far as it achieves integration its institutions tend to further the expression of its selected segment and to inhibit the opposite expressions.[15]
There is, in this last passage, a suggestion of the dynamics of the formation of a civilization but it is not this aspect but that of “form” which prevails in the work of Benedict or Malinowski. For modern savages are relatively stagnant if we discount the disturbances caused by the white man. Hence the title Patterns of Culture.
It is, however, precisely the problem of the dynamics of cultural change—a problem misconstrued by Spengler and rightly ignored by Ruth Benedict—which lies at the centre of Arnold Toynbee’s work. The first three volumes of A Study of History appeared in 1934, a second group of three in 1939, and a final group is still to be published. But we are told that the preoccupation from which the work has sprung, goes back as far as 1911, when Toynbee travelled in Crete and saw the newly discovered remains of the sea-empire of Minos. Then he chanced on the ruins of a Venetian villa, remnant of the time when Venice had dominated the Mediterranean with its galleys. And Toynbee was disconcerted at the thought that yet another empire that “rules the waves” even in our own day might follow its predecessors in decline.[16] Now a preoccupation with decay such as underlies Toynbee’s work need not in itself vitiate study of the birth of civilization; however, the “change and identity” of cultural forms must not be handled mechanically but with all the reverence for the singular which historical material demands. And it is here rather than in errors of fact (which are inevitable in a work of this scope) that we find Toynbee’s work defective. We must, moreover, take exception to his lack of critical precision and to the inadequacy of his conceptual apparatus.
Toynbee, like Spengler, invests certain images which he uses with a spurious reality. These ostensible similes pervade the argument with an implied assurance that they reflect historical situations. When Toynbee compares civilizations with motor cars on a one-way street,[17] or with men resting or climbing on a mountainside, he conveys the impression (which he himself judges correct) that a definite direction, a forward or upward movement, is discernible in history. But such dynamics are imputed, not observed. He writes:
Primitive societies, as we know them by direct observation, may be likened to people lying torpid upon a ledge on a mountainside, with a precipice below and a precipice above; civilizations may be likened to companions of these “sleepers of Ephesus” who have just risen to their feet and have started to climb on up the face of the cliff.[18]
This image (further elaborated in the book, and duly illustrated with a picture in Time magazine) does a great deal more than tell us that primitive societies are static and civilizations dynamic. The dominating feature of the image is the rock cliff with its succession of ledges and precipices. Where is the historical reality corresponding to this scenery which exists independent of the sleepers and climbers and determines their direction? The “one-way street” likewise suggests a predetermined orientation and limitation of cultural endeavour. Toynbee believes that there is a cliff to be climbed, a street to be followed. Yet the truth is—in the terms of his images—that we see figures at rest or on the move in a cloudy space but know nothing about their relative position: we do not know which ledge is above or below which other ledge. Or again: we see motor cars moving, halting, or out of order. But we do not know whether they move in an alley, or on a four-drive highway, on an open plain, or within a circle—we do not even know whether there is an entrance or exit at all.
Toynbee’s images betray an evolutionistic as well as a moral bias which interferes with the historian’s supreme duty of doing justice to each civilization on its own terms. Why should we characterize civilizations which have achieved a deep and lasting harmony (like those of the Zuni or of certain Polynesians) as “arrested civilizations” where “no energy is left over for reconnoitring the course of the road ahead, or the face of the cliff above them, with a view to a further advance”?[19] Where is this road or this cliff? Why should these chimaeras and a feverish desire for “advancement” disturb the satisfaction of people who have attained the double integration of individual and society and of society and nature? Toynbee merely projects postulates which fulfil an emotional need in the West into human groups whose values lie elsewhere. In our own terms: Toynbee declares the “dynamism” of western civilization to be universally valid; and he can do that only by ignoring the “form” of non-western civilizations. But understanding is thereby precluded.