Books: One Long View

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THE WORLD AND THE WEST (99 pp.)—Arnold Toynbee — Oxford University Press ($2).

As if he were sitting, port and cigar at hand, in the common room of some distant planet populated by Oxford dons, Professor Arnold Toynbee looks down on the world and its worries with the Long View of history. Man, says Toynbee, with a Balliol-bred benignity of wit and grace of phrasing, is but a scurrying creature on a cosmic anthill who may be, but is not necessarily, doomed. It all depends on how the scurriers respond to challenge.

Toynbee's genial ability to work out patterns in history made the 1947 abridgment of the first six volumes of his monumental A Study of History a bestseller, and Toynbee's name tinkled among the Martini glasses of Brooklyn as well as of Bloomsbury. Now, Historian Toynbee gives his public a peek at what is yet to come in Volumes VII through X of his magnum opus, due for publication next year. The World and the West, a collection of six lectures delivered last year on the BBC, is always readable, if often disconcertingly brief in its arguments.

Who Invaded Whom? With all the assurance of a Renaissance pope issuing a bull, Toynbee first divides contemporary mankind into two blocs: on one hand, the World; on the other, the West. The West, like its principal challenger, Russia, is an "ex-Christian" civilization. But not only is the West without a faith; it is "the arch-aggressor of modern times." The World, and especially Russia, "invaded by Western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709 and 1610," has reason to mistrust the West. Toynbee avoids embarrassing this general thesis by any mention of the invasions of the West by the World, e.g., those of Islam and Genghis Khan.

Toynbee concedes that, since 1945, the West finds itself "suffering at the hands of the World what the World has been suffering at Western hands for a number of centuries past." Is Toynbee suggesting that the West is simply frying in a fire of its own building? It would seem so, for he argues even that Communist tyranny itself is a Western product: the tyranny is a historical one caused by the Russians' "resignation to an autocratic regime" capable of defending them from the West; Communism is a heresy of Christianity, a Western heresy adopted by Russia, along with Western technology, as a weapon of defense.