Arnold Toynbee and the unity of mankind
Visions of the future by a cultural historian and philosopher of history
Sovaida Maani Ewing is Director of the Center for Peace and Global Governance and a board member of the Citizens for Global Solutions Education Fund. In her recently published CounterPunch article "Humanity Has Two Choices: Unification or Mass Suicide", she summarises the views, warnings and predictions of the British historical philosopher and cultural historian Arnold Toynbee. In terms of content, it is largely what Toynbee wrote in his book "Change and Habit", first published by Oxford University Press, London, in 1966. In it, he argued vehemently in favour of the establishment of a world state.
The title of the article seems a little too black and white to me. There are certainly other possibilities for the survival of mankind in between. But there is no question that uniting them in a democratic world federation would be the safest and best option. Of course, there will be great difficulties on the way there. How, for example, would mankind arrive at this unified thinking?
"Finally, he believed that humanity needed to forge some unity of thought as to what constituted right and wrong. In other words, it was necessary to adopt a shared set of moral values that would serve to harmonize the disparate social and cultural heritages that had evolved independently of each other over the course of human history. Without fundamental agreement on moral issues he argued, it would be difficult to achieve political unification."
At first, this seems impossible to me, because it sounds like brainwashing and synchronisation. But that is certainly not what it is meant to be. Perhaps the project "The Global Ethic" initiated by the Swiss theologian Hans Küng could be helpful here. It includes not only believers of all religions, but also agnostics and atheists. Unfortunately, this approach is hardly discussed at present. It would be worth revitalising.
In my opinion, the article by Sovaida Maani Ewing falls short when it comes to Arnold Toynbee's concrete ideas on the organisational structure of the unification of mankind. You can find this on the last pages of his book "Mankind and Mother Earth" (retranslation from the German edition).
"The present independent regional states are incapable of maintaining peace, protecting the biosphere from human pollution, or conserving their irreplaceable resources. This political anarchy can no longer be allowed to continue in an ecumene that has long since become one in the technical and economic fields. What has been needed for five thousand years - and has proved feasible in technology for a hundred years - is a world-wide political organisation consisting of individual cells on the scale of neolithic village communities - so small and manageable that each member knows the other and yet is a citizen of the world state."
The United Nations as an organisation of sovereign and sometimes hostile and warring nation states is certainly not meant by this. But according to Toynbee, would we have to go back to the neolithic age in order to unite mankind? Here I see an indication of a possible new world organisation, the United Mankind Organisation as an association of people and supplement to the United Nations, as has already been proposed several times in my articles.
More about this on my United Mankind Initiative website.