Spengler, Toynbee and Alexander

I’ve long been taken with the core ideas of the universal historian Arnold J. Toynbee. A fundamental concept of his philosophy of history is that large movements of people drive history and not individuals. As a young undergraduate that concept stuck me as revelatory.

Consider, for example, Alexander the Great. Most would think that he played an essential role in history. But one can argue that the results of his achievements would have occurred even in his absence. After Alexander, the Greeks came to dominate the regions around the eastern Mediterranean. But one can argue that the Greeks would have come to dominate those regions anyway. Their advantages in technology, learning, culture, and the mastery of phalanx made their dominance of these regions inevitable. If it weren’t Alexander, some other general or king would have led the Greeks to victory over the Persians and dominance of the regions around the eastern Mediterranean.

Similar arguments can be made for any great individual in history, even in the history of science. For example, if Sir Isaac Newton had not been born, then Gottfried Leibniz would have invented calculus at about the same time. If Albert Einstein hadn’t conceived of Special Relativity in 1905, then Henri Poincaré or some other scientist would have.

Toynbee’s philosophy of history is often contrasted with that of Oswald Spengler. In Spengler’s view, key heroic figures play essential and fundamental roles in history. In many ways I have come to regard the current play of world affairs as a clash between adherents of Spengler and adherents of Toynbee.

To the conservatives, Bush after 9/11 became that archetypal, heroic figure: the champion on the white horse. That image of Bush was sold and pushed remorselessly. Ultimately, we had evangelical Christian children being taught to pray at life-sized images of Bush. Bush and the neo-conservatives were going to remake the Middle East into a stable, pristine, democratic, reliable supplier of petrochemical products to the West. The whole endeavor was and stubbornly remains a statement of faith in Spengler’s philosophy.

There are those like Atrios or Digby who have argued from the earliest days that the entire Iraq enterprise was doomed inherently from the beginning. I don’t know that they are students of the philosophy of history. Perhaps they are only arguing from a commonsense point of view. Nonetheless, they seem to be arguing consciously or not from a Toynbee perspective.

Regardless, viewing the growing crisis in the Middle East through the prism of Spengler and Toynbee has been very insightful for me. I have long argued for some sort of partition of Iraq as the ultimate solution. In 1920, three very disparate regions were stitched together by the British to form Iraq. Tremendous violence and intimidation was ultimately required to hold these disparate regions together. Those forces holding Iraq together have largely been dissipated. Now, step-by-step, Iraq is being partitioned, often through the most ghastly and brutal means.

It would be far better to establish an orderly process to partition Iraq then continue on this bloody road. Maintaining a sham parliamentary democracy accomplishes such a pathetic, shabby set of goals. Bush and his sycophants get to maintain their fantasy of Chimpy as the great hero on the rearing charger. Republicans get to use the imprimatur of war to sell their electoral campaigns. Conservative Israeli’s get to weave their own narrow wants into America’s strategic aims and even the very foundations of global stability.

Of course, one wishes for stability and democracy for the Middle East. I do believe that democracy was slowly entraining in the Middle East before the Iraq fiasco. I understand that there was a great desire for true democracy building in Iran because the people there saw freedom and democracy growing in Turkey. I can’t imagine freedom and democracy spreading throughout the Middle East unless it is through an organic, indigenous process.

In the final event, I think the entire American adventure in Iraq will have amounted to nothing of historical importance. Alexander the Great achieved significant and spectacular victories in India. Many would argue, Indian historians in particular, that all that effort by the Greeks in India and all those military triumphs amounted to nothing. Virtually all traces of Greek influence in India vanished. It was Alexander’s army that decided, there by the Ganges, that it was time to go home. Where Alexander reached too far nothing of historical importance persisted. His common soldiers knew he had gone too far. It’s time and past time for the American people to insist on bring the troops home from Iraq.