The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  According to Marx, Darwin’s great achievement was to interest us in “the history of nature’s technology.” Engels, as we have seen, eulogized Marx for having similarly “discovered the law of evolution in human history.” For Marxists, Marx had discovered the technology of human history—the forces and institutions that shaped and changed society. The dynamic role of social classes determined the course of history. Capitalism had made the workers into an alienated class. “What the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all,” he prophesied in the Communist Manifesto, “are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” He concluded the Manifesto by appealing to the proletariat to fulfill his scientific prophecy: “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” His was not a plea to fight against menacing odds, but rather an invitation to join the bandwagon of history, to move with the current.

  Marx had developed his materialist scheme of history in articles and brief books, but finally elaborated it and provided the detailed, documented argument in the monumental Das Kapital (Vol. 1, 1867; Vols. 2 and 3, edited by Engels, 1885, 1894). The International Working Men’s Association, which he had inaugurated, properly christened this work, with no intended irony, as “The Bible of the Working Class.” Besides expounding the large historical frame for the future of society and to justify and explain the messianic role of the proletariat and the instability of the capitalist system, he offered a specific economic theory. This was the theory of surplus value, which Engels credited as Marx’s second great “discovery.” Based on David Ricardo’s labor theory of value, the theory of surplus value explained how the capitalist expropriated the worker. If, as Ricardo had argued, all economic value was derived from human labor, then the capitalist prospered by paying workers less than the value that they had added and pocketing the difference. To secure the maximum profit, the capitalist paid the worker only enough for his subsistence. Surplus value, then, is the value produced by the worker beyond what he is compensated. Thus the capitalist’s profit came from exploiting the worker. Although unequivocal in his dogmas of history and of economics, Marx’s lively mind occasionally rebelled at hints of orthodoxy. And he more than once declared, “I am not a Marxist.”

  Karl Marx’s sense of mission was strong enough to sustain him in years of misery and poverty. In 1849 he settled in London, but he was evicted from his house and his property was seized. Two of his four children died there, and his wife suffered breakdowns. All the while the Manchester industrialist, Engels, was supporting him. And Engels eulogized him as “the best-hated and most-slandered man of his age. Governments . . . vied with each other in campaigns of vilification against him. He brushed it all to one side like cobwebs. . . . And he died honoured, loved and mourned by millions of revolutionary workers from the Siberian mines over Europe and America to the coasts of California. . . . although he had many opponents he had hardly a personal enemy.”

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  From Nations to Cultures: Spengler and Toynbee

  After 1870, European man at last had come to know all preceding societies. We had become “the inheritor of the whole planet,” André Malraux observed. “The next step is obviously to conceive humanity as one.” This momentous step in thinking about human history was signaled by the displacement of the idea of Nations by the idea of Culture. This innovation of modern social science would be a key to new ways of thinking about the meaning of history and the future. “Culture” would provide a concept far broader and more cosmopolitan than the idea of “Nations” that had spread across Europe after the fifteenth century. The founding prophet of this new idea was Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), son of a prosperous English Quaker. As a Quaker, he could not enter a university and so began life in the family business. Seeking a climate to cure his tuberculosis, he went to America at the age of twenty-three. On a Havana bus he encountered a fellow Quaker, an archaeologist whom he impulsively joined in study of Toltec remains in Mexico. So began Tylor’s lifelong study of strange and ancient societies and their relation to modern life.

  These studies in Mexico put him on the path that produced Primitive Culture (1871) and made Tylor a founder of cultural anthropology. From the Toltec clues he saw all cultures as parts of a single history of human thought. The “savage,” he saw, was not a mere brute but rather was on the first stage of development toward a higher, civilized state. He noted “animism,” for example, as only the first form of what would become developed religious belief. The evolution that Darwin had described in biology, Tylor too now saw in society. “It is wonderful,” Darwin wrote to Tylor, “how you trace animism from the lower races up to the religious beliefs of the highest races. . . . How curious, also, are the survivals or rudiments of old customs.” “Culture” was not merely the arts and spiritual ideas but “all those habits and capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.”

  For Tylor, then, there was only one human history, which in this new breadth could be called anthropology. “The past,” he wrote, “is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole to explain the part.” “There seems to be no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have lost its bearing on our own thought.” In 1896 Tylor would become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford. And “culture” would soon be liberated from unilinear evolutionary dogma. And from Victorian condescension to “inferior” peoples.

  The unfamiliar American scene, whose peoples had no place in the European classical scheme, once again freed social scientists from the provincialism of the Western European perspective on humankind. Franz Boas (1858-1942)—a Seeker of the meaning of life to primitive peoples—did more than any other single thinker to liberate Western social scientists from simplistic dogmas of racial superiority and from absolute hierarchies of cultural achievement. It was no accident, then, that cultural relativism, the idea of the uniqueness of all cultures and opposition to Old World dogmas of racial superiority, developed in the United States—and in the new social science of anthropology. Boas, born in Germany in 1858 to a merchant family, had a precocious interest in natural science, studied in German universities, and earned a Ph.D. in physics and geography from Kiel. At twenty-five he joined a scientific expedition to Baffin Island, of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. There the Eskimo peoples awakened his interest in the variety of culture. On returning, he became attached to the ethnological museum in Berlin. Then in 1886, on his way back from a study of the Indians of Vancouver Island, he stopped in New York, where he remained. Boas helped prepare the anthropological exhibits in the 1893 Columbian exposition in Chicago, and became professor of anthropology at Columbia University. He then directed and edited reports on the native peoples of Siberia and North America. Along the way he became versatile and comprehensive in studying strange and remote societies, including details of linguistics, demography, statistics, physical anthropology, and folklore. For Boas, like Tylor, saw “culture” including all the ways of a society.

  The acknowledged American leader of the new science of anthropology, Boas was a scrupulous master of detail drawn from his field experience. Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; revised and enlarged in 1938) demonstrated that “there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man.” He attacked simplistic racial stereotypes and insisted that “A close connection between race and personality has never been established.” His conclusions were firmly based on facts gathered in the field. Boas argued that all surviving societies show equally the capacity to develop culture. They have evolved equally but differently. So he diverted the social scientists’ focus from biology (the realism of evolution) to anthropology. And he received the accolade of the German Nazis when they burned his books and rescinded his German Ph.D.

  In the Germany that was burning books by Boas (and many others) there had appeared a quite antithetic view of culture of breathtaking breadth, boldness, nuance, and aesthetic sensitivity. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) surveyed worl
d history with a cosmic pessimism. At the outbreak of World War I he had completed Der Untergang des Abendlandes, and soon thereafter Outlines of a Morphology of World History was published. The two volumes were translated into English under the title The Decline of the West. (1918-22, revised ed. 1922). In a Preface Spengler explained that he owed “practically everything” to Goethe and Nietzsche. “Goethe gave me the method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty.” “And therefore, that which has at last . . . taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy.” Despite this obeisance to the national spirit, Spengler’s scheme broke free of the narrow units of nations and states into his own rich cosmopolitan world-encompassing symbolism—based on the idea of cultures.

  Spengler sees eight distinct cultures: Egypt, India, Babylon, China, classical antiquity (Greece and Rome), Islam, the West (Faustian), and Mexico. Each culture has its own spirit, which cannot be transferred to another, and each has its own life cycle. He gave Giovanni Battista Vico’s idea of cycles and the uniqueness of human history a rich new meaning. While the world of nature is governed by intelligible causes and effects, human history is ruled by destiny. So, Spengler explained, he offered “a new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny (italics in original)—the first indeed of its kind.” Drawing on the products of modern social science, Spengler would offer a new mystic historicism. “Morphology” was the right word for what he offered—not a linear account of social evolution but a dynamic inventory of forms that human efforts had taken across the earth, and so might take in the future. He naturally despises the simplistic division of world history into ancient, medieval, and modern and the imprisonment of thought into narrow Western categories. Instead he sees world history as a composite of cultures, each having its own character and life cycle.

  In depicting each culture he offers intriguing and unforgettable suggestions, by a method that he says he owes to Goethe, relating science to the arts and everything to everything else:

  The Apollinian [classical Greek] Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian [modern Western] strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian [Byzantine-Arabian] felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour.

  Spengler’s book is rich in these “morphological relationships” between dissimilar activities that prove the coherent spirit of each culture and epoch. So there was a common spirit in the ancient Greek polis and in Euclidian geometry, as there was also between the differential calculus and the state of Louis XIV. Chronological “contemporaneity” was misleading. It should be replaced by an understanding of how different events play similar roles in expressing the culture spirit. Thus he sees his own kind of “contemporaneity” in the Trojan War and the Crusades, in Homer and the songs of the Nibelungs.

  “Cultures are organisms,” Spengler explains, “and world-history is their collective biography.” Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. “Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history.” “Every Culture has its own Civilization. . . . The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture. . . . Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.” Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome was the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western (“Faustian”) culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the “megalopolis,” the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.

  “Decline” had for Spengler, then, a quite different meaning than had been popularized by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s “Decline” was a phenomenon in time and space, could be traced on a map and was promoted or delayed by the forces he described. But for Spengler, decline was spiritual, even mystical—Destiny-governed.

  The Decline of the West was enormously popular in Germany of the 1920s. The Nazis claimed Spengler as one of their prophets. In pamphlets after World War I he made pleas for the heroic Prussian spirit, but he several times explicitly repudiated the Nazis. And his cultural view of history was opposed to their crude racism. After the Nazis came to power they disavowed him. He died in obscurity in 1936, but was destined to have a posthumous revival in the United States.

  It is not easy to explain the vogue of universal history in a world torn by the most destructive war of nations yet recorded on this earth. Perhaps the carnage of trench warfare in western Europe (six hundred thousand dead at Verdun, February-July 1916), the introduction of poison gas by Germany in 1915, countless losses at sea, and atrocities inflicted on civilians awakened the West to the follies of the nation-state. And set historians in search of concepts that might give meaning to history despite the tragic spectacle of warring nations. Even the direst pessimist could not deny the grand achievements of the human race by the early twentieth century. Western culture and/or civilization had conquered land and seas and was beginning to conquer the air; productive laboratories were advancing the sciences, copious libraries were teeming with the world’s expanding knowledge, and grand museums were displaying the arts; technology was burgeoning and standards of living were rising. Humanity had ample reason for pride and awe. Perhaps history, then, could be given meaning by surveying and assessing the range and rhythm of human achievement. Spengler had offered brilliant insights with his dynamic inventory of cultures. And even his pessimism was inspired by awe at human possibilities.

  After Spengler, the next widely influential Seeker of the meaning of history was Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975). The Toynbee family had a tradition of grand ideas and social conscience. His uncle, Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), had founded the first “settlement house” to offer education and uplift to the poor of east London, and before his death at the age of thirty had written the book which invented the “industrial revolution.” Benjamin Jowett had given him a post as tutor in Balliol College, Oxford, and the nephew, Arnold J. Toynbee, had followed to Balliol and studied classics there. Then, studying at the British School in Athens, he originated his ideas on the decline of civilizations. He served as tutor in ancient history at Balliol, joined British Intelligence in World War I, and was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. After reporting as the Manchester Guardian correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War (1921-22), Arnold J. Toynbee was director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and director of research for the Foreign Office in World War II. A prodigiously productive scholar, Toynbee had a wide experience of international affairs in his time. His monumental work would be the twelve-volume Study of History (1934-61). His observation of small and large wars between nations and the maelstrom of “international” affairs seems to have confirmed his determination to seek meaning for history in some unit other than the nation-state.

  Toynbee recalled twenty-eight years later how Spengler’s book (which he read in German in 1920) set him on his path of world history. Some critics would later describe Toynbee’s work as sim
ply “a Spenglerian heresy.” Toynbee had found Spengler’s work “teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight. I wondered at first whether my whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind. One of my cardinal points was that the smallest intelligible fields of historical study were whole societies and not arbitrarily insulated fragments of them like the nation-states of the modern West or the city-states of the Graeco-Roman world.” But when Toynbee looked for answers about “the geneses of civilization” he found Spengler “unilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic.” While Spengler believed that the spirit of one culture could not be transferred to another, Toynbee observed that cultures were usually “apparented” to older cultures. Toynbee would use “society” as his synonym for both culture and civilization in Spengler’s vocabulary. Avoiding the Germanic panacea of “destiny,” he focused his original mind on facts to explain the origin, rise, flourishing, and decline of societies. “I became aware,” Toynbee recalled, “of a difference in national traditions. Where the German a priori method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism.”

  Focusing on the genesis and survival of societies, his original approach was eminently practical and fact-oriented. He started with an intriguing paradox. “The view that certain environments, presenting easy and comfortable conditions of life, provide the key to an explanation of the origin of civilizations is examined and rejected.” Instead he “suggests the possibility that man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” Both sides of the paradox are supported by facts from around the earth: