ROW Episode 44

In this episode we highlight some ideas from the works of Arnold Toynbee, the famous 20th century world historian, about the stark choice that humanity would face in the atomic age of either achieving political unification or committing mass suicide and his prediction that in in the face of an existential threat brought about by circumstances of our own making, humanity would turn on a dime and voluntarily adopt a limited world-state even though it would likely do so kicking and screaming.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we highlight some ideas from the works of Arnold Toynbee, the famous 20th century world historian, about the stark choice that humanity would face in the Atomic Age of either achieving political unification or committing mass suicide, and his prediction that in the face of an existential threat brought about by circumstances of our own making, humanity would turn on a dime and voluntarily adopt a limited world state, even though it would likely do so kicking and screaming. Today I'd like to take us through some highlights of a book that contains a collection of his works called Change and Habit. I've got it here for you to see. It's a wonderful book and very illuminating. I wanted to share some of the highlights I had gleaned from reading this book, because they are very pertinent to what's going on in our world today, and I think we should consider them seriously. Arnold Toynbee starts with a very interesting kind of assertion. It's pretty powerful. He says that today, humanity faces a stark choice, or at the time he was writing in the 1960s and 70s, would very shortly be facing two stark choices. Political unification or mass suicide. He contends in this book, Change in Habit, that in the atomic age, humanity would have to choose between these two. And then he goes on to say there are two questions we must answer. The first question he says we need to answer is, what are the obstacles? What are the obstacles to this worldwide political unification? And the second question is, how difficult is it to overcome them? Or to put it differently, how conceivable is it that we can achieve political unification or what he calls a world state, worldwide government. Those are his words. Very interesting. So let's start with the response to his first question. What are the obstacles? These are the responses that he gives. He says the key obstacle is just an old, outworn habit that humanity has, but particularly those of us in the West. He says it's the habit of the Western liking for political disunity and the dislike of political unity. Isn't that interesting? He talks about the long standing habit of divisive feeling that we have. He says because it's an old habit, it tends to reassert itself or we tend to just fall prey to it, because it's the easiest thing we know how to do versus reaching for what he calls the relatively recent habit of world mindedness. That is also a very interesting comment that this secularist historian in the 20th century had perceived through his study of world history. That humanity had recently started a habit of world mindedness, but was having trouble. As we all know, when we want to start a new habit, we want to lose weight and we get off the sugar and we do it for a day or two and then we fall off the wagon. It's so much easier to reach for the old habit of reaching for the snacks and the junk food and the sugar. So adopting new habits is not easy and it takes quite a while. The same is true here. We have this relatively new habit of world mindedness, but we're having trouble remembering to reach for it, and we tend to sink back and reach for the old habit of divisive feeling. What he says, though, is have hope, because this is not a built in trait of human nature. It's merely a habit. And the good news about habits is that they can be modified and abandoned just as they can be acquired and adopted. We're willing as human beings to give up even our most dearly held habits when it becomes clear that it's disastrous to persist. And again going back to giving an example, when I reflect on this, I think about the habit of smoking. So many smokers say,"Oh, I've tried so hard to quit. It's impossible. There's no way. I have to have my cigarettes in order to function, to think clearly, to not put on weight, whatever it is to be calm, not to be anxious." And yet when the doctor gives the diagnosis that, you have emphysema and if you persist, you're likely to develop lung cancer.--I have had a few of my friends who've been in that boat, and it's amazing how they were willing to turn on a dime and give up the habit of smoking, their longstanding habit, even though for years they had sworn up and down that this was an impossible thing to do. That's humanity for you. Now, what is the new habit that we need to adopt? We talked about world mindedness, that's really more the mindset we need to adopt, but the new habit that Arnold Toynbee highlights is common action, on a worldwide scale. Already in the 60s, when he was giving these talks and having these conversations and writing his material, Toynbee thought that it would already be disastrous not to give up a habit of political disunity, at least in two spheres, and that we needed already then to adopt a habit of common action in at least two areas. One was the area of the control of atomic energy, and the other area was the area of administering the production and distribution of food. He thought we need to set up a world authority to control atomic energy and also a world authority to administer the production and distribution of food. 50 years from when he was sharing these thoughts, I think that we could add at least climate change to this list where we need to act collectively in order to solve this collective challenge that is existential. Now he emphasizes the point that the disaster we will ultimately want and need to avoid is death, that we need to choose between death and life. And he says that what's happening in the world is that our technological advancement and revolution has shifted our circumstances and created a situation where we are going to be faced with this stark choice of do or die. He calls the choice between adopting this habit of common action versus the old habit of what he calls the great refusal. I love this term, great refusal. Which means saying,"No. Thank you very much. We don't want political unification. We prefer to stick with our old habit of divisive feeling." Anyway, I've put this up on the slide because I thought that it would be interesting to lock that into our brains. Do we really want to go for the great refusal? Now here was his prediction, 60s and 70s. He says, if he had to predict, he predicted that it was probable that humanity would submit to at least a minimum of world government to the extent that we perceived it was immediately necessary for our salvation, that we would do it kicking and screaming--so even adopting a limited form of world government would come with great resistance and reluctance-- and that we would hold off doing it until the eleventh hour. We wouldn't go willingly. We would wait essentially till things got so bad and our choice became so stark between doing it or facing existential crisis that we would then do it. Now, his second question about whether it's conceivable to have a world government. He starts by saying, let's look our fears squarely in the face. Why is it we're so allergic to this idea? And he says, the reason it gives us nightmares is that we have a vision of a centralized bureaucracy administering the details of local government all over the world and having basically their talons in us. Responding to this fear, here are the thoughts that he has to offer to allay our fears. He says, first of all a world government must be limited to what is strictly necessary. In other words, it must be limited to a very narrow sphere of action, because, he pointed out, people will only accept a world government reluctantly, and so statesmen and women shouldn't try to get them to swallow large doses of government that are not strictly necessary right now. Again, I believe that in the area of climate change, we definitely need to have some world government that has the authority to legislate and take action, binding action on all the nations of the world, because it is an existential problem. Controlling nuclear proliferation, which is the equivalent of controlling atomic energy, is another one. As he points out, as a practical matter, nations will only surrender the amount necessary for self preservation. So that's the first thing. Limited world government is the first key to allaying the fear. The second point he makes, which is really fascinating, is that world government in this day and age has to come about voluntarily through the consent and cooperation of countries. He points out to prior times in world history where a nation has tried to expand and develop an empire and so on, subsume a whole bunch of other nations within its sphere of influence and authority. And he says this has usually been done by force, but he says, we know from experience now that doing this sort of thing by force doesn't end well, because it results in a huge backlash and great resistance, and as soon as there's any weakness in this body the individual units will revolt, because nationalism will have resurged. So the resurgence of nationalism and strong resistance, he says, will be there if we ever try to do this by force, which we must not do. It has to be done voluntarily. He also adds that in this day and age, because we have this, the atomic bomb and the atomic capability, we simply can't use force anymore to bring about such a world government because we would destroy ourselves. If we try to force a nation that has nuclear weapons, we know what the result of that will be. So it has to again be done by consent and cooperation. I just want to pause and reflect here for a moment. For that to happen, it means that countries will all need to come to the independent conclusion that it is in their best interests to adopt a world government. They'd have to make the calculation that they'd be better off developing this limited world government that has authority in very limited spheres of endeavor, as opposed to trying to go it alone. Again, I point to climate change. The only way we can do this successfully, mitigate climate change and stop our world from spiraling into the disaster that it's spiraling into right now, to avoid the absolute catastrophic effects, is for all nations to recognize, We're better off working together on this," Not the way they did with the Paris Agreement, which is through a system of voluntary pledges, but by creating a body that is capable of conducting global consultation where all nations are properly represented, their voices are heard, and that can make decisions and pass international laws that are binding on all nations in order to mitigate the effects of climate change and to stop burning fossil fuels. Okay, so the third thing that Arnold Toynbee says is that we need to also develop the correct mindset, and that is the new habit recently acquired, as he puts it, of world mindedness. He calls it an ideology of being world mindedness. So again, this is something that is definitely worth reflecting on. Now, the next thing he tackles is what form or structure will this limited world government take? He says that he believes that because it has to come about as a result of the voluntary unit of a number of previously separate and independent smaller units, so countries basically coming together to create a larger unit, it will need to be federal. And he offers three reasons for this. First of all, he says states prefer to retain their identity. They also prefer to retain their local autonomy. And thirdly they want to limit the power of any union government to that which is in their interest. So whatever powers they arrogate to this limited world government will have to be powers that benefit them. Otherwise, no point in handing these powers, ceding these powers to them. Now, he also knew that there were certain arguments that people would raise in opposition to this idea of a limited, voluntary world government. First one has to do with,"Oh human beings are so different. How could we possibly unite all these very different human beings in a politically unified limited world government?" His response was, the majority of humanity has always interbred readily. This is what history shows us. Also, important point, such differences are not correlated with how smart you are, how stupid you are, mental ability, moral sensitivity, or whether one has a good or bad character. I love that he's so straightforward about this. And the last point he makes to hammer home one of the problems is that he says, Antipathy towards other races is a moral infirmity that tends to be prevalent more among some groups than others." And he lists those groups he thinks are more susceptible to this moral infirmity, but the main point is it's a moral infirmity. That's all it is. There is no reality to it. There is no substance to it. Secondly, he says psychological obstacles don't exist. He makes a really good point that"A community that remains limited in size to a number of people who can know each other personally will be too small and too weak to undertake the collective enterprises that have made the achievement of civilization possible." These are the words of Arnold Toynbee. Wow, it's so true. If we want to take a magnum leap and create the kind of world civilization that we deserve, we can no longer afford just to be talking to the people who are like us, whom we already know. We have to forge a bigger and broader and wider union. There's no technological barrier, he says, to creating such a limited world government because technology's at the point where we can do this easily. It's actually a perfect tool for what humanity needs today. So our scientific and technological advancements are meshing with where humanity needs to go in terms of its social advancement and its its move towards collective maturity. The next thing, which is absolutely fascinating, is he acknowledges that we need some kind of spiritual union. I was very struck when I read this. This man was a secularist, but he had studied world history and knew about the positive influences of religion in building civilization. In fact, he believed that very often religion is the driving force in creating world civilizations. But he says we need the spiritual union in order to harmonize different social and cultural heritages that we have developed independently of each other, as we've each been developing and evolving in our own silos. So now we need a force, something that can harmonize all of these and pull them all together. In particular, he pointed to the fact that we need unity of thought as to what is right and what is wrong because when there are fundamental differences in moral issues then, he points out, it's very hard to create political unity. The next thing he says is that the this unity of values, unity of thought about what's right and wrong, is not pre existent but it's the product, the slow product of a gradual process. And he gives examples. He says history shows that, for instance, missionaries won converts over who built a new culture of a world state. He points to the individual conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, who then was able to implement these moral principles across the whole empire. Friends, we're left with the choice about what are we going to do? What choice are we going to make? Are we going to choose collaboration, cooperation, and deeper integration and unification in the form of a limited world government, where we can engage in collective and consultative decision making in order to meet the greatest global challenges of our time? Or are we going to opt for the great refusal and stick to our old habit of divisive feeling? Thereby ensuring continued and escalating carnage and devastation on a scale never before seen. We have a choice to make. If you liked this material, first of all, pick up your copy of Toynbee's book, Change in Habit, but also look for an op ed I just wrote that's being picked up around the country in the U.S. It's called Humanity Has Two Choices, Political Unification or Mass Suicide. Here's the link to one of the places you can find it Peace Voice, peacevoice dot info dot org. You can go to their website to find it. I will bid you farewell and I look forward to seeing you again a month from now. Goodbye for now. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.