History's Pendulum

EAST AND WEST by C. Northcote Parkinson. 330 pages. Houghton M/fflm. $5.

It was his humorous Law No. 1 ("Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion") that put Cyril Northcote Parkinson's name right up there beside Calvin Coolidge's ("When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results"). This book now puts Historian Parkinson in the position of the comedian who has had his audience in stitches, clears his throat and says, "But, seriously . . ."

Alternating Phases. Parkinson's thesis is that the whole of civilized history can be reduced to the confrontation of the East and West, with "alternating phases of Oriental and Western ascendancy." The West set the pendulum in motion with the capture of Troy in about 1250 B.C., which launched the Greeks' thrust into Asia Minor. Since that time, the East has rebounded with two long periods of ascendancy--one following the Persian conquests under Darius (522 B.C.), the other from roughly A.D. 400 to 1000, when Buddhism was sweeping Asia and Europe was plunged in the Dark Ages. The West was ascendant from 331 B.C., when Alexander swept through Asia Minor and into India, to about A.D. 200, when Roman power in the Near East crumbled. The second era of Western ascendancy began around 1500 and extended to the mid-1800s.

It is Parkinson's argument that the pendulum is now swinging eastward. The first signs of the shift, he feels, appeared in 1850 with the Taiping rebellion in China, followed closely by the Indian Mutiny and eventually by the Boxer rising of 1900. But the crucial date is 1905, and the crucial event the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese. Since then, Parkinson feels, the "established prestige of the West" has been shattered. (The destruction of the Japanese fleet by the U.S. Navy in World War II does not seem to impress him.) Parkinson does not believe that Eastern parity with the West "is even imminent," but believes that it will eventually come and that it will be up to Russia to fight the West's last rearguard action, as Byzantium once shored up the exhausted Roman Empire.

Energetic Advocate. Parkinson is an energetic advocate, and he rarely lets consistency intrude on the line of his argument. Whereas in an earlier book, The Evolution of Political Thought, he concluded that "Communism is not a creed of great importance in the history of political thought," he now finds that it "seems destined to give the renascent East its cutting edge." He never reckons with the fact that the East is not an entity but a vast breeding ground of heterogeneous societies. In his own amiable way, in fact, Parkinson often seems like a man trying to stuff a quantity of awkwardly oblong facts into a resolutely square theory and hoping to come out with a Law.

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