After Us, The Insects?

CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL (263 pp.)--> Arnold J. Toynbee--Oxford ($3.50).

"The Kingdom of England is only 1,000 years old." "These last 6,000 years--brief though they are . . ." "After all, the reign of man on the Earth . . . is so far only about 100,000 years old . . ."

This is British Historian Arnold J. Toynbee speaking. As readers of his abridged, bestselling A Study of History (TIME, March 17, 1947) well know, on the Toynbee time-&-space scale the Dark Ages are a mere cat nap and the British Empire a flash in the pan. In these 13 essays, mostly written in the past two years, Toynbee again underlines "the lone and outlandish music of ... parochial history" and speaks of the nations of this world as "subordinate and ephemeral political phenomena."

Don't Fence Me In. It has always been irresistibly tempting, Toynbee says, for a great or ancient body of human beings to think of itself as "The Chosen People." As late as the 18th Century, the emperors of China took for granted that they were the divine rulers of "all that is under Heaven"--despite the fact that their neighbor, the "Caesar" of Moscow, had assumed much the same title and traced his primacy back to both pagan Greece and the prophets of Israel. Londoners, cheering a march-past of Dominion troops at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, could not only assert a similar claim but even believe that at last a point in history had come when the sun would stay obligingly at full noon.

A New Lease. Mad as such delusions were and always will be, says Toynbee, a morsel of truth is often hidden in them. This morsel is recognizable to men who, first, think of their national welfare in terms of a civilized inheritance, and second, think of the world itself as "a province of the Kingdom of God." In his view, it is, for example, of minor importance that the old apartment house of Western Europe has recently collapsed: what matters is that Christendom has found a newer, physically stronger home on the North American continent.

But, Toynbee warns, it would be absurd for us to imagine that this transoceanic shift of the Western-Christian heritage is likely to ensure "Western ascendancy" for very long. Political unification of the world "in the near future" is, he thinks, a "foregone conclusion," and once it is achieved, orthodox Christianity will be as old-fashioned as "parish-pump politics." Our descendants, as well as the descendants of our Oriental contemporaries, will be heirs to a religion and a civilization distilled from the teachings of many spiritual messiahs, including Confucius, Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Zarathustra and Mohamed.

This world unification may begin with violence (in the way, say, that Bismarck forcibly united the German states) or it may emerge from a compromise between the free enterprise of Western Christendom (the U.S.) and the totalitarian economy of the Byzantine orthodoxy (the U.S.S.R.). Only one thing can now prevent one world, says Toynbee: the destruction of all our major civilizations by the atom bomb.

Little Mammal, What Now? Even if the bomb falls, muses Author Toynbee there is still a grain of hope. The people most likely .to survive and to be capable of salvaging "some fraction of the present heritage of mankind" are the Negrito pygmies of Central Africa --a race "said by our anthropologists to have an unexpectedly pure and lofty conception of the nature of God and of God's relation to man."

If even the well-sheltered pygmies go up in the explosion, the bereft earth may have to fall back on the descendants of "the winged insects [which came] into existence about 250 million years ago." Could these ants and bees "acquire even that glimmer of intellectual understanding that man has possessed in his day," they might rebuild civilization--looking back on "the advent of the mammals, and the brief reign of the human mammal, as almost irrelevant episodes, 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' "

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