Toynbee's Theory of Challenge and Response

Throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th century some of the finest minds of the rapidly changing Western Civilization explored the question of what drives the evolution of civilization. The questions were quite simple. What causes a civilization to form? What is needed for its continued growth? And what, inevitably, leads to its decline and collapse?. The answers did not come as easily as the questions.

The list of explorers includes many who influenced the course of history during their time. The Russian Nilolai Danilevsky, a contemporary of Dostoievsky, who explored the idea that national ideas and animosities are culturally driven; Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher of the turn of the century; whose 'Decline of the West' introduced the idea of cultures as organisms subject to old age and death; another German, Walter Schubart, who expanded the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Spengler on the cyclic rhythm of sociocultural processes; the American philosopher F.S.C. Northrop and his concept of dominant cultural groups; the American anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and his comparison of growth rates of different dominant cultural groups around the world; and Albert Schweitzer, doctor, missionary, and philosopher, who made the ethical foundation of cultures part of the exploratory effort.

Each of these men, and many others not listed or forgotten, have brought their own vision of of how this creation of ours, civilization, functions. Each has added to an understanding of why civilizations take the, sometimes incomprehensible, courses history records. They wondered, as some of us still do, what happened to the great Egyptian empire, or that of the Romans, or the Persians, Minoans, Greeks, and the many others that flourished and ruled. Why are they not still major players in the history of mankind? What caused them to fall into a stasis, or disappear altogether?

Who cares? You should!

We tend to make two mistakes in this country of ours. One, we tend to think of ourselves as different. What happened to others won't happen to us. Yeah, right. What makes us so different. We're not even sure how we are different from those others. Think people!! The forces that drove the growth, and caused the eventual decline, of all the civilizations your teacher tried to get you to pay attention to in school are the same forces that are creating change and the future of the world we know.

Two, we think of what we have as stable and unchanging. The events of 9/11 are an excellent argument to the contrary. Since the World Trade Center fell we have willingly given away some of the most basic civil quarentees, liberties taken for granted by our parents, the same people who gave their lives to defeat one of the most formidable terrorist mankind has ever known. These changes were not forced upon us by some outside agency. We were the ones who demanded those changes, reluctantly perhaps, to ensure the safety of our great nation. (Whether or not you believe we have made a wise choice, perhaps you should read Change in America)

Our civilization is in a constant state of change. I'm not talking about new buildings or highways or the changing face of the landscape as urban sprawl creeps over out from our urban center. I'm am talking about what we believe. Civilization is not the things we build, or the things we destroy. It is more the things we choose to build, and the things we choose to destroy. Why have we chosen to do those particular things? What beliefs generated the need for those things, and destroyed the need for things we once believed we required? It is our beliefs that define us and all we create.

An example. Just one hundred years ago, a matter of four or five generations, people coming to this country were expected to become 'Americans'. They were expected to adopt American customs, the language, dress, and habits that differentiated those of the new world of liberty from the lands and ways those very people had fled. As in my family, the native language of the immigrants was spoken in the homes of the first generation, but forbidden in the homes of their children. They were to become American. The old ways were to be abandoned. Frequently by the time the third generation was able to speak they could not converse well with their grandparents. It was a belief that carved the face of the nation.

Today that belief has changed. We are all still Americans, but many have returned to the roots and rituals of their immigrant forebears. Multiculturalism is now the standard of the land. Some may argue that it is not a change for the better. Another View of Multiculturalism. Arguments for or against aside, there can be no doubt that society is an animal that is constantly changing its spots. It remakes itself each time a decision is made, a pronouncement is uttered, a law is passed. The changes may be small, or they may be significant. Each creates a new us.

Toynbee, at last!

In the first half of the 20th century the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee ( ) created a masterpiece in twelve volumes titled 'A Study of History'. Toynbee examined the history of a number of ancient civilizations in an attempt to discover what had caused them to form in the first place, what had kept them healthy, and what had led to their demise. His search required decades of study, sifting mountains of information. And in the end the theory he created went far beyond any suggested by his contemporaries.

There are quite a number of intracacies involved in his work. The parts played by technology, the laws of nature, contact between different civilizations, and religion, just to name a few, in the evolution of culture are profound. Despite the mass of history researched, the complexities of a thing such as human nature, and the size of Toynbee's finished product his theory can be boiled down to a very simple concept, that of challenge and response.

Toynbee believed that all civilizations, or dominant cultures, are created when a group of loosely affliated people are presented with a challenge. That challenge may come in many different forms. It may be an environmental threat that requires the members to band together to create a system of irrigation or forces migration into lands already occupied or lands unexplored. It might come in the form of a population shift, an invasion by another group. Whatever the challenge, the group of people needs to see a threat, or an opportunity, some stimulus, to drive them to band together.

The creation of civilization depends on whether the people can successfully meet the challenge. There are far more ways to be successful than there are challenges. The response may set the new culture on a long road of wealth and health, or it may be only a partial success, giving them enough breathing room to find another more appropriate solution. Whatever the challenge, with an appropriate and successful response comes the chance of civilizaition. But only the chance.

Once a new civilizaion has successful birthed itself things change slightly. Initial failure might well have meant the immediate destruction or scattering of the respondents. Time to solifiy a position and grow creates a thing that cannot die as easily. That's not to say that it cannot die. Continued life requires constant effort. No civilizaiton on the face of this planet has ever lived for any length of time of the basis of one successful response to one challenge. To grow and flourish requires meeting new challenges. And meeting each successfully. Again, they may be challenges forces upon it by nature or other groups. Or they may be challenges that the people set for themselves either intentionally or through some error. It is even possible to see some imagined challenge, one that is not real, and respond in a way that gives new vigor to the cutural group.

An example that I will refer to later is that of the space race of the 1960's and 70's. America imagined that the Soviet Union was a threat to establish itself in space and, particularly, on the moon before we did. We entered into a race to put a man on the moon when in reality there were no other contestants. The Soviets never had a space program capable of competing with ours. Yet the nation as a whole responded well. People believed in it, elected officials listened to the belief of the people and funded it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people worked thousands of unpaid hours of overtime to see the thing done. It was a time of great excitement, a passion that ran through the people of this nation, and the planet.

The benefits we derived from this challenge created and drove a new economy for the better part of two decades. Knowledge is wealth Computer technology and miniturization, materials testing, research and development in dozens of different fields created a potential, and a new found wealth, that changed the face of Western Civilization and the planet as a whole. And it was all the result of an imagined challenge.

That we choose to go to space for the reasons we did brings us to the topic of what happens when we fail to respond successfully. We believed that we had to get there first, to beat the Soviets. There was no talk of going for the purpose of simple exploration of a limitless frontier, to exploit the vast riches that await us, or even to get all of our genetic eggs out of one basket in case this fragile little world gets ruined by a wandering piece of space debris. We went for political reasons. It may be that those in power did not believe the Soviets posed a threat. Perhaps our race to the moon was nothing more than a small part in an orchestrated attempt to bring about the eventual collapse of communism. Whatever the stated reason we reached our goal, and our efforts in space ground to a virtual standstill. We enjoyed the benefits of the effort, but the real reasons for going still exist and have never been address with anything approaching the enthusiasm of the 60's and 70's. And the need to establish ourselves permanently in space, to ensure the continued existence of mankind, goes unanswered.

How does this relate to a failure to respond correctly? We went to space in response to a short-term challenge, and succeeded wonderfully. However, getting there taught us things we hadn't expected to learn, that there are thousands of Earth orbit crossing bodies capable of rendering our planet uninhabitable. At the time we were ignorant of the situation, we can't be blamed for what we could not have known. Now we know. It's only the long odds and luck that have saved us so far. Sooner or later both of those are going to fail us. We have a challenge before us, and we are failing to meet it. Yes, we have a large stake in the international space station. It could eventually give the race of Mankind the margin of safety we need. The ISS is only a small part of one of the possible solutions, it is poorly funded though, and its progress can only be compared with that of glaciers.

What challenges face us?

There are any number of challenges that face Western Civilization. The number is probably as large as the number of people you care to ask. We live in an experiment that is still in progess. There has never been a technological society such as ours before. We are the product of a line of research and exploration that began with the Greeks more than two thousand years ago. Some may say that the Roman empire was a technological society of a kind. In a way that is true. They used the knowledge that came to them to build roads, machines, and a cultural framework the world had never seen before. I have one objection and one observation in answer. The Roman Empire was large, it expanded the rule of Roman law and knowledge across much of Africa, the Middle East and most of Europe, but they were not a global society as we are becoming. There were others who knew little or nothing of the great Roman Empire. And my observation is one that everyone knows. The Roman civilization collapsed. That collapse resulted in nearly 700 years of chaos for Europe. There were, however, others who could step into the void. Christianity used the infrastructure of the Romans and spread its belief system through the same lands where the beliefs of the Romans had once created history. The Arab world, with its excellent universities, held the knowledge of the Greeks while Europe blundered around in darkness. They did not do as well as Christianity in making physical inroads into the void left by the Romans because, I believe, the need to expand, the belief that they should do so, did not yet exist. The Roman Empire had been dead two hundred years before the birth of Mohammad and the spread of Islam.

The Chinese, who had had a civilization for hundreds of years before the Roman civilizaiton began, probably knew little of the Romans and cared even less about their passing. The cultures of the Western Hemisphere knew nothing of the happenings in Europe and were not affected at all. It wasn't until the Renaissance and the age of exploration it created that the great civilization in Central and North America took notice of the goings on of the European reborn. Then they cared greatly, and it did them little good.

Politics and, more importantly, multinational corporations are spreading the gospel of Western technological culture across the face of the entire planet. When we look at the challenges that expansion presents we must look at the benefits as well as the shortcomings. Improved health care and a reduction in infant mortality represents as large a threat to humanity as do pollution and the reduction of biodiversity. The populations of many areas of the African continent are exceeding the carrying capacity of the regions they inhabit. The globalization of technology brings the planet together, but it also makes all parts of humanity subject to the same threats. Diseases can travel around the globe in less that a day. Reliance on computers to govern the financial infrastructure leaves us all subject to the same threats. Industrialization brings with it its own set of beliefs and ways of looking at things. Cultural diversity threatens to go the same way as biodiverstiy.

How then do we decide which of these threats to address? How do we decide which of the threats deserve our immediate attention? Do we dedicate our lives to the individual threats that cross our paths? Do we wage war on those who deplete the rain forests, foul the water of our rivers and coasts, threaten our local welfare in their efforts toward globalization of trade, manufacturing, and finance? The answer is yes, we must. The large scale solution will be defined by the compromises we strike in each of the conflicts we fight. Each of these battles though will not bring about the global shift in thinking required. What shift, you ask? How do we decide what form it will take? How do we know what we want to become?

First we must decide what our goal is. If our intention is to enjoy ourselves at the expense of future generations, perhaps at the expense of the very continuation of the race, then there are not a large number of large challenges we must face. Financing our next recreational vehicle and the like just about covers it. Later we may have to worry where our next meal is coming from but we're into the here and now. We worry about tomorrow when it comes. For the time being all we must do, in our capacity as world leader, is decide who gets to share the good times with us, and then take, by force if need be, everything we require for our happiness.

I am not suggesting that most Americans are so short sighted. I believe a national referendum would give most politicians something to think about. People are interested in their own day to day welfare but I believe a good number of them can see beyond their own needs to those of future generations. Given the opportunity many would voice their discontents with the steady erosions of our liberties and the quality of our lives. Many, I think, would be willing to make substantial sacrifices to improve the quality of the American experience, return to the feeling of community we have enjoyed in the past, and to a degree assuage the growing feeling of guilt that has developed with our newly born realization that this is really quite a small planet.

Some do not care. There's no denying it. In the last decades of the 20th century we engaged in many activities that threatened the very existence of the future of the race. Many seemingly intelligent people have been the worst culprits. I would suggest the attribute is only cleverness masquarading as something more noble. That society allows such a deception does not speak well of the thing we have created. It is not a novel idea. We have allowed the same thing in nearly every national election I've been allowed to vote in. We listen to the promises, and applaud them, while saying to those who stand next to us 'Fat chance!'. The belief that politician lie to get elected is almost a national standard. We make jokes about it, bemoan the fact, and live with it.

Yet despite greed, contribution and lobbyist driven politics, and power and profit driven multinational corporations, we have made amends. Many of the mistakes we made were no more sinister in intent than our failure to maintain our presence in space. In many cases there was no intent. Ignorance was the only motivation.. No one had ever done the things we were doing. No one knew that the waste from an industrial plant poured into a river could destroy a whole ecosystem. No one knew that leaded gas could create dangerous environments hundreds of feet wide and thousands of miles long along major highways across the nation. We simply didn't know.

What angered millions and in many ways frustrated a nation was the reluctance to admit and address those problems, and then fail to assign accountability among the ignorant. Each problem required millions of dollars to deal with, and then millions more to develop and implement new ways of doing things. One of our greatest failures was not recognizing that mistakes are inevitable in any experiment. We never made an provision for correcting those mistakes. The price of correcting them was never figured into the price of doing business. Unfortunately there are still many more problems we have created and not yet addressed. The cost for what remains, and those new problems ignorance will create, will not be measured in millions of dollars, or even billions.

Our most fundamental goal is the continuation of the race. 'Duh!' Obvious, you say. Yes, I agree. And yet it is not a common, active thought among us. We take it for granted but it is not often a consideration in our planning for the future, or in our everyday activities. We as a nation have managed well to date through crisis management, letting the problem sneek up on us and then slaying the dragon with ingenuity and the thing that drives ingenuity in a technological society, money. The belief we share, the thing that lies behind money and ingenuity, that we should maintain a world of peaceful places and the magic that inhabits them exists. Without that belief the world would be a much different place even after so short a time experimenting with technology. One way we will come to an understanding of the way we wish to go will be to understand our need for such things. (To begin to understand the matter you should read the works of Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist. He did much to increase our understanding of what we and others cultures find in the world of myth and nature.)

Many of the dragons born in the last century are not yet dead, and more are hatching everyday. I do not doubt we have the ingenuity to develop successful responses to the challenges we have created for ourselves. What I question is whether we have the other resources, and the margin of error we have enjoyed to date. We have set a challenge for ourselves in attempting to export the American standard of technology to the rest of the planet. That in itself will create other challenges we never intended, and will have little love for. See Thoughts on the Carrying Capacity of the Planet.

Other Challenges

If we are to take as given that our intent is to bring the American standard of living to the rest of planet, and that we will be able to successfully meet the challenges inherent in such an undertaking, we must give some thought to the myriad of other challlenges and opportunities that will be presented to us. Some we can see, others will come to us and can only be imagined.