Exporting the Husk without the Grain. The Great Failure of the Western Civilization

Worlds of wisdom from Arnold Toynbee's "Civilizations on Trial" (1948)

The Italian translation of “Civilizations on Trial” that I read when I was maybe 16 years old. Note the paper marks of the points that I found especially interesting. I can still remember some passages almost verbatim.

The recent events made me return to something I read in my youth, “Civilizations on Trial,” by Arnold Toynbee (1948). Simon Sheridan rediscovered him almost at the same time. More than seventy years ago, Toynbee understood the destiny of the great Western expansion of the past few centuries, which he correctly called “a flare of cotton-waste.” I think it is worth re-reading what he was saying, as it is especially relevant to our situation.

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From “Civilizations on Trial” by Arnold Toynbee (1948) — Chapter 5, “The Unification of the world”

For some two hundred years, dating from the beginning of the Vasco de Gama era, our world-storming Western forefathers made a valiant attempt to propagate abroad the whole of our Western cultural heritage, including its religious core as well as its technological ring; and in this they were surely well- inspired; for every culture is a ‘whole’ whose parts are subtly interdependent, and to export the husk without the grain may be as deadly as to radiate the satellite electrons of an atom without the nucleus.

However, about the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our Western Christian era, something happened which, I venture to prophesy, is going to loom out in retrospect as one of the epoch-making events of our modern Western history when this local history is seen in its true light as an incident in the general history of mankind. This portent was a double event, in which the Jesuits’ failure was accentuated by the Royal Society’s simultaneous success. The Jesuits failed to convert the Hindus and Chinese to the Roman Catholic form of Western Christianity. They failed, though they had discovered the psychological ‘know-how,’ because, when it came to the point, neither the Pope nor the Son of Heaven nor the Brahmans would have it. In the same generation, these tragically frustrated Jesuit missionaries’ fellow- Western Catholics and Protestants at home came to the hazardous conclusion that a religion in whose now divided and contentious name they had been fighting an inconclusive fratricidal hundred years’ war was an inopportune element in their cultural heritage. Why not tacitly agree to cut out the wars of religion by cutting out religion itself and concentrate on the application of physical science to practical affairs—a pursuit which aroused no controversy and which promised to be lucrative?

This seventeenth-century turning in the road of Western progress was big with consequences; for the Western civilization that has since run like wildfire round the world has not been the whole of the seamless web; it has been a flare of cotton-waste: a technological selvage with the religious centrepiece torn out. This ‘utility’ pattern of Western civilization was, of course, comparatively easy to take; Peter the Great revealed his genius by instantly pouncing on it as soon as it was displayed in the West’s shop window. A hundred years later, the subtler and more spiritual Al-Gabarti showed a nicer discrimination. French technology hit him in the eye, but he persisted in waiting for a sign. For him, the touchstone of Western civilization, as of his own, was not technology but justice. This Cairene scholar had apprehended the heart of the matter, the issue which the West has still to fight out within itself. ‘And though I . . . understand all mysteries and all knowledge . . . and have not charity, I am nothing’10—‘Or what man is there of you whom, if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or, if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?’11

This brings us back to a question, raised by a sentence of Al Gabarti’s, which is still awaiting our answer. Which really was the most important event of A.H. 1213? Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt or the intermission of the annual pilgrimage from Egypt to the Holy Cities in the Hijaz? The Islamic institution of the pilgrimage is of course, in itself, nothing more than an exacting external observance, but, as a symbol, it stands for the fraternal spirit that binds all Muslims together. Islam is therefore in danger when the pilgrimage falls off, as we have learnt by experience in our own lifetime; and Al-Gabarti was sensitive to this danger because he valued the spiritual treasure with which his ancestral religion was freighted. What value are we to place on Islam ourselves? In a chapter of world history in which the mastery of the world seems likely to lie in the hands of the conspicuously infra-pigmented and notoriously race-conscious transmarine English-speaking peoples, can mankind afford to do without the social cement of Islamic fraternity?

Yet this social service, valuable and noble though it be, is not the essence of Islam—as Al- Gabarti would have been quick to point out to us, though he happened, himself, to be a living embodiment of this particular virtue of his Faith. As his surname records, Al- Gabarti was hereditary master of one of those ‘nations’ that were the constituents of the University of Al-Azhar, as they were of its contemporary, the Sorbonne. And who were his nation of the Gabart? They were the Trans- Abyssinian Gallas and Somalis: true-believing ebony- coloured children of Ham. You will perceive that our hero’s surname and personal name were felicitously matched: surname Al-Gabarti ‘the Ethiop’; personal name ‘Abd-ar~Rahman ‘the Servant of the God of Mercy.’ Yet this worshipper of a compassionate God would have testified that, if the pilgrimage is merely the symbol of a fraternity transcending differences of colour and class, this unity between true believers is, in turn, merely a translation into action here on Earth of their true belief in the unity of God.

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Now what must we Westerners do if we aspire, like Cleanthes, to follow the beck of Zeus and Fate by using our intelligence and exercising our free will, instead of constraining those dread deities to bring us into line by the humiliating method of compulsion? First, I would suggest, we must readjust our own historical outlook on the lines on which the educated representatives of our sister-societies have been readjusting theirs during these last few generations. Our non-Western contemporaries have grasped the fact that, in consequence of the recent unification of the world, our past history has become a vital part of theirs. (Reciprocally, we mentally still- slumbering Westerners have now to realize, on our part, that, in virtue of the same revolution—a revolution, after all, that has been brought about by ourselves—our neighbours’ past is going to become a vital part of our own Western future. ) In rousing ourselves to make this effort of imagination we do not have to start quite from the beginning. We have always realized and acknowledged our debt to Israel, Greece, and Rome. But these, of course, are extinct civilizations, and we have managed to pay our homage to them without budging from our traditional self-centred standpoint because we have taken it for granted—in the blindness of our egotism—that our noble selves are those ‘dead’ civilizations’ raison d’etre. We imagined them living and dying for the sake of preparing the way for us—playing John the Baptist to our own role as the Christ I apologize for the blasphemy of this comparison, but it does bring out sharply how outrageously distorted our outlook has been.

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It will be harder for us to accept the not less plain fact that the past histories of our vociferous, and sometimes vituperative, living contemporaries—the Chinese and the Japanese, the Hindus and the Muslims, and our elder brothers the Orthodox Christians—arc going to become a part of our Western past history in a future world which will be neither Western nor non-Western bur will inherit all the cultures which we Westerners have now brewed together in a single crucible. Yet this is the manifest truth, when we face it. Our own descendants arc not going to be just Western, like ourselves. They arc going to be heirs of Confucius and Lao-Tse as well as Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus; heirs of Gautama Buddha as well as Dcutcro- Isaiah and Jesus Christ; heirs of Zarathustra and Muhammad as well as Elijah and Elisha and Peter and Paul; heirs of Shankara and Ramanuja as well as Clement and Origen; heirs of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Orthodox Church as well as our African Augustine and our Umbrian Benedict; heirs of Ibn Khaldun as well as Bossuet; and heirs (if still wallowing in the Serbonian Bog of politics) of Lenin and Gandhi and Sun Yatsen as well as Cromwell and George Washington and Mazzini.