The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (34 page)

After Spengler, the next widely influential Seeker of the meaning of history was Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975). The Toynbee family had a tradition of grand ideas and social conscience. His uncle, Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), had founded the first “settlement house” to offer education and uplift to the poor of east London, and before his death at the age of thirty had written the book which invented the “industrial revolution.” Benjamin Jowett had given him a post as tutor in Balliol College, Oxford, and the nephew, Arnold J. Toynbee, had followed to Balliol and studied classics there. Then, studying at the British School in Athens, he originated his ideas on the decline of civilizations. He served as tutor in ancient history at Balliol, joined British Intelligence in World War I, and was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. After reporting as the
Manchester Guardian
correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War (1921-22), Arnold J. Toynbee was director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and director of research for the Foreign Office in World War II. A prodigiously productive scholar, Toynbee had a wide experience of international affairs in his time. His monumental work would be the twelve-volume
Study of History
(1934-61). His observation of small and large wars between nations and the maelstrom of “international” affairs seems to have confirmed his determination to seek meaning for history in some unit other than the nation-state.

Toynbee recalled twenty-eight years later how Spengler’s book (which he read in German in 1920) set him on his path of world history. Some critics would later describe Toynbee’s work as simply “a Spenglerian heresy.” Toynbee had found Spengler’s work “teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight. I wondered at first whether my whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind. One of my cardinal points was that the smallest intelligible fields of historical study were whole societies and not arbitrarily insulated fragments of them like the nation-states of the modern West or the city-states of the Graeco-Roman world.” But when Toynbee looked for answers about “the geneses of civilization” he found Spengler “unilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic.” While Spengler believed that the spirit of one culture could not be transferred to another, Toynbee observed that cultures were usually “apparented” to older cultures. Toynbee would use “society” as his synonym for both culture and civilization in Spengler’s vocabulary. Avoiding the Germanic panacea of “destiny,” he focused his original mind on facts to explain the origin, rise, flourishing, and decline of societies. “I became aware,” Toynbee recalled, “of a difference in national traditions. Where the German
a priori
method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism.”

Focusing on the genesis and survival of societies, his original approach was eminently practical and fact-oriented. He started with an intriguing paradox. “The view that certain environments, presenting easy and comfortable conditions of life, provide the key to an explanation of the origin of civilizations is examined and rejected.” Instead he “suggests the possibility that man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” Both sides of the paradox are supported by facts from around the earth:

The Sinic [Chinese] Civilization originated in the Yellow River Valley. The nature of the challenge which started it is unknown but it is clear that the conditions were severe rather than easy.
The Mayan Civilization originated from the challenge of a tropical forest; the Andean from that of a bleak plateau. . . .
The Indic Civilization in Ceylon flourished in the rainless half of the island. . . .
New England, whose European colonists have played a predominant part in the history of North America, is one of the bleakest and most barren parts of the continent. . . .
The natives of Nyasaland, where life is easy, remained primitive savages down to the advent of invaders from a distant and inclement Europe.

The elementary notion, what gave Toynbee’s work its popular appeal, was readily capsuled in the ideas of “challenge” and “response.”

Toynbee offers his own explanation of how and why societies survive and prosper. It is the leadership of “creative minorities” that keeps societies alive and flourishing. But when the “creative” minority becomes a “dominant” minority, imposing its will by force and oppression, then proletariats (internal and external) are created and the society disintegrates. Though fervent and profuse with the data of his “English empiricism,” Toynbee still developed his own mystique to replace “destiny.” The real progress of a civilization consists in what Toynbee calls “etherialization”—“an overcoming of material obstacles which releases the energy of the society to make responses to challenges which henceforth are internal rather than external, spiritual rather than material.”

Religions played an increasingly dominant role in Toynbee’s view as he grew older and advanced with his “Study of History.” “The principal cause of war in our world today,” he wrote on April 9, 1935, in the
Manchester Guardian,
“is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities of States. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions. . . . The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum. . . . People will sacrifice themselves for the ‘Third Reich’ or whatever the Ersatz-Götzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God.” After 1937, Toynbee flirted with Catholicism and he came to believe that the meaning of history would be revealed only in the slow and painful clarification of the relation between God and man.

For Toynbee, finally, the “higher religions” displaced societies or civilizations as the units that gave meaning to history. While brashly insisting on his naively English empirical reliance on facts, which he amassed in prodigious quantity, still in his personal quest for salvation he had developed his own universal apocalyptic view. His reassurance of universal salvation had wide appeal in an age of two world wars. Scholars have objected less to Toynbee’s vague definitions of society and civilization than to his tendency to simplify the study of history into a branch of theodicy—an answer to Job, a science of justifying God’s ways to man.

A World in Revolution?

The grand scholarly schemes of universal history purporting to explain the plight and destiny of civilization in the early twentieth century had their counterparts in a flood of popular literature in the West. People had been taught history, H. G. Wells complained, “in nationalist blinkers, ignoring every country but their own, and now they were turned out into a blaze.”

There were many reasons to move a writer to attempt a World History in 1918. It was the last, the weariest, most disillusioned year of the first World War. Everywhere there were unwonted privations; everywhere there was mourning. The tale of the dead and mutilated had mounted to many millions. Men felt they had come to a crisis in the world affairs. They were too weary and heart-sick to consider complicated possibilities. They were not sure whether they were facing a disaster to civilization or the inauguration of a new phase of human association; they saw things with the simplicity of such flat alternatives, and they clung to hope.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) widened the Western readers’ vision by providing a wonderfully compact, readable, and comprehensive history of the world. He revealed the interconnectedness and uncertainty of human destiny in the twentieth century and the need to transcend national ambitions.

This Western search for hope took many forms. Wells was only one of a community of popular Seekers. The most optimistic saw the world in revolution, and were exhilarated by the remarkable coincidence of so many peoples across the world rising against entrenched forces of privilege and evil. John Reed (1887-1920) was one of the most romantic and most focused of these enthusiastic Seekers—the Western spectators of revolution. Born to a wealthy family in Portland, Oregon, to a father who was active in the Progressive movement, Reed went to Harvard. On graduation in 1910, he worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat and hitchhiked across England, France, and Spain. Settling in New York he wrote poetry and short stories for
Poetry
and
The Masses
and joined the avant-garde of Greenwich Village who came to call him their Golden Boy.

Reed had his first view of the struggle for social justice when he covered the strike against the steel mills in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, and spent four days in jail with members of the International Workers of the World. Six months later he went to Mexico to cover the revolutionary exploits of Pancho Villa (1877-1923). Finding Pancho Villa and his army in Chihuahua, he traveled with them. He came to know them well, while other reporters were sitting in the El Paso bars, waiting word from refugees from battle. Reed’s melodramatic stories for
Metropolitan Magazine
led Walter Lippmann to say that “with Jack Reed reporting begins. . . . incidentally, the stories are literature.” Reed put the stories together in a book called
Insurgent Mexico
(1914). Now one of the highest-paid reporters in the United States at five hundred dollars a week, he was sent to Europe to cover the Western front, and then the Eastern front, of the new world war.

Suspecting that the revolution of February 1917 in Russia signaled greater events to come, he went to Petrograd in September and was there observing and recording the climactic October when the Bolsheviks took over. On Reed’s return to the United States his papers were seized on suspicion of his being a Bolshevik agent. When they were given back to him a year later, he wrote
Ten Days That Shook the World
(1919). “Unreservedly,” Lenin wrote in his introduction, “I recommend it to the workers of the world. . . . It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Reed helped organize a Communist Party in the United States, then went to Russia as delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International. When he was stricken by the typhus that was killing millions of Russians he could not be treated because of the Allied blockade on food and medical supplies to the Soviet Union, and so died at thirty-three.

Reed’s carefully documented day-to-day account of how the Bolsheviks seized power came to be called a Bible for revolutionaries in this century—a magic mirror to inspire young revolutionaries around the world. “Now there was all great Russia to win—and then the world! Would Russia follow and rise? And the world—what of it? Would the peoples answer and rise, a red world-tide?” After describing the funeral ceremony and the playing of the
Internationale
in Red Square for five hundred proletarian martyrs of the revolution, Reed concluded:

The poor love each other so! . . . I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.

The promise and the threat signaled by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermaths were expressed in myriad ways across the West. There was hardly a writer who did not find his own way of depicting the world crisis. Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), the leading muckraker journalist and Reed’s mentor, went to the Soviet Union and returned with an unforgettable apocalyptic phrase: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) in his novel
Darkness at Noon
(1940) offered a parable of the evils of Stalin’s regime and the “so-called Moscow trials.” John Steinbeck (1902-1968) toured the Soviet Union and published an “affectionate account” in his
Russian Journal
(1948) concluding “that Russian people are like all other people in the world . . . by far the greater number are very good.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1940), the longest novel written by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), preached the universality of revolutionary hope. “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now,” Robert Jordan, the heroic American who had joined the fight against the fascists says. “If we win here we will win everywhere.” For some years this was a surprisingly widespread view among Western intellectuals.

The frustration of Seekers who hoped to find salvation in Communism was summed up in
The God That Failed
(1950). The witnesses were a stellar group of intellectuals, including Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender, who had been attracted to Communism in the time between the October Revolution and the Stalin-Hitler pact. As the editor, Richard Crossman, explains:

In this book six intellectuals describe the journey into Communism, and the return. They saw it at first from a long way off—just as their predecessors 130 years ago saw the French Revolution—as a vision of ‘the Kingdom of God on earth’ and, like Wordsworth and Shelley, they dedicated their talents to working humbly for its coming. They were not discouraged by the rebuffs of the professional revolutionaries, or by the jeers of their opponents, until each discovered the gap between his own vision of God and the reality of the Communist State—and the conflict of conscience reached breaking point.

SANCTUARIES OF DOUBT

There are no whole truths;
all truths are half-truths.
It is trying to treat them as
whole truths that plays the devil.

—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD,
DIALOGUES
(1953)

“All History Is Biography”: Carlyle and Emerson

The dogmas of science and destiny would not remain long unchallenged. Man the restless Seeker would not be satisfied by such simplicities. The slaughter on Tiananmen Square in China and the dissolving of the Soviet empire were only climaxes of Western refusals to rest on the couch of dogma. The West had seen again and again the encompassing of the world in dogma, the embodiment of dogma in institutions, with the usual consequences of inquisition and persecution. The twentieth century, even more than ever before, saw the horrors of ideology enforced by institutions, whole nations organized for the slaughter of innocents. But seeking had never ceased. The centuries following the French Revolution of 1789 saw thinkers in the West questioning the certitudes of science and the very concepts that social scientists had devised to make experience amenable to dogma. Again, Western thought was stirred and enriched by champions of human autonomy, of the free individual, of the courage to doubt—rebels against grand simplicities. These dissolvers of ideology were prophets and the vanguard of a new cycle of seeking. They saw uncertainty in the mystery of existence, in the challenge to individual decision, in the vagaries of biography, in the elusive stream of consciousness, in the unpredictable diversity of nature, in the unknowable future of knowledge. Some even were awed by the absurdity of experience. Yet the seeking has never ceased.