spengler and toynbee

Let us take a brief detour through the lore of cyclical theories, to find an appropriate ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ for our model. Ideas of cyclicity in relation to the historical process have a long history, as the infamous confusions of the Great Year make clear. The cyclical views of the ancients are ritually denounced, although the nature of these views, and their exact history, is not understood, because of the ‘linear view of history’ in the early forms of monotheism, or more accurately in the codification of Augustine, in reality the coin of Zarathustra, changing hands in many transactions.

It is not quite true that the Hebraic gave birth to the ‘linear concept of time’, although it could well be claimed that the idea was first honed to some implicit sharpness in the first period of Judaism. The linear view of history was probably already present or emerging very early in Mesopotamia, if not earlier, but certainly appears decisively in a remarkably sophisticated form in the teachings of Zarathustra, that on inspection is a blended cycle-linear conception, as is that of Vico. But their real appearance on the world stage began with their diffusion into the world of emerging Judaism and the Persian Empire after -600. This is a very confusing subject indeed, for the impression of telescoped history is that a cycle of religion gives birth to an anti-cyclical view of time.[i]

Spengler and Toynbee are really ideologists of conservative postmodernism. In the closing period before the onset of the Great War, whose disillusioning scale of destruction had left an entire century of thought in a state of philosophic shell-shock, Spengler prophesied the ‘decline of the West’ and produced a theory of civilizations at the close of this war whose foundations were never successfully laid but whose cogent evocation of cycles drew attention to the large-scale structures of history. What then is World History? he asks at the beginning of his effort to understand the nature of civilization. The Nietzschean elements seem almost like a wished for cultural sabotage, and the idea of a Faustian civilization starting in the Year 1000 and entering decline in the Enlightenment must be a garbled version of this idea of Nietzschean decadence.

With a comparative method whose multicultural sympathy seems of greater value than its theoretical sweep, Spengler attempted to posit a life-cycle of cultures and civilizations, analogous to that of the organism, to draw the conclusion that the West had reached a state of old age, the ‘decline of the West’. There was a relevance to the theme as he propounded it at the point of the First World War, and yet the terms of his discussion are flawed. The reason is clear: he caught our TP3 at its downturn. The result is not decline, but more like what we see in the Hellenistic era.[ii]

Spengler’s theory struck a nerve and ordinary sociological thinking whose more scientific character does not allow itself the least consideration of cyclical ideas cannot put its finger on the blindsiding challenge to the ideas of progress which cannot distinguish discrete progression and the sudden collapse of the idea of progress. His theory of decline detected instead the ‘post-transitional falloff’ in our most recent transition. And his analysis is troubling because his views stood ambiguously near the onslaught of rightist ‘ ends with a doomster’s prophecy of decline. The adamant denial of progression attempts to declare the weakness of his theory a strength. For even to the disillusioned, the case for progression, if not progress, must be compelling, in the transformation of social scale, and the tide of information processing that accompanies each stage of advance from the Paleolithic.

Among the serious difficulties in Spengler’s theory stands the failure to see the historical character of civilizations taken together in their relations of mutual sequence, and the destabilizing effect of other long-term historical forces, such as the exponential growth of demography, or the influence of technology. Indeed, the size of our units is expanding. There may be cycles of civilization, but the sequence of civilizations or their cycles is itself historical. Akkad is different from Sumer, and Rome from Greece, because their phases, particularly of creative advance, have a ‘one after the other’ character and are not independent manifestations. These came after the first civilization, and a sequential relationship soon seen to eonic.

Spengler’s organismic metaphor, civilization as organism, is, in the final analysis, a challenge to the idea of mechanism applied to biological entities rather than a useful means of analyzing civilizations. The organismic metaphor must fail because organisms have very rigorous boundaries to ensure system integrity, which civilizations do not. And this is but one of endless difficulties in the analogy, along with the ambiguity in the possibilities of relative phasing and interaction, if not actual ‘siamesing’, e.g. the Greco-Roman. Further there is no reasonable way to delimit the genesis or the average organismic life-stages for each entity of civilization, or indeed any meaningful way to assign a simple boundary to the cultures under consideration. The first bare minimum would be to have a biological clock on the level of millennia.

Germinating from this, and directly influenced by his method, the works of Toynbee emerged, with a characteristic religious emphasis, applying the Spenglerian root idea from a different perspective, and attempting to isolate twenty-one civilizations, each evidently to constitute a cycle in itself. Toynbee had a better realization of the sequence of civilizations, and was driven, most significantly, by the evidence of history itself to see a distinction between the primary, secondary, and tertiary. But these special cases simply vitiate his generalization, and show that sequence is involved in the ‘net historical’ outcome of Civilization as ‘civilization s’.

This sequential dependency of the large and late on the early and small Sumer is the clue. But then the second cycle produces a new entity, the ‘great religion’, the rival of civilization as universal State, or empire, or whatever. Toynbee can’t decide between the two. The third cycle is on the move again, as of the Thirty Years War. We call it ‘secularism’, mixed with nationalism, much else. The third is moving against the second, and here Toynbee is left behind. This brings us to our moment now. What to do? The point, for our discussion is that the tempo of our eonic master sequence is the better candidate for a ‘unit of analysis’. It is the phase period around Archaic Greece, not the full general stream of Greek civilization, as this intersects with the master sequence by jump diffusion in its successive timing that is the real dynamic.

Allergic to the modern world, like Spengler, Toynbee bore his cyclical cross through the breakdown of his basically Augustinian conceptions, and was criticized by Reinhold Neibhur for falling into Spengleriana from the basically sound eonic architecture of the Augustinian construct, now sadly overgrown to the point of being unusable by mythological undergrowth, and hardwired toward TP2. In the longer trend, the arbitrary number of civilizations in the catalogue of species, and the sequencing of their relations suggest that there is a more basic process at work. It is important to consider that ‘civilization’ is itself a moving target, as a category, and depends on the way in which we define it, to consider its own time and place of usage.

Applying a Toynbean or other idea of cycles to this vague use of the term ‘civilization’ is simply confused, and blocks perception of a more complicated evolution. The difficulty can be seen at once if we extrapolate from past to present. Do arbitrary political gestures and foundational incidents initiate cycles of civilization? Any barbarian with a sword should be able to found a civilization. And anyone at all could, at any time, play the same trick in his backyard. We see the absurdity of confusing historical contingency and the system behavior implied by ‘cyclical regularity’. Any regularity must operate on a field of free action, and since the latter is ‘free’, it must have other business that of founding civilizations. We have the clue right here. Not ‘cycles of civilizations’, but ‘cycles of one Civilization’, probably including the Neolithic, with incidents of civilization as ‘free action’ and diffusion. The ‘idea of civilization’ becomes the legacy of ‘free action’, and our barbarian with a sword can produce contingent replications, which hardly could be organisms with a dynamic. Nature’s solution is eonic sequence in time-slices, beyond the whole field.

Having looked at Spengler and Toynbee, we can construct an idea of an eonic cycle, i.e. as in our eonic sequence. This approach to a theory of civilizations has a number of difficulties, but it solves the problem of cyclical theories, at least. On this score, the idea of an eonic sequence is the only reasonable solution to a theory of cycles of civilization. Cycles, laws of history, cultural systems, punctuated equilibria, are all theoretical zoo animals in counterfeit ‘law of history’ denominations, unless we can actually specify their means of operation, and find evidence of this operation. It is simply impossible to find the dynamical structure of a civilization in the disparate episodes and diverse boundaries of any given zone of culture.

Notes: Eonic Israel The case of Israel never even arrives on the list at all, disappearing into Spengler ’s ‘Magian ’ and Toynbee’s phantom ‘Syriac’ civilization. Israel routinely puts theories of civilization into a shredding machine, because the place, palace, soldiery, timing, and infrastructure, to say nothing of population, fall in and out of constellation, wrecking all generalizations, except that of eonic tempo, relative sourcing as of –600, with a slingshot from –900. Assyria collapses, and tiny Israel survives, with and without a people, place, palace, soldiery, or infrastructure. At the grand climax of TP2, ‘Israel’ has no infrastructure at all, and barely a population. It seems, the bigger the disaster, the closer it comes to pure ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’. We see that the ‘Judaic’ t-stream is built around a record of an eonic transition.

Cultural evolution and t-streams One of the problems we have as we examine world history is the tendency to confuse ‘cultural evolution’ with the histories of particular cultures. But it won’t work, although nothing prevents some other sense of evolution. Cultures permute, change their content, and undergo kaleidoscopic transformations. But is that evolution? We suspect, looking at the eonic effect, that outstanding cultural streams inherited from the Paleolithic are essentially static entities, and that our eonic evolution is a clue to how real cultural evolution must operate.

General views of cultural evolution by and large share with Toynbean notions an implicit view of a fundamental unit of historical study, i.e. a developmental entity such as ‘civilization’, or a culture. The idea of the independent evolution of a culture, a perfectly valid notion, nevertheless suffers the same difficulties that we have found with the term ‘civilization’. The term ‘civilization’ remains tremendously important as the music of cultural organization, but its normal usage fails completely to describe the instrument, that is the mechanics of evolutionary development. The same could be said of the term ‘culture’. Civilizations are more congeries of disparate elements than organized systems. The system, if any, must be defined at a greater level of abstraction. In general, the idea of ‘civilization’ works well only as a term for the meaningful content of culture, and becomes misleading if it is made into some deterministic or biological rubric.

A good example here is the differentiation of the Indo-European stream into multiple t-streams. And it is remarkable that we see three such stream brought into the Axial phase interval, the Roman, Greek, and Indic. We see at once the dilemma of global evolution via the t-stream, as opposed to what we in fact see, which would be the restriction to a single cultural stream. Our Axial interval seems to maximize the quantity of variety in a systematic sweep from Occident to Orient, with a judicious jumpstarting of a Semitic stream that will blend with the Indo-European in the mixmasters of Christianity and Islam.

Genesis of civilization Our model began with three sets of failed theories, those of the rise of the modern, others to do with the Axial period (to the extent they exist), and those to do with the rise of civilization, Toynbee being an instance with his theory of Challenge and Response. We can refrain from a discussion of the details of Toynbee’s classification of world history into twenty-one civilizations, keeping in mind the fruitful thought of the ‘genesis of civilization’, in his, or any other, sequence of ‘genesis, growth, and decay’, as the indispensable root idea that must stand if his theory is to pass muster before objections. But just here is the worst objection. The first and best candidate for the ‘genesis of civilization’ is the period ca. -3000, when the forms of the state first took form in Sumer and Egypt, granting license to the term ‘civilization’. But to call it a ‘genesis’ seems quite arbitrary, for the ‘genesis’ would seem primordial, and the beginning of civilization at this point a relative beginning at a higher level of social existence. Thus, when and where did Greek civilization begin? On the steppes of Asia in the times of the first Indo-Europeans? Before and after the separation of Latins and Gauls? At the first appearance of ‘Greek”? The difficulties become the worse as these geo-temporal noodles of cultural ‘long flow’ blend together in the intensive environment, for example, of the Middle East after the beginning of civilization. It is difficult to write separate cyclical histories of all the sheep in the flock. The cyclical theory must be the shepherd for this flock.

Counter-cyclical models It is almost dangerous to say so, but, supernaturalism apart, the basic Zoroastrian or Judaic-Augustinian crypto-eonic myth is quite sophisticated, because it proposes a~~counter-cyclical~~ counter-cyclical response to cyclical views of history. They wish to ‘surpass history’. Our eonic model automatically includes these possibilities, without any ‘end time extravaganza’, and yet persists with a quite different notion of cycles. This is built into our distinction of eonic determination and free action. A system evolving freedom cannot, as it were, truly produce freedom and leaves its creature in mideonic ‘free fall’, waiting for him to self-initialize his own freedom. Thus there is a potential action against the system of cycles. Note how Christianity rises to service this need, but in fact asphyxiates the freedom effect. We can see it in the obsession with ‘sin’ and ‘will’. This is connected to our idea of a ‘fourth turning point’.

[i] G. J. Whitrow in Time in History (New York: Oxford, 1981) notes, p. 51, “It has for long been held that our modern idea of time derives from that of early Christianity, which in turn can be traced back to that of ancient Israel and Judaism. Instead of adopting the cyclical idea of time, the Jews are said to have believed in a linear concept, based in their case on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God’s purpose. Although there is much to support this view of the origin of our modern idea of time, it is now realized that it can only be adhered to with some reservations.” Nicholas Campion, in The Great Year (New York: Arkana, 1995), p. 16, is especially critical of the work of Mircea Eliade, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon, 1954), for spreading the idea that the Hebrews were the sole inventors of the ‘linear idea of time’, in contradistinction to all others who adopted cyclical ideas.

[ii] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf, 1926), Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford, 1957), abridgement by D.C. Somervell. For a series of critiques of Toynbee’s theory, cf. Toynbee and History (Boston: Porter Sargeant, 1956), Ashley Montagu (ed.), Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), Marvin Perry, Arnold Toynbee and the Western Tradition (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler (New York: Scribner, 1952). Arthur Herman, in The Idea of Decline in Western Culture (New York: The Free Press, 1996) traces the idea of cultural pessimism, and its relation to theories of decline.