One Long View

THE WORLD AND THE WEST (99 pp.)--Arnold Toynbee -- Oxford University Press ($2).

As if he were sitting, port and cigar at hand, in the common room of some distant planet populated by Oxford dons, Professor Arnold Toynbee looks down on the world and its worries with the Long View of history. Man, says Toynbee, with a Balliol-bred benignity of wit and grace of phrasing, is but a scurrying creature on a cosmic anthill who may be, but is not necessarily, doomed. It all depends on how the scurriers respond to challenge.

Toynbee's genial ability to work out patterns in history made the 1947 abridgment of the first six volumes of his monumental A Study of History a bestseller, and Toynbee's name tinkled among the Martini glasses of Brooklyn as well as of Bloomsbury. Now, Historian Toynbee gives his public a peek at what is yet to come in Volumes VII through X of his magnum opus, due for publication next year. The World and the West, a collection of six lectures delivered last year on the BBC, is always readable, if often disconcertingly brief in its arguments.

Who Invaded Whom? With all the assurance of a Renaissance pope issuing a bull, Toynbee first divides contemporary mankind into two blocs: on one hand, the World; on the other, the West. The West, like its principal challenger, Russia, is an "ex-Christian" civilization. But not only is the West without a faith; it is "the arch-aggressor of modern times." The World, and especially Russia, "invaded by Western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709 and 1610," has reason to mistrust the West. Toynbee avoids embarrassing this general thesis by any mention of the invasions of the West by the World, e.g., those of Islam and Genghis Khan.

Toynbee concedes that, since 1945, the West finds itself "suffering at the hands of the World what the World has been suffering at Western hands for a number of centuries past." Is Toynbee suggesting that the West is simply frying in a fire of its own building? It would seem so, for he argues even that Communist tyranny itself is a Western product: the tyranny is a historical one caused by the Russians' "resignation to an autocratic regime" capable of defending them from the West; Communism is a heresy of Christianity, a Western heresy adopted by Russia, along with Western technology, as a weapon of defense.

Western technology has not always saved the Russians, for the West keeps getting ahead: "Peter [the Great] launched Russia on a technological race with the West which Russia is still running. Russia has never yet been able to rest, because the West has continually been making fresh spurts." Peter brought Russian weapons sufficiently up to date to defeat the Swedish invaders in 1709 and the French in 1812, but then the Industrial Revolution came along, and the West outstripped Russia, and (in the guise of the German army) beat the Czar's armies in World War I. Stalin took up where Peter left off, got Russia sufficiently re-Westernized by 1941 to defeat another Western invader, Nazi Germany. But no sooner had the Germans been cleared from the mother soil than the West shot out ahead again with the atomic bomb. "So today, for the third time, Russia is having to make a forced march to catch up." Any Hope? Not only Russia, but the World's other West-fearing civilizations --Islam, India, the Far East -- have adopted Western technology and ideas in self-defense. But the World has accepted only the more trivial parts of Western civilization: it resolutely rejects Western religion and values. Here, Toynbee's readers get a new Toynbean equation, the Law of En counters: "When a traveling culture-ray is diffracted into its component strands ... by the resistance of a social body upon which it has impinged, its techno logical strand is apt to penetrate faster and further than its religious strand ..." Since the World has turned Western technology on its creators and has reject ed Western faith, while the West itself has lost its Christianity, is there any hope? Of course, answers Toynbee in the voice of a man warming his port before the common-room fireplace: look at the Greeks and the Romans. "After [they] had conquered the world by force of arms, the world took its conquerors captive by converting them to new religions which ad dressed their message to all human souls." Is the World going to teach the West a new religion? Toynbee asks -- and it is hard to tell whether he means it or is merely blowing smoke rings in his wine glass. "We cannot say, because we cannot foretell the future. We can only see that what has actually happened once, in another episode of history, must at least be one of the possibilities that lie ahead of us."

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