Why We Need Arnold Toynbee's Good Life

“He was an expert in world civilisations who made the cover of Time magazine in 1947, praised for writing ‘the most provocative work of historical theory… since Karl Marx’s Capital’.”

“The most influential prophets of this creed are in Silicon Valley in California, where, to the tune of billions of dollars, the tech industry tells a Whiggish tale about the digital ascent of humanity: from our benighted times, we’ll emerge into a brighter future, a happier and more open society in which everything has been measured and engineered into a state of perfect efficiency.”

“The problem with the Industrial System was that it didn’t know when to stop, pushing relentlessly into domains where it simply didn’t work.”

“Toynbee’s primary target was The New Cambridge Modern History (1957-79), a 14-volume history of Europe since the Renaissance with four editors and dozens of authors. He thought that such works were feats of engineering rather than achievements of scholarship: ‘They will take their rank with our stupendous tunnels and bridges and dams and liners and battleships and skyscrapers, and their editors will be remembered among the famous Western engineers.’ Impressive, in other words, but not really history.”

“As the American poet Jack Gilbert would put it in ‘Winter Happiness in Greece’ (2009): ‘The world is beyond us even as we own it.’”

“‘One must be free to resort to the different methods of the poet, the historian, and the scientist in turn,’ he argued. Today, we could do worse than emulate Toynbee’s genuine and self-reflective brand of intellectual pluralism: ‘No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.’”

“Intellectual pluralism is important. It’s also pretty unobjectionable as far as banners go, easy to gather a crowd behind. Academics reminding one another to let a hundred flowers bloom are a little bit like politicians calling for a renewed spirit of bipartisanship: not wrong, but really asking only for the lowest common denominator of critical engagement. Toynbee called for harmony, but he was never one to settle on such safe ground, rather continuing onto more challenging terrain. He dares humanists to imagine a more muscular role for themselves as engaged critics and moral thinkers.”

“We forget sometimes (or are uncomfortable in saying) that the humanities are at root about questions of value: what it means to lead a good life or how to build a just society.”

“humanistic inquiry is a moral enterprise, an unfinished project of exploration and improvement”

“humanists must be crusaders, that their strength lies in their capacity (and willingness) to confront members of the public with hard questions about themselves”

“Technology isn’t going anywhere. The real issue is what to do with it.”

“Technology comes, in other words, with political baggage. We need critics who can pull back the curtain, who can scrutinise digital technology without either antipathy or boosterism, who can imagine how it might be used differently. We need critics who can ask questions of value.”

“We must remember how to speak the language of value, encouraging our readers and students to ask not simply ‘Is it more efficient?’ or ‘How much does it cost?’ but ‘Is it good or bad? For whom? According to which standard?’”

“The US novelist Ursula K Le Guin put it well in her speech at the National Book Awards in New York last year when she observed that we need ‘the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being’. This is what the humanities are for – not writing better quarterly reports or grabbing a gig in corporate communications – but for posing fundamental questions of value and helping us imagine alternatives to the way we live.”

“What are the humanities for in a technological age? For Toynbee, the answer was clear: to save us from ourselves.”