Shirley Robin Letwin on the love of Toynbee

John Wood on 'the balance of payments' Reviews by Nicholas Richardson Robin Holloway and Auberon Waugh

The riddle of Arnold Toynbee has grown with the volumes written about him. It only begins with the difficulty of discovering what connection A Study of History has with history. Toynbee has been called a mystic, a determinist, and a rationalist, as well as accused both of 'valuing religion for utilitarian purposes' and of denying value to the secular and material side of human life.' "I can only say," he replies in his Reconsiderations, • that I am neither orthodox nor rationalist, and that my ' transrationalism ' between these two poles is clear to me at any rate.

Those wanting more clarification are now given a slim volume* in which Toynbee speaks directly as a moralist. He is replying to questions that express, he believes, the "doubts and hopes and fears of this generation of people." As a diagnosis of what ails us, Toynbee's remarks read like the Lady's Home Guide to Standard Social Problems. They are all here, from pollution, war, and the population explosion to the generation gap. There is not much danger that Toynbee's solution to these problems will deprive those who revel in them. But it does make clear how he thinks about human life.

The answer to all our difficulties, Toynbee tells us, is Love : " Love is the only thing that makes life possible or indeed tolerable." "How can the older and the younger generations rise to the present difficult and critical occasion and bridge the gap between them? As always in all human relations, through mutual love and through a recognition, by each individual, of the inadequacy of his own love . . ."

The foundation of Toynbee's doctrine of love is an understanding of the human world as a .s.vhiiipool. of crea *Surviving the Future Arnold Toynbee (OUP E2.00) tures "competing with each other for exploiting the universe." This competition is "a conflict of power" in which no real success is possible because "all except the most primitive species of living creatures die and the fact of death is enough to doom egocentricity to ultimate failure." The moral Toynbee draws is twofold. On the one hand the problem of human life is to learn to welcome inescapable death (Toynbee opposes the prejudice against suicide); on the other hand, we must exert ourselves to help others and the human race as a whole to survive. Though aspirations both to die and to live might seem to be not wholly compatible, Toynbee assures us that both are served by religion and morality which teach the same truth, that self-centredness must give way to love.

Religion teaches us, he believes, that each man is a fragment of the spiritual whole which has nothing intrinsically separate about it, so that "at death a human being's soul is re-absorbed into the supra-personal spiritual presence behind the universe." This implies that "personal human individuality is acquired at the price of being separated from this supra-personal reality . . , and I am therefore glad that it has to be paid for a limited period only." Despite this indifference to life on earth for himself, Toynbee would sentence his fellow men to surviving as long as possible because, it would seem, loving others gives men "the possibility of personal achievements" and helps them to pass the time.

How to order social relations so as to maximize survival is, in Toynbee's view, what we learn from morality. It supplies a code of conduct for overcoming selfcentredness and practising what religion teaches is right — " self-abnegation, self-denial, and also if need be selfsacrifice." If we learn our lessons well, we will cease to compete with other men; we will love everyone; wars will no longer happen; and the human race will have a secure future.

Toynbee thinks of this as the Christian doctrine of love without personal immortality. But the doctrine of personal immortality is indispensable to Christian love, not so much because it insists on the soul's immortality as because it endows each human being with a unique worth which lies within himself and not in his subordination to something beyond or greater than himself. This unique being is the object of Christian love. Serious Christian theology has therefore empha sized that God loves men for their own sake and not as mere parts in the machinery of the universe; that the salvation of one person is worth "more than the good of the whole universe of nature "; and that no person is at the disposition of any other. The saint is not someone who sacrifices or obliterates his self, but someone with so keen a sense of his self and such extraordinary fidelity to it that he will die rather than betray it.

A secular way of putting this is that each human being has a capacity for becoming not merely an individual creature surviving successfully but a person with a mode of existence peculiar to himself. That is why 'Know Thyself' has been a central teaching of philosophers as diverse as Socrates, St Augustine, St Thomas and Hegel. If love means something more profound than infatuation or benevolent sentimentality, the human being seen as a person is the only proper object of love. He cannot be deduced from any principle about Love, Survival, or Humanity, nor is he merely a bundle of miscellaneous fantasies, impulses, opinions, and mannerisms, for neither a syllogism, nor a rag-bag can be the object or seat of an abiding curiosity and enchantment. The person that can love and be loved is the weaver of a web of memories, Lut constituting a continuous 'I,' with a unique coherence and style of understanding and responding.

This conception of human beings as persons is what makes it improper to manage men as subordinate parts of a social whole or to exalt social activity as the supreme or only human good. But also for the same reason, social life is not merely a necessity imposed by the inability of individual human beings to survive on their own. It is positively desirable because living with other men, listening and speaking to them, is essential to the creation of the person. It also follows that there can be no unanimity and no permanently or universally desirable or unchanging social arrangements. As each person is an inexhaustible source of interpretation and response, men are constantly modifying their judgements of what is good and practicable and differing with one another. To seek an escape from change in human affairs, to decry political activity because it is concerned with the adjustment of human arrangements according to changing human judgements or to want to eliminate the possibility of disagreement, is to declare one's indifference to human beings as persons.

This is just what Toynbee has done. One obvious symptom is his attitude to art. A number of critics have charged him with neglecting art in A Study of History and he has pleaded guilty. This is not merely an odd lapse. Nor is his unashamed description in this book of Shakespeare's Hamlet as the story of a radical student cleaning up the mess made by his irresponsible elders. In Toynbee's scheme of things there is no place for art understood as imagining and creating for its own sake regardless of any extrinsic benefit — a form of what the ancients called ' contemplation.'

Though he claims that ' understanding ' and ' creativity ' are as praiseworthy as love, Toynbee in fact treats all human activities as though they were geared to social improvement. The only object for understanding as he describes it is to "know how to apportion our love." By being creative he means "trying to change this universe" which is imperfect because "many living creatures prey on one another," and there are earthquakes, floods, droughts, and tornadoes. Therefore we must try to supplement and replace the natural environment by a "man-made environment." But this prescription equates ' understanding ' and ' creativity ' with putting things right and has nothing to do with understanding or creating as activities of a person making a world for himself.

For all that Toynbee says about "action for gaining closer contact with the spiritual presence behind the universe," the only content he gives to such ' action ' is the " paramount object of taking care not to liquidate ourselves." The survival of the race should serve, he hopes, as consolation for the death each individual faces, and we can use the time gained, he advises, to "explore and colonize other planets . . . and even in other galaxies." Moreover, we must not let "our sense of our own human dignity " inhibit us " breeding new varieties of human beings, as if we ourselves were domesticated animals," since it would be " illogical," " unenterprising" and "cowardly for man to leave the propagation of his own species at the mercy of nature. . . ."

His overriding interest in good works does not however prevent Toynbee from considering politics totally base. In his earlier work, he had declared that "it ;s not easy to draft a definition of the state that distinguishes it from another ancient institution: slavery." In this book, he tells us that government means "imposing the will of the rulers on their individual subjects. You may call them citizens, yet they are only subjects because their Government coerces them, if necessary by violence. This is what we mean by law and order."

Politics, as he understands it, has nothing to do with persuading men that one alternative is preferable to another, but only with ' conditioning ' them to "make them acquiesce in being disciplined." In the past religion has been "the prime conditioner which enabled the ' establishment ' to turn men into soldiers," whereas today "the principal conditioner is likely to be technology," in the form of television.

The reason why, on Toynbee's view, politics cannot be anything but a nasty business of using brute force is that he sees no distinction between persuasion and conditioning, or between arbitrary violence and the exercise of authority by lawful government. These distinctions are meaningless to him because they depend on noticing differences in what human beings understand and how they respond, and Toynbee has no interest in such discrimination.

Nor can he appreciate the human capacity for devising alternatives. He takes it to be an axiom that the United States "could not remain half slave and half free" and had to fight a civil war, without considering all sorts of other adjustments, arrangements and transitions that might have come without fighting. He tells us that the poverty of poor countries is due to "terms of trade" and "a failure to practise family planning" and that technology necessarily "requires an increas ing regimentation of life " — clichés to which a few minutes of thought can add a dozen other possibilities. His facile com parisons are dangerously misleading : "Capitalism protects individual freedom at the expense of social justice; Communism puts social justice before freedom," just as earlier he had made the activities of the Zionists morally equivalent to those of the Nazis because the Nazis were indignant about the German defeat in 1918 and the Jews were indignant about the Nazi extermination camps.

All these diagnoses and prescriptions make it clear that Toynbee has no concern with human beings as persons and that what he means by love is radically different from the Christian doctrine of love. But neither is his message any closer to the Eastern religions dominated by the Platonic doctrine in which, as Diotima tells Socrates, love begins as an appreciation of beauty in a person and uses him to ascend to Absolute Beauty. Though Toynbee denounces Plato's Republic and Laws n the orthodox ' liberal ' manner as program's for reactionary fascist societies, his own humanitarian message is far more inimical to the human personality than Plato's philosophy.

Plato puts love directed to philosophical understanding above the love of persons. In, Toynbee's world, there is no more room for philosophical understanding than for persons. Love therefore becomes synonymous with acts of self-denial and selfsacrifice. But self-sacrifice is not, as Toynbee supposes, any basis for moray behaviour. The morality of self-sacrifice offers no guidance for the task of shaping a person or for respecting other persons. It is a most insidious and self-righteous form of tyranny, not an altruistic but a gnostic doctrine. And the only object available for sacrificial action, that can be "more valuable and more lasting than the individual himself," is the preservation of a collection of human beings, leading to that worship of a collectivity — this time a world state — that Toynbee claims to abhor.

The answer to the riddle of Toynbee is that, however sincere his desire to have a genuine historical interest in the past and to believe in free will and spiritual goods, his writings belie these aspirations because, he has no idea of the human person. Neither fragments of a spiritual presence, sentenced to reside for a time on earth, nor creatures struggling above all to survive can create anything worth understanding or understand anything created. For such beings, the historian's interest in men's capacity for bringing good out of evil and evil out of good is meaningless. They cannot be curious about anything and there is nothing about them worthy of curiosity. They have nothing to love and there is nothing lovable in them. This book makes it plain, as Prof. Kedourie suggested in The Chatham House Version, that Toynbee's chief concern is to escape from the human condition. He is the prophet of a humanitarianism without human beings.