Toynbee in the PX

AMERICA AND THE WORLD REVOLUTION (231 pp.)--Arnold J. Toynbee-- Oxford ($4.75).

While most historians have trouble explaining one civilization, British Historian Arnold Toynbee sweeps grandly over them all, comparing Machiavelli to St. Benedict, Moses to Mohammed. But a historian who paints so vast a canvas is bound to fudge some of the details. One of the disconcerting details of A Study of History has now been blown up to book-length size, where it is more disturbing than ever. It is Toynbee's casual indifference to the menace of Communism.

This collection of recent Toynbee lectures makes the point that Communism is merely a part of the social revolution that is sweeping the world. "This awakening of hope and purpose in the hearts and minds of the hitherto depressed three-quarters of the world's population," writes Toynbee, "will stand out in retrospect as the epoch-making event of our age. As for the present-day conflict between competing ideologies, this will be as meaningless to our descendants, 300 years from now, as our 16th and 17th century ancestors' wars of religion already are to us."

There are no real ideological issues separating East from West, says Toynbee. The differences are purely economic. Americans, writes Toynbee, were once as revolutionary as the Russians or the Chinese Communists or the Castro Cubans.

The American Revolution--"the shot heard round the world"--inspired these later revolutions and shared their goals. But growing rich, the U.S. has lost touch with the world's underprivileged. "America," he writes, "is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defense of vested interests." Americans fear Communism only because they "fear for their own pocketbooks."

To rejoin the world revolution, America must shed its materialism, symbolized abroad by the ubiquitous PX, which Americans patronize to avoid local contacts. With a pique that suggests he was once sassed by a PX clerk, Toynbee calls on the President "to sign one executive order abolishing all PXs throughout the world, and another order releasing from their contracts all American government servants abroad who feel incapable of lapping up local food and drink."

In this discussion of economics, Toynbee blandly ignores Communism's ugliest aspect--its totalitarianism. His implication: a have-not nation is entitled to totalitarian methods to catch up with the haves--an argument that was also used to justify Hitler. Gibbon, pondering the collapse of civilization among the ruins of the Forum, achieved a certain grandeur. Toynbee, among the groceries in the PX, seems little more than irritable.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.