Theory: Arnold Toynbee's Historical Model in Study of History
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this video I try to lay out a kind of outline of Arnold Toynbee's cyclical historical model and explain his conceptual vocabulary. In future videos I'll probably be drawing on this stuff quite a bit to explore current events.
0:00-7:52 Introduction
7:52-8:40 Genesis
8:40-16:06 Growth
16:06-21:57 Time of Troubles
21:57-26:34 Universal State
26:34-39:19 Symptoms of Spiritual Schism in Disintegration and Saviors
Man was this very helpful! Thanks super lot. Didn't know Tonybee was such a big deal back then; I'm studying theories regarding social change and civilizations, and I thought within the linearity of how ridiculous was Spengler's this might also be the case for Tonybee. But now I see I was quite mistaken dearly. A predicament any theorist should never be in.
Edit: Please do upload more videos. You just will never know how many people in the future might need this kind of information, and it will surely help them as this was for me too- a glad chance of encounter will it be.
Thanks man! It's really good to hear people find what I'm doing interesting or useful. I think Toynbee is a fascinating guy. And, yeah, he was like a superstar when he wrote this. I think the degree to which his work is today neglected is criminal. Macro/meta-history stuff in general has sort of fallen out of favor in the academy. It's interesting that he saw this coming, and tried to make a case against it. I think he's right. And that he's right about a lot of the dynamics of these historical forces. I actually like Spengler a lot too, but, yeah, I can understand why people might not. Toynbee is much more, like, empirical. And his concepts, frankly, I think are a lot more useful as categories for thinking about social and historical transformations. Thanks again for watching!
Very helpful. Much appreciated.
Hi. Firstly, thank you for making this video, the spiritual schisms section was really great and informative. However, I'm a little confused as to the universal state-universal church emergence. In this video, you said that Tonybee thought that Marxism was the universal church while you think that its "derivative" (for the lack of a better word), would be "wokeism". However, this seems more relevant to the social class distinction and conflict than with the emergence of a universal church.
The reason these certain ideologies initially use strong faith and belief is to ensure loyalty because in order for the elites to centralize enough power to hold onto their positions and form the universal state, they need a good mechanism for loyalty and these ideologies provide plenty of that (and they also need to believe it too for reasons ranging from justifying their position to overall meaning in life and explaining the world). This is more broadly a part of the class war, something Tonybee identified in declining civilizations and something you mentioned in the video and something I expand in this comment later:
"On the other hand, the horizontal schism of a society along lines of class is not only peculiar to civilizations, but it is also a phenomenon which first appears at the moment of breakdown, and which is a distinctive mark of the phases of breakdown and disintegration, by contrast with its absence during the phase of growth." (The Disintegration Of Civilizations - Chapter 27 The nature and symptoms of social disintegration)
Both Marxism and to an extent, "wokeism" fit into this, right? When you institutionalize something like say "solving racism", usually its initially a reaction to a genuine social problem. But as the original problem beings to be solved, you have all these people who's livelihoods depend on that problem existing, so they tend to get more radical in order to keep their positions in society, so this becomes an exaggeration and eventually almost a religious belief. Marxism is pure class identity, "wokeism" is other types of identity like gender or race. This seems like a closer explanation instead of a universal church.
Because AFAIK, the universal church is supposed to inherently contain spiritual elements within it and tends to be a product of the internal proletariat within the civilization. The dominant minority produces philosophies/ideologies which can give inspiration to universal states (e.g. Progressivism/"Wokeness") but internal proletariat produces the "higher religions" that then coalesce into universal churches (e.g. Jesus-> Early Christianity-> Church which can be dropped into any region and people can built and network there so its basically universal and makes universal claims) as the dominant minority no longer cares about providing or protecting the internal proletariat. This is what he says:
". . It appeared that dominant minorities produced philosophies which sometimes gave inspirations to universal states, that internal proletariats produced higher religions which sought to embody themselves in universal churches, and that external proletariats produced heroic ages which were the tragedies of barbarian war-bands." (VII, p. 1)
Both Marxism and "wokeness" and its derivative theories are products of the intellectual elites, and occasionally other types of elites. These types of beliefs came from aristocrats and academics and eventually, other elites like political ones and business coopt these to their own ends and try to promote them to the masses. I don't see how they're products of the internal proletariat when much of these theories and beliefs have been brought into public light by the elites themselves, not by your average farmer or something like that.
The universal states also seem to first unite on the cultural plane with an ideology like the aforementioned Progressivism/"Wokeness" but without a full political union. There can be infighting there (e.g. maybe when Germany and Hungary fight over LGBTQ+ stuff though the type of warfare Tonybee talks about is more serious and physical but this tends to happen after serious times of trouble, maybe if there are things like food shortages + energy shortage + whatever, serious times of trouble will appear that Tonybee alludes to and then we might see inter-state conflict in the Western Civilization. Mb not Germany-Hungary per se, but mb Germany-France as they try to go forcibly neo-colonial to get energy and other resources from their former colonies and they might go a little rough against each other or something like in Ancient Greece before Rome formed a universal state, who knows, this is just a possible scenario, maybe unlikely). Anyway, people in the universal state are basically just a quasi-formless mass of self-interested people that are kept together by an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy which only want to use each other, while at the same time avoiding any demands or duties and they're now ruled more by superstition of their fears and nonsensical beliefs create:
""..these societies starting as unities on the cultural plane, without being united on the political plane. This régime is favourable to social and cultural progress; but its price is chronic warfare between the local states; ..,after a long drawn out 'time of troubles', is belatedly retrieved by the establishment of a universal state." (Part I 'The Shape Of History': Chapter 7 Hellenic and Chinese models)
I think that the universal church may or may not form but its still too early because the universal state itself hasn't fully formed and we still haven't experienced a true big crisis in the West and the internal proletariat isn't being "oppressed" enough. So I don't see how Marxism/"wokeness" can be a universal church since it doesn't really match what Tonybee was saying before. Universal churches tend to be created by an internal proletariat. Also as far as I'm aware, the universal church if it emerges, will contain spiritual elements and "higher" religious type of stuff and will likely not come from the present dominant minority types but from the internal proletariat. I don't think its progressivism (though the universal church may borrow some elements from it) even though there is religious zeal behind it.
Taking this into account, can you explain why Tonybee or you think that Marxism/"wokeness" is a universal church given that it doesn't exactly contain higher spiritual elements, its promoted mostly by wealthier elite substrate of the population and was a creation of the intellectual elite, emerged at the time of relative prosperity in the society (but increasing wealth differences in class because of industrialization and globalization, but in this case, it would be the poor people who's jobs were outsourced and they tend to not be "woke" or embrace Marxism so that sorta conflicts with the universal state-church? Also, from Marxism to Queer Theory, intellectuals have been and still are a part of an elite and they were the ones who created these ideologies) and not times of troubles and emerged before an establishment of a universal state. None of this sounds like a description of what a universal church is like and is more similar to what Spengler called "ethical socialism" that started to take off in 1900s (a bit before) which is the final world sentiment of the Western civilization (and not say "second religiousness" which is more similar to the universal church and develops alongside Caesarism among the masses while universal church develops alongside universal state by the internal proletariat, though in Spengler's view, this doesn't have to be universalizing; Spengler in close to 1920 said that we are still many generations away from that point. EU is not really a "universal state", doesn't meet such criteria) and Puritanism. The final world sentiment always makes it out of the civilization as a legacy of a dying society. Those which have religious components can be turned into full religions of other societies and those societies can use it (e.g. Buddhism from the Indian civilization) to express their native beliefs in a type of syncretism as has been done in other parts of Asia hence why you have so many types of Buddhism that are so radically different they can hardly be considered a single belief. Those which are highly rationalistic like Stoicism and lack religious components don't really tend to be embraced much on the long term scale by other societies. "Wokeness"/Ethical Socialism seems more similar to this.
Please correct me if I got something wrong. Thanks.
Social Psychology
Erm Erich Fromm is my BOY
Can you tell plz who are the 6 person's of history, who were taken as the persons who went away from the orbit life circles ....
I've posted a comment here concerning a paranormal-appearing phenomenon that puts the patterns observed by Toynbee into a greater framework, a few hours ago. There has been a link in the text to a summary on that phenomenon by me, and I wonder if because of this, my comment may have been deleted by someone else than the maker of the video. Might it be possible to clarify this question? That framework phenomenon is of a great interest, and I could point out some features of it also without such a link.
Avanti, barbari!
Also more info on transfiguration or will Think Culture become the next Jesus for our phylogenesis
Oh man, yeah, it's a very tantalizing prospect. Its inclusion in this 'study of history' is extremely interesting to me, given that there is 0 history of it. It's more.. an eschatological concept? The prospect of a civilization which has transcended the field of history and is no longer subject to the vicissitudes of these psychosocial dynamics. It is, like, the return of Christ, right?
I for one think it is very clear that this return would look like Think Culture.