T── on Technology

Someone on a ##forth channel wondered why Tolkien was so down on technology; an easy answer is that factory production had gotten a little out of hand, given the something like a billion shells burnt in the "Materialschlachte" or Great War. But Tolkien is not the author that concerns this post.

Arnold Toynbee likewise was deeply affected by the Great War and concluded that the West was suffering from a spiritual crisis.

The quotes and indeed much of this material is cribbed from "Arnold Toynbee and the Crisis of the West" by Marvin Perry (1982). This copy was discarded by the Karachi-American School Library. Nobody had checked it out.

> ... from youth Toynbee was steeped in the outlook and values of Hellenism and Christianity the two traditions that are the foundation of Western Civilization. Toynbee would seek a creative synthesis between the rationalism of Athens and the revelation of Jerusalem.

Toynbee looked for larger meanings and not mere fact finding; this left him open to attacks from specialists with their minutiae, even while he preached that "mankind must become one family, he said, or it will destroy itself." Toynbee rejected determinism; this sets him apart from Spengler, even though he approved of Spengler's inquiries into the whole, and the comparative approach across civilizations.

Toynbee stresses man over matter; if the creative elite cannot lead the way out of crisis--"resting on one's oars"--society will degenerate into an out-of-touch minority, a mass of proles who hold not a very positive view of the prior lot, and barbarians on the border.

On religion:

> We should "relegate economic and political history to a subordinate place and give religious history primacy. For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race."

Toynbee was however quite agnostic: "he rejected doctrines that lacked credibility. For example, he could not adhere to some essential Christian dogmas -- the Virgin Borth, the Resurrection, the Ascension -- for they are irreconcilable with what science tells us about the uniformity of nature."

Toynbee's history was, like that of Western rationalism and religion, or Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian, a hybrid of myth and fact-finding; critics "insisted that facts were forced to fit an arbitrary and rigid a priori framework". This perhaps reflects his use of intuition in addition to reason.

From the Greeks comes their rationality and thus worship of man (or the creations thereof: the city-state, the chatgpt). Toynbee feels that modern man makes this same mistake. From Christianity, "an ideal of human brotherhood that could overcome cultural differences", and that "the breakdown of a civilization is no cataclysm ... if it [gives] birth of a church".

> The history of Hellenism teaches what modern Westerners have forgotten or dismissed -- a secular and rational outlook cannot hold society together or restrain man's basest impulses. Unless he is guided by prophetic values, man will deify his state or his leaders, and act that unleashes the worst elements of human nature

Toynbee did not however reject reason; he "struggled to harmonize the spiritual values of higher religions with the requirements of the modern age."

The modern age rejects the notion that man is intrinsically evil; "the philosophes held that man was basically good and that evil resulted from faulty leadership, poor education, and bad leadership." Toynbee regarded this as a "vain repetition of Hellenism" and "admired the Middle Ages because it held the promise of a Christendom united by spiritual ideals."

> The tragedy began with Hildebrand, who, in seeking to rescue the Church from sexual and financial corruption, was drawn into the arena of power politics in which force was utilized for spiritual ends. This was a dangerous game. Intoxicated by the successful use of force, said Toynbee, the papacy carried it to extremes causing its own spiritual degeneration. The conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor eventually caused the papacy to lose its moral leadership and the devotion hitherto granted to a universal Church was transferred to emerging secular states with disastrous consequences for the future of the West.

The revival of the city-state in turn created nationalism; "Machiavelli gave intellectual expression and moral approval to this new outlook", and 17th century thinkers were repelled by the Wars of Religion between Catholic and Protestant sects.

> The Christian churches that had blundered morally during the Wars of Religion also discredited themselves intellectually by stubbornly retaining a Ptolemaic and Aristotelian science as if this natural philosophy was truly vital to Christian revelation.

This turned the ideal man from a Medieval saint to the technician: "as technology moved from triumph to triumph it came to be admired as a magic key that would unlock the door to an earthly paradise." However, "the crimes and failures of the modern West compel us to be less complacent and enthusiastic about secularism."

Toynbee felt that "divorced from Christianity, liberalism degenerates into selfish competitiveness". He however valued the liberal tradition: "protection of individual rights, the rule of law, constitutional government, toleration, and social justice". Communism was seen as a greater threat; "Marxism began as a Western Christian heresy that attacked a professedly Christian society for not adhering to the ideals of social justice proclaimed by early Christianity."

> Marxism supplied the proletariat of the 19th century with the same weapon that Calvinism supplied the bourgeoisie of the 16th century. The doctrine of historical materialism gave the proletariat confidence that they were favored by the forces of the universe in the same manner that the doctrine of predestination gave assurance to the Calvinist bourgeoisie that they were the Elect.

Fanaticism was another unfortunate aspect that Marxism picked up on from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the urgent demand to spread the good word. The Bolsheviks had this and a tradition of dealing ruthlessly with those who strayed from orthodoxy. Some of that was historical Russian practice, but some of it did come from the Church. However, Marxism went too much in for the material plane and thus lacking the spiritual is flawed.

Toynbee really did not like nationalism, but "though the spiritual message of higher religions is infinitely superior to that nationalist vision, higher religions have not been able to break nationalism's power or appeal."

(The book goes on, but the above is perhaps a good starting summary of the text and some of Toynbee's beliefs.)

Endnotes

Oddly enough, another Toynbee gave a scathing review of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, "and today those books have passed into a merciful oblivion", Philip Toynbee, 1961.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anecdotes-from-the-archive/war-of-the-manufacturing-machines-1916/

tags #politics #history #lotr #book