to succumb whereas others strike out a successful response through a
creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, while others again,
neither succeed in responding along original lines nor fail to respond
altogether, but manage to survive the crisis by waiting until some
creative individual or creative minority has shown the way through,
and then following tamely in the footsteps of the pioneers.
These plausible words do not, upon closer inspection, explain the
problem which concerns us. The “creative movement of
Withdrawal-and-Return” is illustrated by examples which rob it not only
of its obvious, but of all definite, meaning.[32]
The other formula—that of “Challenge-and-Response”[33]—is not evolved
from inside history either but is applied, as it were, from the outside;
and its applicability, let alone its power to explain the facts, is
often more than doubtful. “Challenge-and-Response” is sometimes used to
describe a true conflict; sometimes it refers merely to the ordinary
seesaw of historical fortune. Always, however, it has a misleading ring,
since _observed facts_ are called a response, to a _hypothetical
challenge_ construed to meet those facts. In Volume II, “The Range of
Challenge-and-Response,” we find headings like “The Stimulus of Hard
Countries,” “The Stimulus of New Ground,” “The Stimulus of Blows,” “The
Stimulus of Pressure,” “The Stimulus of Penalization,” and so on. The
primary data of history merely show that certain peoples achieved
greatness; Toynbee thinks that the adverse conditions which he
enumerates served as stimuli. That may be so. In any case, it does not
explain the fact which, above all others, requires explanation, namely,
that in some cases these conditions worked as stimuli and in others they
did not. I do not find, therefore, that the formula is conducive to
understanding; it must in each case invent a challenge to fit a
historical reality which it labels response.
Our criticism does not proceed from a positivistic belief in a so-called
“scientific” historiography which is supposed first to assemble
objective facts which are subsequently interpreted. Our objection here
is not against Toynbee’s procedure, but against a terminology which
obscures what is the starting-point, and what the outcome, of his
procedure. And we make the further criticism that he does not actually
evolve from each particular historical situation the notion of a
particular challenge to which it can be construed as a response; he
applies the formula, as I have said, from the outside, and it is
therefore doomed to irrelevance. For example: Toynbee considers the
descent of the prehistoric Egyptians into the marshy Nile valley as
their response to the challenge of the desiccation of North Africa. In
their new homeland they faced, in due course, as a further challenge,
“the internal articulation of the new-born Egyptiac society” and failed.
The truth is that the Egyptians flourished exceedingly for two thousand
years after the Pyramid Age; but Toynbee thinks they failed because he
cannot conceive of a “response” in Egyptian terms, but only in those
with which he is familiar: secular government, democracy, and the Poor
Law.[34] But since neither the rich nor the poor Egyptians took this
view of their state, Toynbee’s conclusion is irrelevant. It is true that
he quotes the tales which dragomans told to late Greek travellers about
the oppressive rule of the builders of the pyramids. But the actual
folk-tales of Pharaonic Egypt show us that the people took as great a
delight in tales of royalty as the public of the Arabian Nights took in
the doings of the despot Harun al Rashid. Snefru, whom Toynbee names, is
known as one of the most popular rulers in legend. The fact of the
matter is that Toynbee should have started from an analysis of the
“response.” This would not have shown, as Toynbee has it, that “Death
laid its icy hand on the life of the growing civilization at the moment
when the challenge that was the stimulus of its growth was transferred
from the external to the internal field [from the subjugation of nature
to the organization of society, H.F.] because in this new situation, the
shepherds of the people betrayed their trust.”[35] Studied without
preconceived ideas the “response” of the Egyptians stands revealed as a
vastly different achievement. The ideal of a marvellously integrated
society had been formed long before the pyramids were built; it was as
nearly realized, when they were built, as any ideal social form can be
translated into actuality; and it remained continuously before the eyes
of rulers and people alike during subsequent centuries. It was an ideal
which ought to thrill a western historian by its novelty, for it falls
entirely outside the experience of Greek or Roman or Modern Man,
although it survives, in an attenuated form, in Africa. It represents a
harmony between man and the divine which is beyond our boldest dreams,
since it was maintained by divine power which had taken charge of the
affairs of man in the person of Pharaoh. Society moved in unison with
nature. Justice, which was the social aspect of the cosmic order,
pervaded the commonwealth. The “trust” which the people put in their
“shepherds” was by no means what Toynbee imagines; their trust was that
Pharaoh should wield to the full the absolute power to which his
divinity entitled him, and which enabled him—as nothing else could—to
ensure the well-being of the whole community.
It seems to me that these discussions have cleared the ground for our
understanding. Generalizations based on a limited historical experience,
and theorizing, however ingeniously conducted, _must_ fail to disclose
the individual character of any one civilization or of any one series of
events. We must concentrate on what Ruth Benedict called the “selected
segment of the arc of possible human behaviour,” “the characteristic
purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society.” In our own
terms: In studying the birth of a civilization we are concerned with the
emergence of its “form.”