IN TOYNBEE’S JUDGMENT

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33093, 7 December 1972, Page 17

IN TOYNBEE’S JUDGMENT

(By

JAMES RESTON,

', of the "New York Times," through N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, December 5. The end of the year is a time for summing up and looking forward, and since Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, has been keeping book on the human race for most of his 83 years, it seems reasonable to look him up in St James’s Square for a personal judgment about where we all now stand.

The old gentleman is a little wispy now, all white hair and wonderful bushy eyebrows, and bright eager eyes, but while he talks ruefully about the human family, he thinks, like a loving but disappointed schoolmaster, that maybe the next generation or- two may have a chance.

In the last quarter of this century, of the first quarter in the next —he thinks in centuries and continents—he foresees, not another world war, but a great struggle among the advanced industrial nations for the limited natural resources of an overpopulated world. He sees progress toward co-operation among the nations, and toward control of human fertility, but thinks both must go much faster if the nations are to avoid disaster.

He is rather pleased with the recent trends in Germany and the Soviet Union. The Germans, he says, may have come to terms with history, and seem now to have got beyond the dreams of con-

quest, -and the course of revenge. The Russians have changed too, he thinks, not much but some. Ever since Peter the Great, they have vowed to catch up with the West, but somehow, they always bound forward and then either get tangled in their own contradictions and bureaucracy or “go to sleep,” and find themselves behind the West again. Now, Toynbee believes, these is at least a temporary change in Moscow. They seem to be considering the possibility that they have more to gain in the world of cemputers, trade and modem technology by co-operating with the advanced industrial nations than by opposing them in the world of ideology and politics. This will be a slow process, Toynbee thinks, for the Russians are suspicious and have good historical reasons

for being so, but they are concerned about the emergence of China in the East and the envious glances of Communist Eastern Europe at the prosperous West, so they are reaching out to Germany, Japan, and the United States for technological help and trade, and this, he thinks, is a good thing. When he talks about the living generations in the Western countries, Toynbee sounds not only doubtful but sad. He welcomes the movement toward European unity, with Britain a part of it. Nationalism is still a very strong force in the world, he says, and most of the people in the Western European countries don’t like this troubling and complicated movement toward federation. But, he observes, unification in Europe will go on. Even weak Federal experiments like the early American confederacy of separate states have a way of drawing power to the centre, and this, he thinks, will happen in Europe—maybe not as close and unified as in the United States or the Soviet Union, but in the end a strong centralised independent European federal union nonetheless.

Toynbee doesn’t like what he sees in the Western world today. There is, he thinks, an obvious decline in common honesty, an absence of common purpose. He has to lock his doors at night, and even check his bank statements for possible fraud. There is little pride in work.

The modem unions are as selfish as the old robber baron owners of the past. Material success and the

gross national product are now the aims of the peoples and Governments of the Western nations. As a person, Toynbee says he does not believe in orthodox religion, but as a historian, he thinks nations rise or fall in relation to the moral unity of the family and the moral purpose of the State, and he sees in the West a decline in both. In this regard, he is outspokenly disappointed in the United States. It was, he says, the new Jerusalem, the great centre of both power and idealism, but now, particularly since the war in Vietnam, it seems very much like the other imperial Powers, more interested in its power than in its ideals. Still, he says he has his consolation. Some of the young are rejecting the materialistic goal of life, and turning to simpler ways, and approaching the old and the sick with compassion. Some families, he observes, particularly the Jews, are holding together, and their strength, he predicts, will increase, but on the whole he seems pessimistic about the West, and hopes, not for a revival of orthodox faith, but for an ethical reformation that will come out of the spiritual needs of the contemporary Western world. He will not see this reformation, he says, but he believes in the regeneration of nations, if their leaders will appeal to the ideals of the people and not only to their pocketbooks. Meanwhile, he takes a long view, even of his own life. He is still working on a book on the decline of Byzantium, which he says he first planned in 1910.