I first came across Toynbee’s work during my first year at college. I was reading Asimov’s “Foundation” at the time and I remember comparing Toynbee with Hari Seldon, the father of psycho-history in Asimov’s trilogy.
Re-reading Toynbee’s work twenty-five years on, I can see why I was tempted to make the comparison. His terminology, and the way he presents his arguments; at times it reads like bad Sci-Fi.
Here he enumerates the “laws” governing the social radiation of culture:
The first law is that an integral culture ray, like an integral light ray, is diffracted into a spectrum of its component elements in the course of penetrating a recalcitrant object.See what I mean?
The second law is that the diffraction may also occur, without any impact on an alien body social, if the radiating society has already broken down and gone into disintegration.
Our third law is that the velocity and penetrative power of an integral culture ray are averages of the diverse velocities and penetrative powers which its economic, political and ‘cultural’ components display when, as a result of diffraction, they travel independently of each other.
Juvenile criticisms aside, working my way through Toynbee reminds me of the extent to which Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” was a simplification, rather than a distillation, of previous work.
Reading Toynbee is much more rewarding. His view of cultural radiation can be employed to explain the development of militant Islam’s conception of the US as The Great Satan (I’m surprised I haven’t seen a paper on it). And his concept of a military ‘limes’, where border states do business with trans-frontier barbarians, seems strangely applicable to present day Europe.
If I’m not posting, it’s because I’m reading.
