Is human progress in history a unilinear process from the ancient to the modern through the medieval or is it a multilinear progress with a great deal of complexity and many twists and turns? Both concepts have large following within the scholarly community and among political leaders and leaders of public opinion. Perhaps we need to explore these questions further precisely because the answer to these questions may not be an either/or response, but a combination of both. We have another question to explore that we raised in the previous lecture about the relationship between culture and civilization. To answer these questions, we will engage the ideas of four philosophers of history: Ibn Khaldun, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee. But before we do that, let us look at the map of the last four civilizations and see the intertwining of trade and culture.
World history as the struggle for freedom
We saw in the previous lecture that Hegel identified two grounds for human progress: The pursuit of freedom and the desire for recognition. “The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free.” His model for progress generated a unilinear view of history, for he had to ignore several important details. Two examples suffice it to clarify this point. Hegel downplayed the fact that his model had already materialized as early as the 10th century, for by that time the movement from absolute monarchy to equal dignity would have been completed under Islamic expansion. By the 10th century, diverse humanity was seen as worthy of equal dignity and holders of political powers could not openly exempt themselves from following the rule of law. Hegel himself acknowledge this fact as he reviewed the Islamic model in his Philosophy of History: “The leading features of Mahometanism [Islam] involve this—that in actual existence nothing can become fixed, but that everything is destined to expand itself in activity and life in the boundless amplitude of the world, so that the worship of the One remains the only bond by which the whole is capable of uniting. In this expansion, this active energy, all limits, all national and caste distinctions vanish; no particular race, political claim of birth or possession is regarded—only man as a believer.”
Another important observation Hegel failed to incorporate to the unilinear model has to do with the subjection of politics to governance to ethical evaluation began in the Islamic civilization 8th century prior to its adoption of Europe as the result of the Protestant Reformation. “The Reconciliation presented in Christianity, but only in the germ, without national or political development. We must therefore regard it as commencing rather with the enormous contrast between the spiritual, religious principle, and the barbarian Real World. For Spirit as the consciousness of an inner World is, at the commencement, itself still in an abstract form. All that is secular is consequently given over to rudeness and capricious violence. The Mohammedan principle—the enlightenment of the Oriental World—is the first to contravene this barbarism and caprice. We find it developing itself later and more rapidly than Christianity; for the latter needed eight centuries to grow up into a political form.” ~ Hegel, Philosophy of History
Finally, he ignored the impact of Islamic rationalism on the rise of the West, a point that we will not pursue in this lecture, as it deserves a separate lecture to elaborate it.
World history as struggle for economic equality
Karl Marx developed a materialist version of Hegelian spirit-based version which the latter outline in his The Phenomenology of Spirit. For Marx, it is not ideas but power that matters, and ideas serve as a mask used by powerholders to conceal their real intentions. He insisted that the state is always controlled by those who own the means of production, and world history is thus the history of the struggle between workers, the proletariat, and property owners, the capitalists. Under capitalism, the contradiction is between the workers and the bourgeoisie. The Marxist theory of history is based on two main concepts: “socioeconomic formation” and “class struggle.” The “socioeconomic formation” relates to the nature of the social relations that correspond to the ownership structure of the means of the production in a particular historical stage of the human development. Like Hegel, he envisaged the end of history prior to the end of humanity. But unlike him, he saw the end as an eternal bliss on earth, describing the communist stage of history in utopian state: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
World history as Interplay of Spiritually Grounded Cultures
Spengler produced in his Decline of the West a multilinear model of human progress in which human progress is achieved through the incremental contributions of different world civilizations, each of which is developed by a singular culture that goes through a life cycle of birth, expansion, and decline. The organic cycle of civilizations follows the model developed earlier by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Khaldun, who presented the life of universal states in cyclical patterns. The khaldunian model is based on impact of cultures, particularly that of the ruling culture, on the rise and fall of expansive and prosperous states. All states, he argued, began with nomadic culture of courage, resilience, moral discipline, and group solidarity, which allows it to overcome sedentary culture that holds the power of the state, but would not be able to retain it because of level of its moral corruption, moral complacency, and internal friction and discord. “A culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of the peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences and reverts into the proto-soul.” ~ Spengler, Decline of the West
And because culture goes through stages before it matures into a prosperous society, Spengler observed that notion of culture and civilization are not the same. “For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words … are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture…. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of the Doric and Gothic.”
World civilizations are Grounded in Religious Traditions
Civilizations come to life and develop through the interaction of three elements: culture, religion, and the universal state. Out of the three elements, Toynbee identifies religion as the most significant in shaping civilizations. The dynamic of the formation of new civilizations and the deconstruction of old ones is fairly complex. It consists in the interaction of the “universal state,” “church,” and “barbarian heroic age.” This is the Khaldunian dynamic suggested by the 14th century Arab historian and the founder of modern sociology.
Western civilization, while appear grandiose at this moment, forms only one element in unified World civilization: “In a unified world, the eighteen non-Western civilizations—five of them living, fourteen of them extinct—will assuredly reassert their influence. And as, in the course of generations and centuries, a unified world gradually works its way toward an equilibrium between its diverse component cultures, the Western component will gradually be relegated to the modest place which is all that it can expect to retain in virtue of its intrinsic worth by comparison with those other cultures—surviving and extinct—which the Western society, through its modern expansion, has brought into association with itself and with one another.” ~ Toynbee, Study of History
Global society would not be western: “As a result of these successive expansions of particular civilizations, the whole habitable world has now been unified into a single great society. The movement through which this process has been finally consummated is the modern expansion of Western Christendom. But we have to bear in mind, first, that this expansion of Western Christendom has merely completed the unification of the world and has not been the agency that has produced more than the last stage of the process; and second, that, though the unification of the world has been finally achieved within a Western framework, the present Western ascendency in the world is certain not to last.” ~ Toynbee, Study of History
Decline of the West would be a direct consequence of two elements it failed to eliminate: war and class. “The decline itself results from inherent contradictions in Western civilization, not the least of which is the failure of modern West to eliminate the two major sins that brought down earlier civilization—“War” and “Class.” ~ Toynbee, Study of History
Warned of egocentrism. In 1793, King George III sent a delegation with gift to the then China’s Emperor Ch’ien Lung and suggesting that the emperor would allow his to open a mission to oversee trade with China. Emperor Lung sent back a long letter that Toynbee used to illustrate what he calls the egocentric illusion. Here is passage that illustrates Toynbee’s point: “If 1 have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit Introduction which prompted you to dispatch them from afar. Our Dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated into every country under Heaven, and kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and’ have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Conclusion
Human progress is the work of many cultures and civilizations, and Western civilization is one of at about 19 civilizations that succeeded one another over the last 5 millennia. While many civilizations have contributed to human progress, only two arose to the level of global civilization, or globalism: Islamic globalism and Western globalism, and both embraced at least at the level of ideas the notion of equal dignity.
