Men Must Choose

by ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

IN OUR day we are living through a change in the scale of human affairs that is moving almost too fast for us to keep track of it. Within the year a jet plane has flown from India to Britain in twenty-four hours; and it is difficult, now to recall our thrill when, at some date between the wars, the first plane made the same journey in seven days. The writer of this article, who is sixtythree years old, used, as a child, to listen to a greatuncle of his, who had commanded an East Indiaman and had never served on anything but a sailing ship, describing a voyage — on which he was carrying troops from England to India in the year of the Indian Mutiny — in which it had taken him not hours or days, but months, to make the journey from the Thames to the Hooghly under sail round the Cape.

The Constitution of the United States allowed four months for an elected President to wind up his affairs in his home in Georgia or New Hampshire and then make the long ride to Washington. At the date when the Constitution was drafted, land communications were still much what they had been at the date in the sixth centuty B.C. when Darius organized the Persian Empire. At both dates, riding on horseback was the fastest means available for covering the ground; and in Darius s Persian Empire, as in George Washington’s United States, it was a three months’ journey from the border — say from Ephesus, on the shore of the Aegean Sea — to the capital at Susa in the neighborhood of the South Persian oil field, near the head of the Persian Gulf.

Well, what is the size, today, of a United States that has expanded physically in the meantime from coast to coast? In the human terms in which we measure distance by our ability to “annihilate” it, a United States extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific is no larger today than the Persian Empire’s pygmy contemporary Attica. In Darius’s day the Athenians gave themselves a democratic government in which every citizen participated, not through an elected representative, but in his own person; and this direct form of democracy was feasible in the Attica of 508 B.C. because the country was small enough for every citizen, even if his home lay in the most remote of the border districts, to reach the capital and cast his vote within the day.

In 1952 the United States is just about that Attic size; for in 1952 any American citizen can reach Washington within the day from any section, while conversely a President domiciled in the White House, or a presidential candidate encamped at Springfield, Illinois, or at Denver, Colorado, can travel within the day to any spot in the United States where he may choose to make a speech. Of course, in America today all this traveling is done by air, whereas your Athenian in the sixth century B.C. had to do his traveling on foot; but this technological difference in the means of locomotion is immaterial from the human point of view. In terms of human geography the United States A.D. 1952 is a country of the same scale as Attica in 508 B.C. in the pertinent sense of being a country in which no section is more than a day’s journey from the capital.

Copyright 1952, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

Indeed, there is a sense in which the United States today is humanly far smaller than Cleisthenes’ Attica was — is no larger, in fact, than the room in which the notes for this paper were being written at Princeton, New Jersey. Without stirring from that room, the writer could listen in and look in at Chicago while world history, as well as American history, was being made at the Republican and Democratic conventions there. Instead of having to attend the conventions in the flesh, he could make the conventions attend on him over the radio just by turning a knob on a gadget; and people all over the world on those same days were bringing these American conventions into their rooms over the radio, because by this time the world had become so small that American politics had come to be a matter of life and death for the whole of mankind.

2

THIS latest change in the scale of human affairs has shrunk—and, in shrinking, it has simplified — the human geography of the globe. Every land and sea has suffered a sensational reduction in scale. The former English Channel, which was still an effective strategic obstacle as recently as 1940, has now become almost invisible as the jet plane streaks across it. The British Isles have been reduced to the former dimensions, and been parked in the former location, of what used to be called the Channel Islands. North America has succeeded to Britain’s former role of being an island moored close off the western shore of a continent from which “the Channel” — as we must now learn to call the former Atlantic Ocean — no longer insulates either the estuary of the St. Lawrence or the Bulge of Brazil. But “a” continent is now a solecism; for today there is only one continent — the one that stretches from the west shore of the Bering Straits to the east shore of the Straits of Dakar — and there also is only one ocean, the Pacific. Even the Pacific, when one thinks of if, is no longer the ocean that it once was, now that Admiral Nimitz has discovered the “know-how” for conducting naval operations right across the breadth of this salt-water pond as if there were no such thing as the date line.

Thus the mechanical means of transport that we have been inventing during these last 150 years have changed the world’s human geography almost out of recognition. What are the human consequences of this technologically engineered human revolution likely to be? We may gain some inkling of them by looking at the sequels to previous revolutions of the kind; for this is not the first time that a revolutionary change of scale has suddenly overtaken human affairs. There was a comparable change about four centuries before our day, as a result, of the fifteenth-century Portuguese invention of an ocean-going sailing ship. And, before that, there was a change of the same kind in the seventeenth century B.C., as a result of the Central Asian invention of domesticating the horse and harnessing him to a wheeled vehicle. What were the human consequences of a technological revolution in these two cases, in which history already knows the end as well as the beginning of the story ?

Any revolution in the means of communication is apt to become the cause, if it is not the effect, of a general revolution in technology; and a general revolution in technology is bound to bring with it a change in the scale of economic, and therefore of military and political, operations.

On the political plane, one regular effect of technological revolutions in the past has been to dwarf the state’s of the previous standard caliber by overshadowing them with new giant communities geared to the new scale of human operations. On the eve of the fifteenth-century invention of the oceanfaring sailing ship, the standard states of our Western world were city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Nuremberg, and Ghent. As a result of a Portuguese technological achievement, the standard scale of state suddenly jurpped from the city-state class to the nation-state class. Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands — from the sixteenth century till within our own lifetime this string of nation-states along the Atlantic seaboard of the Old World dominated the globe with their shipping, their commerce, their manufactures, their emigrants, and their empires; and now, within our lifetime, we have seen these nation-states go the way of Venice and Florence. The invention of the aeroplane has put down these West European nation-states from their seat and has exalted the United States and the Soviet Union. In an air age the standard state must be one of a supranational caliber, and in our mid-twentiethcentury world there are only two states that fill this bill.

But, at the pace at which an ever more rapidly advancing technology is now “annihilating distance,” will even the Soviet Union and the United States be massive enough to stay the course? Our age is not merely an air age; it is also an atombomb age. In a world in which human hands wield this weapon, is there a future for any state short of a world-state? For only a world-state can put the atom bomb out of action by monopolizing the possession of it; and only a political dispensation that is capable of putting the atom bomb out of action can give mankind the means of saving itself from “genosuicide.”

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HISTORY is now moving at a rapidly accelerating speed. What is the moral?

One moral is that, in such times above all, the penalty for looking back and lingering is the fate that overtook Lot’s wife. At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Italian citystates were collectively preponderant over all the rest of the Western world in population, technical ability, and wealth. Individually, though, a Venice or a Milan was a dwarf compared with the gigantic new nation-states — France, Spain, and the rest — that were now suddenly arising all around; and, after the danger threatening Italy from these new “barbarians” had been advertised by the Italian states’ impotence to cope with the French invasion of Italy in 1494, Machiavelli, in the last chapter of The Prince, put it to the Italians that they were now confronted with a choice between uniting and going under. In the end, the Italians did take the great Florentine statesman’s advice, but not till they had waited for four centuries. Machiavelli died in 1527; Florence joined Piedmont and Milan in constituting a new national Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

In the meantime, a still disunited Italy had paid for her dilatoriness by becoming the battlefield of Europe instead of continuing to be Europe’s countinghouse and workshop; and, even when she did at last unite, she did this too late to save her situation. If Italy had brought herself to unite in 1493, she would have been the dominant national state in the Western world throughout the modern age. As it was, she achieved, through her tardy union, nothing but an admission to the lowest place on the list of powers of the nation-state caliber at a stage when the days of such mere nation-states were already numbered.

We can read the same story in the history of the city-states of Ancient Greece; for the warning which the medieval Italian city-states received from Machiavelli was given to the Greek city-states by statesmen whose insight was as clear as his. A fourth-century Athenian Isocrates urged union upon Greek city-states that were being overshadowed by a rising Kingdom of Macedon; a thirdcentury Aetolian Agelaus urged it upon them again when they were being overshadowed by a rising Roman Empire. Each time, the Greeks hesitated and delayed; and the penalty which overtook them was their unification — by conquest instead of by mutual agreement — in a Roman world-state to which, at this stage, the Greeks found themselves compelled to submit as the only alternative to annihilation.

These historical precedents are prophetic warnings to us in our day. They will be Jeremiads for us if we ignore them; but they can equally well be good tidings of salvation for us if we take them to heart and act upon them in time, without lingering and looking backward towards a past which however homesick for it we may be — has been relegated to ancient history by a revolutionary change of scale that has been the consequence of a contemporary revolution in technology.

What must we do to be saved ? The heart of our difficulty is the difference in pace between the hare-swift movement of the scientific intellect, which can revolutionize our technology within the span of a single lifetime, and the tortoise-slow movement of the subconscious underbelly of the human psyche, which knows no change or shadow of turning and is the same yesterday, today, and forever. In truth, of course, the subconscious psyche does move, but at a rate that is infinitesimally slow by comparison with the scientific intellect’s; and the difference between these two rates of spiritual movement is the crux of the statesman’s problem. The inability of the subconscious to fly at the intellect’s pace is apt to drive the subconscious, in blind panic, into an irrational, obstinate, anachronistic conservatism that may land us in disaster unless we can contrive to buy from Fate the time that the subconscious psyche requires for accomplishing the slow and painful task of adapting itself to the inevitable human consequences of a revolutionary change of technological circumstances.

Our racing technology has now suddenly brought within point-blank atom-bomb range of one another a number of human societies that are still psychologically poles apart because, in the sailingship age, horse-cart age, and wheelbarrow age in which we have been living right into our own lifetime, these societies have been insulated from one another. We need time to give them their chance of growing as close to one another in spirit as they now are in body; and this need for time spells a need for patience and for mutual forbearance.

We cannot yet foresee the day when the West and Russia will be able to live together as one flock with one shepherd because — as every citizen of any federal polity knows — it is impracticable for people to coöperate politically unless they already share a common way of life. Until they have grown together to that degree, the best political relation with one another that they can hope to achieve is one of live and let live. It is of vital importance for all of us that, in the dangerous age in which we are still strangers to one another, the West and Russia should maintain a modus Vivendi that will save them from drifting into an atomic Third World War; and the United Nations is the forum in which the Elephant and the Whale can continue to do business until they have had time to digest the truth that, however alien from one another they may look, the Elephant, the Whale, and the Hat are nevertheless three fellow members of the mammalian order.

Meanwhile, there is everything to be said for encouraging elephants, whales, and bats to enter respectively into family unions with the other members of their own species. Our Western community, for example, is ripe for union now. It would, though, be both unnecessary and wrongheaded for us to confine the membership of an originally Western club to candidates who can produce Western birth certificates. Political capacity, not cultural origin, is the proper lest for admission. NATO, in which we have a working basis for a union of countries that are governing themselves democratically in our sense, already contains, in Turkey, one originally non-Western member that has given adequate proof of a will and power to make democratic institutions work effectively in its own domestic life.

There is no reason why our Western community should not expand, as the United States has expanded, by successively admitting new states to membership as they qualify for this. Nor need we foresee any limits to a progressive political unification of mankind; for the same technology which, by inventing the atom bomb, has now made world unity Man’s only ultimate alternative to selfdestruction, has also made world unity feasible for us by placing in our hands physical means of communication which we can use as tools for demolishing the pre-air-age psychological barriers between us.

If only we school ourselves to be patient and forbearing, as well as inventive and constructive, we can look into the future, not indeed without anxiety, but also not without a heartening hope.