Books: Tourist with a Long View

BETWEEN MAULE AND AMAZON by Arnold J. Toynbee. 154 pages. Oxford University Press. $5.

Arnold Toynbee showed in his ten-volume Study of History that he could juggle the lives of civilization as confidently as lesser chroniclers dwell on the vagaries of municipal elections. Although his 1961 Reconsiderations amounted to an admission of error in some of the principles that sustained his Study, the work did not topple. Now, at 78, Toynbee is ready to cope with various mundane matters. He has taken note of the hippies ("A red warning light for the American way of life") and clashed head-on with advertising ("The destiny of our Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for more than it turns on the issue of our struggle with Communism").

In Between Maule and Amazon, Toynbee writes briefly about his most recent travels in Latin America and saves for his last page a firm course of treatment for that troubled continent: "My first step would be to dump all the statues of San Martin in the Atlantic, all the statues of O'Higgins in the Pacific, and all the statues of Bolivar in the Caribbean, and I would forbid their replacement, under pain of death."

Given the Latin American temperament, it is unlikely that this unsmiling advice will be taken. It even raises the possibility that only in Brazil would Toynbee's safety be assured, for he found Brazilian nationalism "ironic and lighthearted." But his point, though indelicately made, is clear enough. To a passionate one-worlder, the sight of nationalism in action is dreary at best. And as a champion of religion, Toynbee would replace the statues of the national liberators with "replicas of theChrist of the Andes and pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe."

One might object that the simple label of nationalist does not characterize Bolivar, whose efforts to create a community of independent countries preceded by more than a century the formation of today's Organization of American States. Toynbee himself hedges on his theory. Suppose, he suggests, peaceful "integration" of all Latin American countries were to come about. Would it be followed "by a more vicious regional super-nationalism?" For Toynbee, who takes the practiced historian's long view, Latin America may not reach a state of political grace in any event: "The sequel to the 19th century unification of Germany is a bad augury."

Useful Guide. Toynbee has a very human eye for detail—but with a scholarly difference. Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, pleases him because it has escaped the "geometer"—the builder who lays out cities as grids. But it also reminds him that "chessboard Babylon was so depressing for Nebuchadnezzar's highland wife that he had to build her an artificial knobbly mountain—the famous 'Hanging Gardens.' " Noting that Brasilia's TV tower dominates the city while the main body of the cathedral is subterranean, Toynbee observes that "technology is the dominant element in present-day life; religion is retreating to the catacombs again."