Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) was not only a successor of O. Spengler's ideas, but also to a large extent developed further the concept of the cyclical movement of history, backing it up with even more historical material, exploring even more countries, peoples, civilizations - both ancient and modern … In his huge 12-volume work "Comprehension of History" he described 37 civilizations.
Each civilization begins with a response to a challenge - first the natural, and then the human environment. Toynbee considered the origins of Egyptian civilization to illustrate this point. Many thousands of years ago, strong warming in North Africa, in the Afrasian savannah, led to dry land, the Sahara Desert appeared. The communities of hunters and gatherers of the Afrasian savannah, without changing in response to the challenge either their location or their way of life, paid the price of complete extinction.
But some communities have responded to the challenge of the drought by changing their homelands and lifestyles. They, inspired by courage or despair, stepped into the perilous swamps around the Nile and turned them into fertile lands. Perhaps, Toynbee wrote, their neighbors watched this venture with little hope of success, because the savannah had not yet completely turned into a desert, and the Nile swamps seemed impregnable and impassable wilderness. But the success surpassed the most optimistic hopes of the pioneers. The obstinacy of nature is conquered by human labor. The marshes were drained, dammed and turned into fields.
This could be seen in Ancient Greece. Earlier, the ancient Greeks who lived in Attica were engaged in cattle breeding. But when the pastures of Attica dried up and the cultivated lands were depleted, the people switched from animal husbandry and agriculture to the cultivation of olive plantations. Oliva is able not only to survive on a bare stone, but also to bear fruit abundantly. However, you cannot live with oil alone, and the Athenians began to exchange it for Scythian grain. Oil was poured into earthen jars and transported by sea, and this stimulated pottery production and developed the art of sailing. Silver mines also began to be exploited, because trade required money. Thus, the Athenians increased their wealth a hundredfold.
From the painting of jugs, Greek painting began, and when there were almost no trees left, Greek sculptors began to work in stone. As a result, amazing sculptures and the Parthenon were born.
Toynbee gave examples of people's inability to respond to a challenge. This is the fate of the Mayan civilization. Unlike the dams and drainages of Egypt, which are still maintained in working order, the material fruits of the tireless labors of the ancient Maya were almost gone. The only surviving monuments of a bygone civilization, Toynbee wrote, are the ruins of the once grandiose buildings. Now they are hiding in the depths of the rainforest. The forest swallowed them up almost literally, like a boa constrictor. The contrast between the level of modern Mexico - a rather poor country - and the level of the ancient Maya civilization is so great that it defies human imagination. These masterpieces - huge pyramids, huge monuments - were once evidence of the victory of man over nature. But even from the height of their palaces and pyramids, people could not see the enemy sneaking up. Man could not prevent the return of the forest, which cold-bloodedly swallowed up cultivated fields, squares and houses, and then reached palaces and temples.
Often the challenge comes from the community. So, the Persian king Xerxes attacked Athens in 480-479. The Persians captured all of Attica, including Athens, and even the holy of holies - the temple of Athena on the top of the mountain. The entire population of Attica, abandoning their homes, rushed in search of salvation to the Peloponnese. In this situation, the Athenian fleet began and won the Battle of Salamine. The war caused a powerful upsurge in the spirit of the Athenian people, it was the beginning of the highest achievements, perhaps never repeated in the history of mankind.
Similar phenomena have taken place in the history of Russia. In the XVI century. Poland and Sweden delivered powerful blows to Russia. The Poles occupied Smolensk in 1582, and from 1610 to 1612 they held Moscow. Under the treaty of 1617, Russia was deprived of access to the Baltic Sea. All this, according to Toynbee, deeply traumatized the Russians, and the internal shock pushed them to practical action, which was expressed in the new aggressive policy of Peter I, his modernization of the country, and led to new conquests.
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Often times, an unanswered call is repeated over and over again. The inability of this or that society, due to the loss of creative principles, to respond to the challenge deprives it of its vitality, leads to its death.
Our modern civilization, or it would be more correct to say all modern mankind, is facing a challenge: nature is dying, the forces of aggression and violence are growing. Toynbee believed that there was still hope that humanity would be able to find a worthy response to this challenge.
Each civilization passes in its development, according to Toynbee, five stages - birth, growth, breakdown, decay and death.
Eskimos, nomads, Toynbee refers to frozen civilizations. They adapted to the external environment as much as possible, and they no longer had an incentive to develop further. The same thing happened with Sparta. Unlike the Athenians, who took up olives and trade, the Spartans decided to seize foreign lands. They seized fertile areas in Messinia, and the people who lived there, the same Greeks, rose to revolt several times, which gradually led to the breakdown of Sparta. She stopped developing and began to slowly harden, ossify.
Of course, the most striking example of the growth of civilization is the Western European civilization. For the first time in its history, mankind is faced with a situation where one society has extended its influence over almost the entire inhabited surface of the earth. The uncontrollably developing Western civilization, not knowing the limits of aspirations, began to knock on all doors, break open all barriers and break into the most closed fortresses.
The main engine of the rapid growth of civilization is an active creative minority. It is this that breathes new life into the social system, since in every civilization, Toynbee believed, even during the periods of its most lively growth, huge masses of people never come out of a state of stagnation and hibernation, and the overwhelming majority of people of any civilization are no different from a primitive man society. The active minority is yeast in the common pot of humanity. The problem is how the active minority should rouse the rest of the masses, wake them up. This, as a rule, is accomplished through the functioning of the mimesis mechanism - imitation. In a primitive society, mimesis was focused on the older generation, on the images of ancestors, and in modern, growing societies, a creative personality, a leader who blazes a new path, becomes the standard. Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Charlemagne, Peter I, Napoleon were the leaders who sparked powerful social movements. Their energy infected the masses and gave impetus to grandiose transformations in the history of this or that country.
In history, everything passes - glory, wealth, and fame. Athens after the collapse of the Persian empire, after colossal successes in the development of the economy, after a take-off in philosophy, art, politics, gradually began to decline. They failed in the IV century. resist the Macedonian military force, did not intervene, watching as Rome ruined their neighbors, and, of course, could not withstand the fight against Rome itself, since all of Athens' allies were destroyed. In 86, the Roman general Sulla took Athens by storm, and although he spared the city, it was the shameful finale of Athenian political history.
At the end of the XII century. The Mamluks, Toynbee noted, as the Romans once did, were considered invincible in the Levant. But like the Romans, they chose to rest on their laurels, oblivious to signs of growing vulnerability. In 1789, an old enemy armed with new technology - Napoleon's French Expeditionary Force, a descendant of the unfortunate Frankish knights - inflicted a crushing defeat on them. Remaining in captivity of old military traditions, the Mamluks have long ceased to develop tactics and military equipment and met with the West, which had well-trained infantry with firearms. This led to a serious breakdown in the rule of the Mamluk beys in Egypt.
Decay begins, according to Toynbee, with the decay of the creative minority. In a growing society, the creative minority is constantly changing both in composition and in convictions. The ruling minority of a disintegrating society, on the contrary, becomes a closed group, whose ideas and ideals become "eternal", ossified laws. The challenge faced by a disintegrating society as a result of the inertia of the ruling minority now remains unanswered. Rather, it refuses to answer the challenge and does not even notice or tries not to notice the challenge.
Decaying societies, according to Toynbee, inevitably formed the so-called internal proletariat. For Toynbee, this concept means what I call marginal groups. The proletarian, Toynbee believed, is more a state of mind than a place in society. The true signs of a proletarian are not poverty or low birth, but a constant feeling of dissatisfaction caused by the fact that he does not have a firm place in society, that no one needs him and no one is going to take care of him. The proletariat also includes refugees from former colonies, ruined free peasants, artisans, aristocrats, and slaves. In a crumbling society, the inner proletariat enters the scene, revolts, destroys everything that can be crushed. A vivid example of this is the uprising of the Thracian gladiator Spartacus, who from 73 to 71 BC.kept the entire Italic peninsula in suspense. The internal proletariat (in Toynbee's understanding) is in huge numbers today in developing countries, and it also exists in Russia.
Any growing civilization inevitably spreads in breadth, seizes new lands, forms colonies, the people of which often welcome the liberators as bearers of a more progressive system. But as soon as society begins to decay, on the periphery of the country, in the colonies, on the outskirts, the "external proletariat" raises its head. So, in Rome, the first to revolt was the barbarian population of the North African colonies. The vastness of the barbarian territories blocked the possibilities of Roman weapons. In northwest Africa, the Roman army was never able to reach the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains or the Sahara steppes.
In the era of disintegration, it seems, nature itself intensifies the tendencies of collapse: earthquakes, epidemics, destructive hurricanes (explosions at nuclear power plants, the death of ships and aircraft) are constant companions of the decline of civilization.
However, no powerful civilization is completely destroyed. Within its framework, a new culture is emerging, like a chrysalis, most often in the form of a new religion. So, on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, the first Christian communities arose, which laid the foundation for a completely new, Christian civilization.
From the book "The Power of History". V. D. Gubin, V. I. Strelkov