2002 A.D.

Arnold J. Toynbee, the British historian who has worked harder than any living man to synthesize the meaning of the world's known past civilizations (he lists 26), took a long look into the future. Invited to speak last week at a philosophical society at Edinburgh University with no newspapermen present and without a prepared text, Historian Toynbee made a gloomy but provocative guess at the world in the year 2002 A.D.

"Within half a century," he predicted ". . . the whole face of the planet will have been unified politically through the concentration of irresistible military power in some single set of hands." Whether this unification will come through a world war or without it, he would not say. Nor was he ready to predict in whose hands the irresistible military power would rest. But in his mind's eye, Toynbee seemed to see the U.S. in nominal charge of the world, with Soviet Russia tacitly recognizing American dominance because it feared to challenge the U.S. to war.

Asia, Parthia & Rome. "If a modern westernizing world were to be unified peacefully," Toynbee said, "one could imagine, in 2002, a political map not unlike that of the Graeco-Roman world in A.D. 102, in which everything between Britain and India inclusive was gathered up in three empires--the empire in India and central Asia, the Parthian in Iran and Iraq, the Roman world round the Mediterranean. In form these three powers were all mutually independent, in reality the paramountcy of the Roman Empire was admitted by the other two."

The American empire of 2002 would, like Augustus' Roman Empire, make great use of what Toynbee called "constitutional fictions." The U.S. once overlorded it over Latin America with a big stick, Toynbee says, but learned better. "The states of Europe and Asia within the U.S. sphere of influence are going to be as touchy as the Latin American states, and the U.S. is likely to handle them by a diplomatic technique that she has learned from her Latin American experience."

Form & Fact. "No community in the world will be able to afford to admit that it is not democratic; but even in . . . western countries that have had a long experience of working parliamentary institutions, the real control of the electorate over the government will have become less effective than it was in the igth century, because the rise in the standard of education will not have kept pace either with the dilution of the electorate or with the increasing complicatedness and technicality of public business." In less experienced states, Toynbee suggests, an even greater gulf will grow "between democratic form and bureaucratic fact."

"Democracy will have receded in the current Western usage of the term, as meaning self-government. It may, though, have advanced in the current Russian usage, as meaning social equality in contrast to hierarchy of classes. The loss of freedom on the material plane will have been the price of abolition of violence and injustice on the material plane. 'Government is the penalty for original sin.' Given the imperfection of human nature, the only way to abolish strife and injustice on a material plane is to restrict freedom there. In a powerful, healthy, overpopulated world, even the proletarian's freedom to beget children will no longer be his private affair, but will be regulated by the state."

Back to Church. But man, believes Toynbee, cannot live without freedom any more than he can live without religion. "And if freedom is suppressed on the material plane, it will break out on the spiritual plane . . . The 19th century movement in the Western world which replaced religion by technology as the center of interest will be reversed in the 21st century by a countermovement in which mankind will turn back from technology to religion."

"There will be no more Fords and Napoleons," Professor Toynbee predicts, "but there may still be St. Francises and John Wesleys."

Where may the new religious movement flower first? "It might not start in America or in any European or Western country," said Toynbee, "but in India. Conquered India will take her matter-of-fact American conqueror captive . . . The center of power in the world will ebb back from the shores of the Atlantic to the Middle East, where the earliest civilizations arose 5,000 or 6,000 years ago."

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