Good Angel?

Unlike most other contemporary historians, Arnold Toynbee is no mere bookkeeper of destiny. He believes that the facts compiled from the past would be useless unless related to the moral purposes that animate men's actions. On a BBC symposium, Moral Historian Toynbee presented a remarkable analysis of the West's tragic relations with Asia, and it defined the West's job in Asia better than volumes of State Department directives and U.N. studies.

The New Dream. The West, as Toynbee sees it, drew its first strength from Asia's great, early civilization and eventually used its knowledge to rule Asia. In turn, Asia drew its new strength from modern Western civilization and is using that strength now to shake off Western rule. But the significant thing to Toynbee is not that Asia has learned Western technology. It is that, through it, Asia's people have caught, willy nilly, "an idea, an ideal, a hope"--technology's "imponderable spiritual fellow travelers."

Writes Toynbee: "A peasantry that had previously been acquiescing--and this for hundreds and thousands of years on end--in serving as hewers of wood and drawers of water for a privileged minority, has at last been awakening from its slumber . . . For all that time, it had never dreamed of any possibility of a change for the better. The impact of the West has put this dream into [its] mind . . .

"The reawakening peasantry, being human, are unlikely to be reasonable, and, being ignorant (even for human beings), they may carry their unreasonableness to perilous lengths . . . They do not realize that, if they are eventually to get material benefits out of technology, they must first put spiritual treasures into it--such rare treasures as selfdiscipline, and patience and vision . . ." It will take Asia generations to break away from stifling old customs and catch up with technology's real demands and opportunities. "But Asia today is impatient; she is not in a mood to wait. [Asia] is a field that is almost asking for an enemy to come by night and sow tares in it. The enemy has, of course, turned up . . ."

The Old Catch. "In the present contest between Russia and the West for winning the soul of Asia--the souls of the peasant three-quarters of mankind--a Communist Russia has an appeal for Asia which it would be folly for us to . . . underestimate . . . Russia can say to Asia today: '. . . Like you today, I yesterday was depressed, ignorant, hopeless, and tame . . . See how I have pulled myself up to the Western level of efficiency, prosperity and power . . . by my own bootstraps . . . You can do [it] for yourselves tomorrow if you will only take my advice . . .'

"Of course there is, as always, a catch in what the tempter says to the intended victim . . . But then Adam and Eve have never been good at seeing the catch in their temptations without a good angel to enlighten them . . . The Russian challenge to the West is a challenge to us to be Asia's good angel--the angel who will guide Asia's feet out of the Communist paths of destruction by showing her a Western way of peace. This is the West's next assignment, and no doubt it is the hardest one that has ever been put upon us . . . It is a call to rise above ourselves . . . a call that we cannot refuse . . ."

This is a kind of Point Four program that Washington has never yet envisioned.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.