10-09-2016, 08:23 AM
(10-08-2016, 07:05 PM)Odin Wrote: A lot of the Academy has developed a knee-jerk suspicion of any grand, general historical theories. Partly this is due to the influence of Postmodernism and it's rejection of all "grand narratives", and partly because they have developed a deep suspicion of anything that can be seen as "deterministic" and encouraging predictions about the future, which is derided as "historicism", which is considered a very bad thing in the Anglo-American portion of Academia. Professional historians have become a very narrow bunch mainly focused on increasingly narrow subjects and generally see the big historical ideas of people like Spengler, Toynbee, and Durant to be "fantasy".
Spengler has an agenda. Toynbee and Durant are too 'popular'. Toynbee (let alone Durant) has made some now-indefensible errors, like denying the personal achievements of people of sub-Saharan Africa. He thus neglects Ethiopia (isolated, but sophisticated at times), the presence of black Africans in Egypt (where attribution of technological achievements to persons just does not happen unless the person is the Pharaoh), and of course to modern Western civilization (he wrote his Study of History around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, an impressive collection of achievements by any standard, and he apparently had no clue that such was going on).
Toynbee was onto something with his Times of Trouble and Universal State and recognizing the civilization as the unit of history. I wonder if there is some coincidence in sound between "United States", the most powerful empire that has ever existed, and "Universal State"? Toynbee's Universal State takes over a whole, or nearly the whole, of a civilization with a rigid authoritarianism that regiments everything; the authoritarian order then suppresses dissent, innovation, individuality, and even enterprise. The Roman and Byzantine Empires exemplify the ultimate failure of late classical civilization in the "Latin" and "Greek" parts of the Classical world; the Soviet Union exemplifies the failure of eastern Orthodox civilization. See also Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Persian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Cambodian, Aztec, and Mayan civilization. Toynbee sees the Inca civilization in a stage of rot at the time of the Spanish conquest with the Spanish conquest as a sort of hostile takeover, those making the takeover never changing much except who rules. Toynbee makes some sense.
Western Christian Civilization has had its contenders for "Universal State": the Ottoman Empire (the Universal State can be imposed from without), Inquisition-era Spain, the Napoleonic zone of conquests, Wilhelmine Germany, the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. The United States of America wisely avoided cadging an empire out of its zones of military conquest in World War II; it was satisfied with imposing some needed reforms in Germany, Italy, and Japan without any effort to impose American culture in those places.
Should the United States become an Evil Empire (a Trump Presidency would be the key step if it could change the political process indefinitely) and start trying to impose its way upon other parts of Western civilization (like Latin America) , then the Universal State is a reality in the West, and the decline is underway.
Much historical research has become excursions into detailed study of trivialities like the dining habits of George Washington. We can all see the fault in such trifles. Postmodernism looks like just another academic fad nearly certain to be cast off in short order.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.