I have been reading Toynbee*'s Study of History and looking for how to summarize his logic so I can apply it to our desperate situation. Also reading Pitrim Sirokin* and came across a summary of Toynbee*. It is good, spare and works.
Arnold Toynbee The Study of History
Pitrim Sorokin. Social Philosophies of An Age of Crisis
Toynbee looks at civilizations and asks why they arrived, survived, and died. He treats civilizations as quite different from societies. the core is that the leaders the led and the message must cohere. How are we doing.?
Here is Sorokin on Toynbee.
Of such civilizations, he takes twenty-one (later on, twenty-six) “related and unrelated” species: the Western, two Orthodox Christian (in Russia and the Near East), the Iranic, the Arabic, the Hindu, two Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indie, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Sumeric, the Hit- tite, the Babylonic, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec, the Mayan, the Egyptiac, plus five “arrested civilizations”: Poly¬ nesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, and Spartan.3
…..but to a specific combination of two conditions: the presence of a creative minority ( with. a message the rest of the population believes in) in a given society and of an environment which is neither too unfavorable nor too favorable.
It seems to me that our creative elite has left the population behind but had a message that didn’t fit the more passive majority
The mechanism of the birth of civilization in these conditions is formulated as an interplay of Challenge-and-Response.
The environment of the foregoing type incessantly challenges the society; and the society, through its creative minority, successfully responds to the challenge and solves the need. A new challenge follows, and a new response successfully ensues; and so the process continues incessantly. In these conditions no possibility of rest exists, the society is on the move all the time, and such a move brings it, sooner or later, to the stage of civilization.
The next problem of the study is why and how, out of twenty-six civilizations, four (Far Western Christian, Far Eastern Christian, Scandinavian, and Syriac) miscarried and proved abortive; five (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Spartan, and Ottoman) were arrested in their growth at an early stage; whereas the remaining civilizations grew “through an elan that carried them from challenge through response to further chal¬ lenge and from differentiation through integration to differen¬ tiation again?”
no less than sixteen out of these twenty-six are by now dead and buried” (the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Sumeric, the Mayan, the Indie, the Hittite, the Syriac, the Hellenic, the Babylonic, the Mexic, the Arabic, the Yucatec, the Spartan, and the Ottoman). Of the remaining ten civilizations living,
no less than sixteen out of these twenty-six are by now dead and buried” (the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Sumeric, the Mayan, the Indie, the Hittite, the Syriac, the Hellenic, the Babylonic, the Mexic, the Arabic, the Yucatec, the Spartan, and the Ottoman). Of the remaining ten civilizations living,
In Toynbee’s formulation, “the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an an¬ swering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.”
When in the history of any society a Creative Minority degenerates into a mere Dominant Minority which attempts to retain by force a position which it has ceased to merit, this fatal change in the character of the ruling element provokes, on the other hand, the secession of a Proletariat (the majority) which no longer spontaneously admires or freely imitates the ruling element, and which revolts against being reduced to the status of an unwilling “underdog.” This Proletariat, when it asserts itself, is divided from the outset into two distinct parts. There is an “Internal Proletariat” (the majority of the members) and ... an “External Proletariat” of barbarians beyond the pale who now violently resist incorporation. And thus the breakdown of a civilization gives rise to a class-war within the body social of a society which was neither divided against itself by hard-and-fast divisions nor sundered from its neighbors by unbridgeable gulfs so long as it was in growth.13
This declining phase consists of three sub-phases: (a) the breakdown of the civilization, (b) its disintegration, and (c) its dissolution. The breakdown and dissolution are often separated by centuries, even thousands of years, from one an¬ other.
we can hear the beat of an elemental rhythm ... of Challenge-and- Response and Withdrawal-and-Return and Rout-and-Rally and Ap- parentation-and-Affiliation and Schism-and-Palingenesia. This elemental rhythm is the alternating beat of Yin and Yang. . .
Mapping Tpynbee onto our own time actually looks pretty easy. Our failure at coherence across leadership followership in a message is obvious. How does such a society as ours embrace the challenge and response? Remember, the challenge is on the Social side, the failure of economics and capitalism, and on the physical side it is crops and climate.