Playboy Interview: Arnold Toynbee

Hailed by many scholars as the greatest historian of the century, assailed by others for what they consider an obsession with dead rather than living civilizations, and for his insistence that the Western world may collapse unless it rediscovers a sense of spiritual purpose, Arnold Joseph Toynbee, at 77, is one of the most brilliant, distinguished and controversial of living Englishmen. Best known as the author of "A Study of History"--a prodigious attempt, which occupied him for 27 years and fills a dozen weighty volumes, to chronicle and assess nothing less than the entire recorded history of mankind--Toynbee is also an acknowledged authority on contemporary international relations and a contentious critic of American foreign policy in particular. He was a member of British delegations to peace conferences after both World Wars, and for much of his working life has supervised the annual survey published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Although Toynbee's eminence and accomplishments are beyond dispute (he is a Companion of Honor, a title granted by the Queen for outstanding literary achievement or public service, and bears honorary degrees from Princeton, Columbhia, Combridge and his own university, Oxford), other historians have for years been attacking his theories, in detail as well as in design. When the last four volumes of "A Study of History" appeared, the prominent Dutch scholar Pieter Geyl dubbed them "a further installment of the same maddening profusion of vastly learned examples, stated in an attractive or impressive, but frequently slipshod fashion and proving exactly nothing." The British historian A. J. P. Taylor, writing on Toynbee's book "East to West," averred that his colleauge "disliked contact with life.... Toynbee is an expatriate, a rootless man, alien everywhere and...at home only among the ruins." Toynbee, however, credits his classical background with giving him "a mental standing ground outside the time and place into which I happen to have been born" and "a lifelong conviction that human affairs do not become intelligible until they are seen as a whole."

Western civilization can escape the fate of Babylon and Rome, Toynbee believes, if the people of the West accept his thesis that "our choice is going to be not between a whole world and a shreddedup world, but between one world and no world." He prophesies "that the human race is going to choose life and good, not death and evil. I therefore believe in the imminence of one world, and I believe that, in the 21st Century, human life is going to be a unity again in all its aspects and activities." Among the obstacles to such a unity, Toynbee has often singled out nationalism as a prime cause of war and social disintegration. Zionism--which he considers a nationalistic perversion of Judaism, a religion he professes to admire--has been one of his most frequent targets. "All the far-flung ghettos of the world are to be gathered into one patch of soil in Palestine to create a single consolidated ghetto there," he once wrote. S. O. Liptzin, Chairman of the American Jewish Congress Commission on Jewish Affairs, considers Toynbee's dubious distinction between Judaism and Zionism "insulting and dishonest." Another critic has called Toynbee "an outright, if highly sophisticated anti-Semite." Toynbee himself claims he is neither an enemy of the Jews nor an advocate for the Arabs; but while visiting the Arab countries, he has chosen to bypass Israel--which he invariably refers to as "Palestine"; he has also publicly denounced "the Jewish massacre of Arabs in 1948." His questionable attitude toward the Jews, like the other controversial issues that have evolved out of his search for a "total" view of mankind, will continue to be debated as long as his works are read.

Today, though nominally in retirement, Toynbee spends three days a week working at Chatham House in London, headquarters of the Royal Institute. He remains an active traveler and continues to write every morning; his afternoons are devoted to research, sometimes in the British Museum--where he can be seen taking voluminous notes in a minuscule hand--but usually in the book-lined study of his fourth-floor apartment in West London, where late last winter he spent two four-hour sessions, on consecutive days, with Playboy interviewer Norman MacKenzie. As he spoke, in a gentle but emphatic voice, he sat passively, relying on subtle idiosyncrasises of expression--especially a trick of squinting, and a habit of lifting his eyebrows in mock surprise--to dramatize his statements. We began our conversations by asking him to amplify some of his well-publicized criticisms of the United States.

[Q] Playboy: A few years ago you wrote that America is "the leader of a world-wide counterrevolutionary movement in defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor." Do you still feel that way?

[A] Toynbee: More than ever, I'm afraid. The U. S. Government and the American people used to sympathize with and encourage liberation movements all over the world, such as the Spanish-American struggle against Spain, the Irish and Indian movements against Britain, the Italian Risorgimento against Austria, and the Polish movement against Austria, Prussia and Russia. But today, America is making it her business to oppose and defeat so-called wars of liberation wherever they break out, and in some cases she has actively supported reactionary and unrepresentative regimes in other countries. She has even practiced countersubversion, as in Guatemala a few years ago. I think this policy is immoral; it is also bound to bring its own retribution. In resisting subversive leftwing practices to which she objects, America has in some cases fallen into adopting the same practices herself. The occasion of this big--and, as I see it, unfortunate--change in American attitudes and policy was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The deeper cause of the change, I should say, is that America has become immensely rich, and therefore has become defensive-minded. She suspects other people of wanting to take her wealth from her, and this has made her militantly antiliberal.

[Q] Playboy: Is this view what led you to make such extreme statements as your remark that "Madison Avenue is more danger to the West than communism"?

[A] Toynbee: That is an extreme statement, but I believe it is a correct one. Communism is a threat to the West from outside, but not a very serious one. No Western country seems likely to be converted to communism. Most Western countries, including the U. S., are becoming welfare states, which is a form of inoculation against communism. Madison Avenue, however, is a threat from the inside, and we are betrayed by what is false within. Pushing sales by advertising is propagating what Plato called "the lie in the soul." It is substituting the "image" of things for the truth about them. It is, in fact, a campaign of subversion against intellectual honesty and moral integrity--and these are the indispensable foundations of decent civilized life.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be implying that America should be more concerned with its domestic integrity than with what the Government construes as a moral responsibility to protect the free world from falling under Communist control.

[A] Toynbee: If, at any time between 1941 and 1946, you had told me that one day I should wish to see America return to isolationism, I should not have believed you. Of course, I still do not really wish to see America go isolationist. The world has now become a unity, and we must all, therefore, become world-minded--especially America, because she is at present the most powerful country in the world. I do not want to see communism, capitalism and other ways of life--the ways of the majority of mankind--that are neither Communist nor capitalist, finding means to co-exist with one another. That is why I think America's policy of opposing communism by force is misconceived. It defeats its own object. The only effective means of preventing the spread of communism--or any other way of life, for that matter--is to make some different way of life more attractive on the test of its results. In Europe, the U. S. is helping Europeans to do things that the Europeans themselves believe to be good for them. In Asia, the U. S. is trying to impose on Asians things that the U. S. feels to be good for Asians--or to be good for American interests in Asia. The Americans and the Northwest Europeans have the same way of life; Asians, however, have their own ways, which are neither Communist nor capitalist.

[Q] Playboy: In this context, you have said: "In refusing to refusing to recognize that the Viet Cong represents a national liberation movement made by the south Vietnamese themselves, and in attributing the war wholly to Communist intervention from the outside, the United States is unintentionally making herself the heir of European colonialism in Asia." Do you stand by that statement?

[A] Toynbee: I certainly do. I arrived at this conclusion as a result of a number of meetings and discussions with people in different parts of the United States in the fall of 1964 and the spring of 1965. To my mind, the most alarming thing about the American attitude toward Vietnam--and this applies to the Administration as well as to the general public--is that, as I see it, the American attitude is so unrealistic. I think America wants to play the role of Saint George on a world scale, and therefore needs a world-wide dragon: monolithic world communism. I happen to think it is an imaginary dragon that she is hugging, that the U. S. will not look at the realities. As I see it, the motive that makes the Viet Cong and North Vietnam fight this colossus of the United States at tremendous cost to themselves is one that is very well known. What they want is national liberation from foreign domination, and then national reunification. They wanted to get rid of the French, and now the want to get rid of they Americans. They want to be reunited again. This is a perfectly understandable motive; it is one that inspires people to fight wars of liberation. But the U. S. goes on insisting that this is part of a world Communist conspiracy. Until the Americans get down to looking at the realities, without prejudice, they won't begin to solve their difficulties in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: Some commentators feel that the Chinese are willing to see the United States drawn more and more deeply into Vietnam, because it offers them a chance to demonstrate to the world that the U. S. is an imperialist power. Do you think this is the case?

[A] Toynbee: I think that some such motive is probably present. After all, the Chinese are causing America odium and expense in lives and money. Vietnam is costly, after all. But, of course, the Chinese might miscalculate; the risk in this policy is that the war with the U. S. might in the end make Vietnam turn against China. China is not being a very handsome partner to Vietnam. So the Chinese can't go all the way in this policy. I also think we should recoganize that the Chinese have a strong motive for wishing to get America farther removed from their own doorstep. She is standing on their doorstep in Vietnam, in Taiwan, in Korea. They would like to see her farther off. I think that is a genuine anxiety on their part.

[Q] Playboy: Are you suggesting that the U. S. withdraw completely from Southeast Asia, in order to cease causing China anxiety?

[A] Toynbee: I believe the right policy for America would be to try to get a Southeast Asia that wasn't dominated either politically or militarily by any major power, either by herself or by China. Americans might say: "Well, if we go out, China will come in." But what is the priority of Chinese motives? I think China's paramount motive is Southeast Asia is to get America out. As I said, America is uncomfortably close to China's doorstep, from China's point of view. The safeguard, from the American point of view, would be that, if China did then think of encroaching on Southeast Asia, there would always be the deterrent that this might provoke the U. S. to return. A really neutral Southeast Asia could well receive aid from both America and China. Both these countries, I believe, have a common interest in ensuring that Southeast Asia shall be politically and militarily independent.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you have suggested that the U. S. should "stand aside and allow self-determination in Vietnam...even if this leads, as it most certainly will lead, to...a Communist regime."

[A] Toynbee: I think it is desirable that there should be a regime in Vietnam that will be genuinely independent and neutral and that will therefore form a kind of insulator between the United Sates and China. I think this is desirable from the point of view of Vietnam itself, and from the point of view of China and America, too. The only Vietnamese regime I can think of that would be capable of doing this is a united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. That is what we would get if we had self-determination in Vietnam--and that, to my mind, is very desirable, even at the cost of this being a Communist regime. Ho Chi Minh is a Communist, after all, only because the French and the Americans forced him to turn to communism as a means of organizing the movement for independence. He started as a nationalist. He is still a nationalist first. All Communists or capitalists are nationalists first and foremost. Any other ideology always comes second, I think, to nationalism. I believe the North Vietnamese hate having been thrust into China's arms by France and being firmly kept there now by America. As I see it, America is playing China's game, not America's and Russia's game, by making war in Vietnam. If America withdrew and allowed the two forcibly separated halves of Vietnam to reunite under Ho Chi Minh, I believe a reunited Vietnam would be as effective a barrier to China's expansion as Yugoslavia is to Russia's.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see Ho playing a Tito-ist role in the Far East?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, and astonishing China by his ingratitude, just as Austria astonished Russia by her ingratitude at the time of the Crimean War.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the United States would accept a Communist regime in Vietnam?

[A] Toynbee: They have accepted a Communist regime in Yugoslavia, haven't they? They have recognized that from their point of view, Tito is as good a thing as they can get--in that part of the world, anyway. My hope would be that they would come to see that Ho Chi Minh was as good a thing as they could get in Southeast Asia. But there is a serious psychological obstacle. America first has to admit that she has made a mistake--a big one.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there is anything the U. S. can do about ending the war while Hanoi and Peking refuse to negotiate except on terms equivalent to unconditional and unilateral American withdrawal?

[A] Toynbee: Well, nobody is going to refuse to negotiate on any terms. If both sides agree on a cease-fire, the crucial question is whether the U. S. would agree to a genuine consultation of opinion in the South as well as the North, including the option for the South to reunite with the North. But Hanoi doesn't believe that America is at present willing to do that, thought President Johnson keeps on saying that he is ready to negotiate unconditionally. Now, I notice that though the British Foreign Secretary steadily lays the blame on Hanoi for refusing to negotiate now, he always says, too, that if we could get back to the 1954 Geneva agreements, then there would come a point when there would be a free vote in Vietnam over the question of reunion. If that possibility could be assured, then I think we would be removing the chief obstacle to negotiation. But will the U. S. be willing to agree to that? After all, she refused once before to be a party to an agreement under which south Vietnam could join up again with North Vietnam. Has she changed her mind and her policy on this?

[Q] Playboy: Many of those opposed to U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam argue that to do so would open the door to Communist take-overs in Laos, Cambodia and even Thailand. How do you feel about this "domino theory"?

[A] Toynbee: The domino theory depends 3 on the dogma that communism or anti-communism is the capital question in everybody's mind. I entirely disbelieve in this. I think communism is a very secondary thing, and that capitalism is also a very secondary thing at present, compared with nationalism. I think Cambodia and Laos and Thailand will follow their national interests--whatever they think these are. If they think their interest is to go Communist, they will go Communist. But I don't think the fact of Vietnam's going Communist will necessarily lead to the neighboring countries' going Communist, too. As a matter of fact, they are very anxious not to fall under Chinese control. For about 2000 years, all the people of Southeast Asia have been afraid of falling under Chinese domination, and sometimes they have temporarily fallen under it. I think that if the American presence were removed, then the whole national effort of these countries would go back to resisting being taken over by China instead of America. In Vietnam, in particular, there would be some hope of stabilizing the regime on this basis of independence, because the Vietnamese people have a stronger national consciousness; I think they are the most upstanding of all these peoples. After all, they have resisted China for 2000 years; they resisted the French; and now they are resisting the Americans.

[Q] Playboy: You have expressed a great deal of hostility toward nationalism in many of your writings. How do you reconcile your support of self-determination in Vietnam with your low regard for nationalism?

[A] Toynbee: Nationalism is the big enemy of the human race in present conditions, because technology has made the world one, while the habit of nationalism tries to keep it apart. Technology can be used to better mankind; but if we can't get over nationalism, technology will be used to smash up mankind, I think. Though I dislike all nationalism, however, I dislike an aggressive nationalism more than I dislike a defensive nationalism. It seems to me that before you can get over nationalism, you have to satisfy the nationalism of people who have been subject to foreign rule--like so many people in Asia and Africa, including the Vietnamese. The only desirable long-term policy is that all nationalism should be subordinated to some kind of general government of the human race. We are a long way off from that; but unless we can get there, now that we are in the atomic age, our future is pretty black.

[Q] Playboy: China can now make nuclear weapons, and will soon have rockets to carry them. How do you think this will change the nuclear "balance of terror"?

[A] Toynbee: For the moment, atomic weapons are making China cautious in action--as distinct from her words--because her nuclear installations are hostages to fortune while they are in the embryonic stage. If and when China has stockpiled nuclear weapons and rockets on the American and Russian scale, American and Russia will have to treat China as an equal.

[Q] Playboy: In view of the bellicosity of China's leaders, do you believe that they might be more ready than the Russians to risk the use of nuclear weapons against the West?

[A] Toynbee: Their words would make us think so; but the more they have to lose, the more cautious they are likely to become.

[Q] Playboy: The upsurgence of the warmongering Red Guard movement, with Mao Tse-tung's wholehearted support, would seem to give little evidence of a trend toward caution in Chinese foreign policy.

[A] Toynbee: I think the Red Guard uprising is merely a still more violent form of the violent reaction in China against foreigners that began as long ago as the Boxer rebellion at the beginning of this century&mash;nearly half a century before the Communist take-over. This constantly increasing Chinese militancy is, I believe, a reaction to China's century of humiliation, from 1839 to 1945, during which the Chinese were trampled on by Britain, France and Japan, in turn, and were treated as "natives," after having been the center and source of civilization in their half of the world for more than 2000 years. I think the Chinese have turned savage now because they want two things that cannot be combined. They want to get rid of everything Western and, at the same time, they want to have the material power and wealth that can be given only by a mastery of Western science and technology. As they acquire it, I expect China's policy to evolve in the way Russia's has evolved--toward coexistence with the West; and the West, as far as China is concerned, includes Russia. For the moment, I think the Chinese hate America and Russia equally.

[Q] Playboy: since the Soviet Union is now moving closer to what the Chinese consider heretical capitalist ideas such as wage incentives and the mass production of consumer goods, do you see industrialization leading to a withering away of Communist ideals in Russia?

[A] Toynbee: No, I do not. I expect industrialization to lead, everywhere, to a mixture of free enterprise with socialism. The technological and economic forces that are at work on both sides of the Iron Curtain are identical, and they are going to produce uniform results. President Johnson's "Great Society" and Mr. Kosygin's post-Stalinist communism will be very like each other. The past conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, and between Moslems and Christians, throw light on what is likely to happen. After all, Christianity and Islam coexist in the world today, after 13 centuries of war and hostility; both Protestantism and Catholicism have managed to survive in the same world, though for centuries after the Reformation each party swore that the world would be an impossible place to live in as long as the other party was on the map. The same thing is likely to happen to communism and capitalism. They are each going on swearing that they cannot coexist with the other, yet they are beginning to coexist more and more. And what is more, they are beginning to become less and less unlike each other. They keep their labels but change their contents. Eventually, I suspect, they will become practically indistinguishable from each other. For I think that the same thing is happening to Russia now as began to happen to America in 1917. Russia, in her turn, is ceasing to be revolutionary and is becoming conservative. For the moment, this makes a present to China of the prorevolutionary role in the world that was played by America until 1917 and by Russia after that date. But China, too, will surely become conservative in her turn, as she becomes more affluent. Traditionally, in their politics, the Chinese have been conservative and moderate.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that, as China catches up industrially and economically with Russia, their ideological differences will slowly disappear?

[A] Toynbee: Probably so--but I think the ideological dispute between China and Russia is a screen for a deeper and perhaps more lasting conflict of national interests, and the heart of this conflict lies in China's determination to regain all the territories that were taken from her during the century 1839-1945. She has already regained Sinkiang, Manchuria and Tibet. Till 1856-1860, the whole leftbank half of the Amur basin, as well as the territory between the Ussuri river and the sea down to the site of Vladivostok, inclusive, was Chinese. The Chinese would like to recover these lost territories from Russia; but China is no match for Russia yet. Before many more years, however, she will be.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that this is one of the major anxieties underlying Russia's antagonism toward China today?

[A] Toynbee: I should. Look at the length of the land frontier between Russia and China. After all, if America got tired of boxing with China, she could just pull her troops back across the Pacific and have half the world between her and China. But Russia can't disengage from China. Once, long ago, I traveled from Peking back to Ostend by train. The Russians and Chinese were fighting in Manchurian then, over the railway that the Russians had built on what the Chinese claimed to be their land. I can't forget the impression of coming out of that teeming country, China, into the empty expanse of Siberia. There they were, side by side. It was like two levels of water. When you have two very different levels of water, there is termendous pressure to combine at the same level. Now, the Russians are conscious of this. They are trying to fill eastern Siberia and to industrialize it but it is a race against time. I think they have great cause for anxiety.

[Q] Playboy: Do you anticipate that this territorial dispute may lead to war between Russia and China?

[A] Toynbee: I do not expect to see armed clashes between nuclear powers. But, of course, I may be too optimistic.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the differences between Moscow and Peking could be turned to the advantage of the West?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, I do. If peace were to be re-established in Vietnam, I think that Russia might seek insurance against Chinese nationalism by reaching an understanding with the United States. Russia, after all, is far more genuinely threatened by Chinese chauvinism than is the United States. But this new line-up would only continue the Could War while shifting the line of division between the opposing parties. I don't want to see a line-up of the West and Russia against China. But I do want to see a rapprochement between Russia and America--not necessarily against China but for a more positive purpose: to stabilize the world and put the world in order. Nothing can put the world in order except the combined action of the United States and the soviet Union. Vietnam is the key, because while President Johnson goes on with the Vietnam war, and U. S. bombers smash up the country, Russia just can't afford to side with America. Nationalism may be more important than communism, but take another example. If a Moslem country were fighting a holy war against a Christian country, it would be difficult for another Christian country to collaborate with the Moslems who were fighting a holy war against its coreligionists. The same sort of thing applies here; we have to allow for the outward appearance of Communist solidarity. So I think that the Vietnam war is the key to relations between Moscow and Washington.

[Q] Playboy: How do you see relation between the U. S. and China developing in the next ten years?

[A] Toynbee: It very much depends upon the attitude of the U. S. toward China. As I see it, America has been busy since 1949 sticking pins into the tiger and then saying, "Look what a ferocious tiger it is--it reacts." The French have a saying: "This creature is very wicked; it defends itself when attacked." I think this sums up my view of American relations with China. American has been stirring up China; she has been as nasty to China as she can be. For instance, she has been lobbying to keep China out of the United Nations and has been urging other countries to stop trading with China. How can you expect China not to be nasty to America and to America's Western satellites? What I would try first is behaving to China as if she were an ordinary country with ordinary human rights, to see how she reacts to that. I think China is determined to get all Western powers--and today that really means primarily the United States--away from her doorstep. I don't think Britain on her doorstep in Hong Kong or Portugal on her doorstep in Macao is much of a worry to China; but America is.

China wants to get back to her position as it was when she was the leading nation in East Asia, in the same sort of way as the U. S. is the leading nation in the Western Hemisphere. But I don't see China having world-wide ambitions. In the past, she was the great power in East Asia but not outside that area; and she can be the leading power in that area again without actually annexing or politically and militarily dominating the smaller countries around her. For instance, China could take the line in Eastern Asia that the U. S. takes in the Western Hemisphere. The U. S. bars all non-American powers from reacquiring political influence or control in the hemisphere, but it is only occasionally and temporarily that she herself has occupied Latin-American countries militarily. The U. S. interest in the hemisphere is largely negative--an interest in keeping other powers out. I think that this is also china's substantial interest in Eastern Asia. for the present regime of china, as for the present regime in Russia, communism is an instrument of nationalism, not an end in itself.

I always go back to the original struggle in Russia between Stalin and Trotsky. So far as I know, Trotsky was the only leading statesman in any Communist country who was genuinely prepared to sacrifice the national interest of his country in order to propagate the Communist world revolution. That's what trotsky wanted to do with Russia. But Stalin Wanted to exploit communism in Russia's national interests, and Stalin won. This is significant. I think the nationalist will always win over any other kind of ideologist. Therefore, I believe that what China wants with communism is to use it as an instrument for restoring China to her traditional position in the world. That may be a position of very great power and importance, but it is something quite different from expending China's national resources and well-being in order to convert the whole world to communism by force.

[Q] Playboy: If what you say is true, why do you think Chinese communism has such a significant appeal in Africa and Latin America?

[A] Toynbee: Like the Africans and the Chinese have been treated as "natives," and they have suffered recently enough, and are still suffering enough from white imperialism, to feel a real solidarity with other poor peoples, and to join forces with them rather than with the West or even with Russia. The Africans and Latin Americans think the Russians are wretched white people like the rest of us. After all, the Russians are becoming as prosperous as the Europeans and the americans, and now in african and Latin-American eyes, their true color is coming out. The African and Asian revolutionaries feel that the Russians don't really means business. They think, however, that the Chinese do mean business. So it isn't communism so much as Chinese support that is attractive to Africans and Asians who are still subject to colonial regimes. Chinese communism is attractive insofar as it proves to be as effective as Russian communism in generating industrial and military power under the conditions of the present-day world.

[Q] Playboy: How can the U. S. combat this appeal?

[A] Toynbee: By competing with Russia and China in giving these developing countries the things they want. But this is more difficult for a capitalist country than for a Communist country. They point is illustrated by the fate of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. Latin America really needs a drastic revolution; it needs the putting down of the selfish minority that is in power in most Latin-American countries. This is a thing that communism will do but that America, almost on principle, won't do. Therefore, America's attempts to help the people of Latin America are going to be frustrated by her leniency toward the ruling minorities. Communist countries don't have the same inhibitions, so communism has rather more to offer to the masses in Latin America that has the United States.

[Q] Playboy: Can you se any way the U. S. could avoid supporting reactionary dictatorships as a bulwark against Communist take-overs?

[A] Toynbee: By going back to her original tradition. If you go back 150 years, you will find passages in Metternich's dispatches in which he bewails the revolutionary subversive action of the United States in South America and Europe, very much the way in which Mr. Dulles bewailed the actions of the Soviet Union there. America started with a revolutionary tradition, but about the time of the Russian Revolution, she suddenly made this about-face and became the Metternich of the present day, trying to organize another Holy Alliance against revolution.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that America's foreign-aid programs have been a failure in this respect?

[A] Toynbee: They are not successful insofar as they put money in the pockets of the rich. There are many countries, including India and many Latin-American countries, in which you have got to have really drastic social and political changes before foreign aid can effectively reach the pockets it should go to. But America in her present mood will not do that, and her present mood will not do that, and her present foreign-aid program is therefore bound to be frustrated to a large extent. Some things, like the Peace Corps, are successful, because all these individual young men and women are obviously politically disinterested and they are now doing useful things for the countries they work in. But monetary and economic improvements are largely frustrated by the social setup of many of the countries that are being given aid. Things are different, of course, in both the east-European Communist countries and the West-European capitalist countries that have received U. S. aid. They are in a healthier social condition than many other parts of the world. The reason the Marshall Plan was a success was that the social and political structure of the west-European countries was sound enough for that money to be put in the right places and to fructify. But that is not the case in Latin America or, say, in India or Pakistan.

[Q] Playboy: Because of these economic inequities, do you foresee the possibility of a military conflict between the West and the underdeveloped nations?

[A] Toynbee: I think this is the issue underlying the Rhodesian question today. If you take a long-term view, you can see that, until about 300 years ago, the West was just an ordinary part of the world, just one section of the civilized world like any other, not more advanced in any way, not less advanced. But about three centuries back, we in the West began to pull away. We became preponderant in power because we stole a march on the rest of the world in technology. For a time, this put us ahead of other people. As a result, a smallish minority of the human race, which is becoming a smaller minority every year, has easily dominated the world through its technological superiority. But as we see from the case of Russia, technology may be a difficult thing to invent, but it is not so difficult a thing to adopt from other people once it has been invented. Now, Russia, China and all the rest of the non-Western majority of the human race have begun to realize that if they want to get even with the West and to hold their own, they must master Western technology. If it is possible to do it, world has fully mastered Western technology--Russia pretty well has done so already; she is now ahead of most Western countries except the U.S.--then numbers will count. The West has a limited time to get off its perch. If we continue to be racialist, and if we go on insisting on our domination, instead of trying to get back to an equality with the majority, we shall eventually become an oppressed minority. It is up to us. The question that Britain faces over Rhodesia is this: Are we going to be racialist or are we going to be mankind-minded and try to give equal treatment to nonwhites and whites? We haven't given a positive answer so far. For instance, Britain is perfectly ready to use force in Arab countries, like Aden. She won't use force against a white minority in Rhodesia. The world notes this and draws conclusions.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there is a danger of a racial rather than an ideological or economic split in the world?

[A] Toynbee: I didn't think that until recently. After all, the biggest rivalry has been between America and Russia, two white nations; in Asia, the key differences have been between India and china and between India and Pakistan. But since the Rhodesian issue came to the surface, and since I have seen how divided Britain is on the race question, including the internal question of Pakistani and West Indian immigrants, I am much more inclined to fear that we may line up on racial or color lines. This is a grim prospect. I am now rather afraid that racial differences, which are very inflammatory, may come to the top. The really provocative thing is the Western nations' double standard in dealing with white people and with nonwhites. People in Britain, for example, are horrified at the idea of using military force against the 217,000 white Rhodesians. But they don't get upset when force is used against Arabs in Aden. This is so everywhere. The Americans wouldn't do to, say, France what they are doing in Vietnam--no not for a moment.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that the persistence of such attitudes abroad may be related to the rise of "Black Power" and Negro rioting in the U. S.?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, I do--and I expect, in the immediate future, an increase in violence on both sides. But I also expect that the ultimate solution of the race conflict in the U. S. is going to be integration in the 100-percent form of intermarriage. This will become possible when the African Americans have arrived at cultural equality with the European Americans--as they will one day. What look like race conflict often masks a conflict between people who are at different levels of culture. I believe culture counts for more than race. We can learn from current history. When I say "we," of course, this is the minority white point of view, isn't it? A number of countries have already solved this problem. Go to west Pakistan, for example; you will see there people of every kind of physical race--black, white, yellow--living together, intermarrying, passing the time of day together socially, without any race consciousness whatever. The divisions in the Indian subcontinent are religious, not a matter of color. Go to Mexico and many other Latin-American countries, where the population is predominantly Indian, with a dash of white in it, and you will see the same. This problem has been solved already in a great part of the world, largely in Latin America and the Islamic world. It is only a portion of the Western world, especially the Teutonic-speaking portion, the people who speak English and Dutch and German, that seems to be so bad about race.

[Q] Playboy: Why, in your opinion?

[A] Toynbee: This attitude has rather a distant origin, I think. After all, these are the barbarians who came into the Roman Empire. By the time they had carved out successor states from the Roman Empire, they were very conscious that they were the new dominant race. Of course, they became assimilated, but perhaps later on, when they came up against markedly different races--the Africans, for instance--this sense of racial privilege and race pride came out again. I don't know. In any case, it is a very serious thing. It is not so bad in the French Commonwealth--though the Algerian war was as bad as it could be, of course; but the French colons did intermarry with Africans quite a lot, too. That is a help.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that racial or religious differences are as important historically as economic or class conflicts?

[A] Toynbee: It is awfully hard to measure the relative importance. I think Marx was right to criticize the old-fashioned kind of history, which was in terms of politics and wars entirely--a history of kings and queens and battles and political revolutions. But Marx made no real progress by saying: "It is not politics; it is economics that counts. That is the key thing." I don't think there is any key thing; or if there is, it is probably the underlying religious feelings that people have. Religion gets down to the deepest layers of the human soul. On the whole, I should say that no aspect or activity of human life is the sole key to history. The old-fashioned political view of history, the view that politics is more important than economics, is borne out, against Marx, by the facts. When people have the choice between an economic interest and a political interest, they will nearly always sacrifice the economic interest for the political goal. One remarkable case is that of Trieste in recent times. Trieste was a very flourishing port for the whole Habsburg monarchy, but the population was mainly Italian. They had this choice: Did they wish to see the Austrian Empire broken up and themselves united with Italy at the cost of being ruined economically, or did they prefer to remain prosperous economically and remain Austrian subjects? They preferrred to be Italians and be ruinned--and I think this is rather characteristic. I can think of many other instances. Politics are more romantic that economics. You can appeal more powerfully to peoples' emotions on political or military issued that on economic matters. People are pretty silly about this.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that the United Nations has been effective in arbitrating such political and military disputes on an international level?

[A] Toynbee: Its history so far has been sadly like the history of the League of Nations. Its technical organizations, like those of the League of Nations, have been a great success; they have played a very valuable role in a world where we are trying to help the backward countries to get abreast of the more advanced countries. But that in itself will not keep the peace of the world. There will be no advance for anybody unless we can keep the world in order. But as a peace-keeping agency, the United Nations is no stronger than the strength that is behind it. Given the present distribution of power in the world, the United Nations would not be effective in say, insisting on a compromise settlement in Kashmir or a settlement in Rhodesia unless it could count on the joint action of the Soviet Union and the United States. That was the original idea at San Francisco in 1945. But as has happened so often after a great war in which one side has suffered a decisive defeat, there was an immediate reversal of alliances. As soon as Japan and Germany were temporarily out of the way, the power competition shifted to between the former allies, Russia and America. That is one of the Fatal aspects of power politics. It is what has hindered the United Nations from playing the role that it was meant to play in putting the world in order. Unless the world is put in order effectively, our future is black.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think are the chances of putting the world in order?

[A] Toynbee: Pretty good. I believe that the world is going to be put in order, and I also believe that mankind will fairly soon come to a point at which we shall be willing to buy order at a high cost in terms of liberty. We shall not like to give up our traditional liberty to go to war, to go on strike, to spend our earnings as we choose instead of paying them away in taxes for the public authorities to spend as they choose. But I believe that peace and affluence are what most people desire, and we cannot have these without order in the age of mechanization. I therefore believe that the human race would submit to a Russo-American--or a Russo-American-Chinese--dictatorship if it believed that, at this price, it could have affluence and peace. This was the state of mind of the peoples of the Mediterranean world in the First Century B.C. That was why they welcomed Augustus' world dictatorship and, by welcoming it, made it possible.

If the 125 sovereign independent states of this atomic-age world remain sovereign and independent, they will destroy one another and the human race as well. The only hope of survival for these states lies in voluntarily subordinating themselves to a world government. The original 13 North American states have survived because they have subordinated themselves to the Union. I should like to see the rudiments, anyway, of a world government for the crucial things, for life-and -death things like the control of atomic energy and the production and distribution of food--to take the two most urgent issues. I don't think we can get through without that. Treaties between individual governments will not be enough to ensure that atomic energy is not used either to blow the world up or to poison it, or to see that enough of the right kind of food is produced and is then distributed to the right places.

[Q] Playboy: Would you like to see some kind of international peace-keeping force?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, I would. Of course, it can only be of avail with the smaller powers. A peace-keeping force could deal with Rhodesia, perhaps; it might deal with India and Pakistan. It could even deal with powers the size of France and Britain. The mere fact that, in December 1956, Russia and America happened to have the same point of view was enough to stop Britain, France and Israel dead in their attack on Egypt. But a peace-keeping force couldn't deal with rows among America, China and Russia. You would need the combined force of Russia And America backing some system of world government rather than just the moral force of treaties over such crucial matters as food and atomic weapons.

[Q] Playboy: You have written that the invention of nuclear weapons has helped to keep the peace since the end of World War Two. How?

[A] Toynbee: Let's suppose they hadn't been invented. It is hard to imagine that, in such circumstances, there wouldn't have been already a final war between Russia and America. That would have been the natural sequel, I think, to the second World War. One of the two surviving superpowers would have knocked the other out and would have established a world empire as the result of a third World War. But that can't happen in the nuclear age, because they would each knock the other out; there couldn't be a winner. No one would be left to organize the world as a conqueror. I think that has been a deterrent. I also think a nuclear club is extremely important. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the great menaces in the world today. I should really like to see nuclear weapons confined to Russia and America and, I suppose, China. We cannot prevent China from having nuclear weapons now. But I should like to see Britain and Egypt give them up, and I would like to see France somehow induced, after De Gaulle has departed, to give them up as well. Of course, if nuclear weapons were limited to Russia and America, there wouldn't be democratic government of the world. A Russo-American world government would probably be very authoritarian, but it would at least ensure the survival of the human race--and that is the first consideration, to my mind. I have 11 grandchildren, and I want them to survive; that comes first for me.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any practical steps you think could be taken to achieve universal nuclear disarmament?

[A] Toynbee: There are 123 states in the world besides Russia and America. If Russia and America were to have a nuclear monopoly, the would have to persuade the rest of the world that they were not going to misuse their power but were going to use it to preserve the human race, not to destroy it. They would also have to persuade the world that they were genuinely proposing to scale down their own nuclear weapons gradually to the vanishing point. If they could make people really believe those two things, then there might be some chance of persuading the world. What is at issue is the survival of the human race versus the self-destruction of the species; so we had better let the Russians and the Americans have this temporary monopoly, pending the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

[Q] Playboy: Are you suggesting that the great powers should use their nuclear stockpile as a means of discouraging the development of nuclear capacity or missile systems by lesser powers?

[A] Toynbee: Yes--by giving a guarantee of nuclear protection to any power that is willing to renounce nuclear weapons.

[Q] Playboy: Is it realistic to expect any nation to relinquish its atomic weapons voluntarily?

[A] Toynbee: Weapons do tend to be idolized, don't they? They have a kind of ceremonial value--like swords. They survive as focuses of emotion long after they cease to have any practical value. It is possible that they will become a kind of status symbol, that people will keep nuclear weapons for this reason, thought they are a little more expensive than even the most elaborate swords. But if war were really ruled out and if peace were preserved for many generations, I suppose a time might come when people would be rational enough to ask whether there was any point in keeping these nuclear weapons. But here we come up against a very irrational element in human affairs, especially concentrated on thing like war and weapons. Each time a new weapon was invented in the past, people would say that it was so awful that they must not use it. But they did use it, and thought it was awful, it didn't wipe out the human race. We have got something now, however, that could really extinguish life on this planet. Mankind has not been in this situation since toward the end of the Paleolithic Age. Toward the end of the Paleolithic Age, we got the better of lions and tigers and creatures like that, and from that time onward the survival of the human race was ensured. But in 1945 our survival again became uncertain, because we became our own lions and tigers, so to speak. The threat to the survival of the human race has actually been much greater since 1945 than it was during the first million years of human history, because man equipped with modern technology is much more formidable than any lion or tiger or microbe could be. So we are in a very dangerous situation, one that is really unique. On the other side of the balance sheet, however, is the fact that atoms for peace could give mankind an unheard-of material prosperity and power for constructive action. This is also something new. So the extreme possibilities are very far apart, with a choice between certain annihilation on one side and a kind of earthly paradise on the other.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think any useful steps can be taken to restrict the extension of the arms race into space?

[A] Toynbee: I think they could be. The recent Russo-American treaty for the demilitarization of outer space is a promising first step. As a start, you could get a minimum of mutual confidence established between America and Russia. Things are bad enough on this planet without our extending our differences to infinity. But all this concern with space may change our attitude on some things. Take this question of nationalism and national sovereignty. Until the other day, until a few hundred years ago anyway, the surface of this planet was infinite, as far as man knew; he hadn't explored all the unknown regions on earth, so the sovereign state then seemed a more sizable and respectable object compared with the size of the known universe than it seems now. I mean, to cut up one planet into 125 sovereign states, when our whole world has become just a dot among millions of galaxies--well, there is a kind of disproportion in doing that. People might realize the absurdity of this. I think it might have a quite important psychological effect, making people see that local sovereign states are ridiculous when set against the scale of the universe.

[Q] Playboy: how do you feel about the importance of the space race?

[A] Toynbee: when I listened on the radio to the space rendezvous between the Gemini astronauts, I must admit that I was rather excited. But I regard this as a rather childish form of escapism--despite the enormous interest people take in it. We have been failing since the Second World War to clean up this planet, so we have been trying to divert our minds from that by thinking about outer space. I think we had better settle things here first and put this planet n order before we head for other worlds. I am also skeptical about any useful nonmilitary result coming from it. When Europe discovered the Americas, there was an immediate practical new world to explore. The astronomers tell us that there are an infinite number of habitable planets in the universe but that the nearest one is probably thousands of light years away from us. So from the scientific point of view, it is very interesting to know about this, but from the practical point of view, however much progress we make in spacemanship, we probably shall never be able to reach those distant planets, even if we can land on the moon or Mars. This may be just stick-in-the mudness, a ridiculous conservatism on my part. But as I am acutely aware of this planet's immediate political and military dangers, I get rather impatient at the diversion of energy and interest to the space race.

[Q] Playboy: You have argued that, despite its technological prowess, the West may be in a process of decline comparable with that of Rome and Greece. Do you feel any inclination to revise that rather pessimistic judgment?

[A] Tonybee: I have never been pessimistic, sine I have never, like Spengler, thought of it as being predestined or fated that a civilization must break down after so many centuries. I have always thought that the future was open for every civilization, and that it wasn't necessary for the Greek civilization to break down. I think the Greeks could have taken a different line that would have enabled them to go on in perpetuity, and I think the same holds for our own civilization. I feel that its future is open. It depends on us--the living generation and the future generations--whether we crush it or whether we preserve it and improve it. But I am a pessimist in the sense that, on looking back over the past, I think we can see very clearly the ways in which people did wreck a number of civilizations, and how they have repeated the same unnecessary mistakes quite a number of times. This suggests that it is rather easy for people to go on making these mistakes.

[Q] Playboy: Could you name some of these mistakes--particularly those you feel we are repeating today?

[A] Toynbee: Going to war, above all. Also, trying to suppress opinions that one dislikes and trying to hold down subject peoples who are ripe for independence. In the past, war has been the immediate cause of breakdown, but wars are probably symptoms of something else that has gone wrong. Obviously, in our turn, we may bring the same thing on ourselves. The first thing to try to do about this is to make war impossible. In order to do this, we must get back behind war to social justice. I think there are two hopeful signs. People are rather historical-minded now; they are aware of the mistakes made in the past. And the best safeguard against making the same mistakes again is to know what they were and what the consequences were. We might make other mistakes, but perhaps we shan't make those particular mistakes. I also think we are now much more sensitive in our consciences about social justice; privileged people are becoming, increasingly, throughout the world, more ready to concede social justice voluntarily, and that, too, is a safeguard against destruction.

[Q] Playboy: Are you thinking of the efforts now being made in the United States to solve the problems of poverty and civil rights?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, and I would also note the change of heart among the wealthy people of this country in my lifetime. I have lived to see, in Britain, a far-reaching redistribution of wealth and a recognition by the rich and the privileged that social injustice is hateful, even to themselves. They have shown a great deal of good humor in accepting the change, in bearing high taxation, and so on. The American rich, being more recently rich and much richer than the richest rich in Britain have ever been, are more surly and sulky about this. But I think they are coming round. I think President Johnson's idea of the Great Society is probably going to succeed in America, if everything isn't wrecked by the Vietnam war.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking as a historian rather than as a critic of current U. S. foreign policy, do you feel that America has made a significant contribution to the health, wealth and happiness of mankind?

[A] Toynbee: America has made a very significant contribution. Ever since the American colonies were founded, they have given a new opening and a new hope to people of all kinds who have in some sense been penalized in Europe. They were people who hadn't been given an economic opportunity, or who had been in political or religious trouble. They were able to make a new start in America. That planted deeply in American minds the idea that there is no ceiling on an individual and no limit to the progress of a family. In America a man can rise to any level. Now, this is something very good and very stimulating. It is what human life ought to be like. That's been a very great American contribution to the welfare of mankind. I think this aspect of the American way of life sets an example to the rest of the world. It has awakened hope in other countries--hope that the same thing might be possible for them, too. Go to a place like India, where the social structure has been frozen for thousands of years, and where things are now stirring. The ordinary person in the villages of India now feels that life can perhaps be made better. I think this is ultimately due to the American example, although the India peasants may not be directly conscious of this.

[Q] Playboy: Let us look at the other side of the ledger. What would you say has been America's greatest disservice to Western civilization?

[A] Toynbee: Her fanatical attitude toward communism. This is the old intolerance of the 16th and 17th Century wars of religion come to life again. What the 20th Century needs is 18th Century tolerance. When students become political-minded--as has begun to happen on American college campuses--this is usually a sing that something has gone gravely wrong with their country. I think this rising student revolt against the Vietnam war may be the first symptom of a coming general revolt in the U. S. against "the American way of life." my impression is that this way of life is unsatisfying and that it has made the Americans an unhappy people. Sooner or later, I believe there will be a strong reaction against it among Americans of all ages and all social classes.

[Q] Playboy: How long do you think the united States will maintain its position as the leading world power?

[A] Toynbee: Not long, because history is moving faster and faster. In the end, the Continent--that is, Asia plus its European peninsula--will become preponderant over the Americas, which, after all, are only a couple of large islands. Britain's predominance lasted for about one century; France's previous predominance lasted for about tow centuries. Shall we give the U.S. 50 years?

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that, judged against the perspective of history, communism is likely to rank with the other great ideological movements, such as Mohammedanism or Buddhism or Christianity?

[A] Toynbee: I don't expect it to have the long-term hold on people's hearts that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have had. If you look at those other three religions, you will see that they all offer very direct practical counsel and aid to the individual human being in his personal life, in the problems he faces in his passage through life. This is what gives them their hold on human hearts. Now, communism is all for the collective welfare of mankind, not for the individual's welfare. It assumes that the individual is going to take a stoic line and say that his individual life is unimportant so long as the community prospers. But human beings are egotistic. An ideology that give nothing to the individual ego, either in this world or in another world, isn't, in the end, going to be able to compete on equal terms. This is a weak point of communism in a competition for converting the world, for it fails to recognize that human affairs are a network of relations between individuals, that all acting and all choice comes out of some individual personality. If one has ever tried to get teamwork done in the intellectual field, one realizes that a committee can't write a poem, and I doubt whether they can even write a report. All real action and real thought comes out of individual minds. So in one sense, I rate the importance of the individual very high. But I think that a great man can't actualize his greatness unless the environment is favorable for him; in that sense, he is beholden to his environment. But there are also situations in which, if a great man does not turn up, a society can't solve the problems that confront it. I think a good example of this is Churchill and Britain in 1940. If there had been no Churchill, would Britain have held out? Perhaps not On the other hand, if Churchill had been prime minister of France instead of Britain, would Churchill's personality have been able to make France stay in the War? Perhaps so.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think President Kennedy was a great man?

[A] Toynbee: President Kennedy was great in truly caring for the welfare of the whole human race. He will be remembered as the first American President who was mankind's president, too.

[Q] Playboy: Probably more than any other living historian, you have studied the lives of great men. Do you see any pattern n their character or behavior?

[A] Toynbee: There is one characteristic that, though far from being general, has been common to a number of great men. That is, some of the greatest men have been people who have had a broken career; they have started off on some ordinary, conventional line; they have come to grief in that; and then they've withdrawn from the world and come back in some new capacity. Saint Paul started off as a fanatical orthodox Pharisee. He had a religious experience, withdrew into the desert for several years and then came back as a Christian missionary, which was obviously going to be his true career. He wouldn't be remembered now if he had never been anything but a persecutor. Thucydides is another case. He started out as a minor naval commander, and he had a reverse and he was exiled; he came back as a writer of the history of the war in which he had not been a military success himself. This is a rather significant and important pattern, but it is by no means universal; many great men have gone steadily through without this great withdrawal.

[Q] Playboy: Could this pattern of withdrawal and return be related to what Jung called the "40-year-old success"?

[A] Toynbee: There does appear to be a psychological law operating here--a law that people who somehow got on the wrong path recover themselves in the middle of life. They are twice born; and the are different from the once-born. The twice-born often get farther; it's like a rocket that has a second boost.

[Q] Playboy: Several fellow historians have pointed out the similarity of your views and those of Jung. How much influence did Jung actually have on you?

[A] Toynbee: He had a latish influence. I can't remember when I first read Jung; it must have been about halfway through the 1930s or a bit later, I suppose. I read his book on psychological types first. There were an awful lot of new ideas for me in that, and so he had a very strong influence. But it came about three quarters of the way through the writing of my own book. What fascinated me was the way he assembled his evidence. He would take one of his own clinical cases, a piece of Greek mythology, some historical event something out of astrology, and he would show you that these were all expressions of some identical primordial image deep down in the psyche, which was coming out in all these different ways. He saw a psychological unity at the bottom of human nature. This seemed to me to throw a lot of light on things in history that interested me enormously.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to Jung's idea of a collective unconscious for the human race?

[A] Toynbee: Yes. It fits in, you see, with my notion that there is a fairly constant, fixed human nature. Before, we know a little about the surface world of the intellect; but now--thanks to the insights of men like Jung--the psychological world, the vast continent of the subconscious, has been immensely expanded. This gives a huge new dimension to all studies of human affairs, I think.

[Q] Playboy: Did Freud influence your thinking as much as Jung?

[A] Toynbee: No, and I think I can see why. It was because his theories were more strait-laced, more narrowly geared. I don't believe in sex being at the bottom of everything, even if one takes the word "sex" in the very esoteric sense in which Freud uses it--or came to use it by the end. I don't believe in this or any other single key to human affairs. It is just one explanation among a number; I feel that we ought to have a wider horizon, that's all.

[Q] Playboy: There are some religious moralists who associate the breakdown of a civilization with a period of spiritual decline and sexual decadence. They feel that we're living in such a time today. Do you think there is any historical justification for this view?

[A] Toynbee: It is very hard to say; the sexual manners and customs of various societies are so different. What seems horrible to some people seems quite all right to another lot. The early Christians were, of course, in revolt against the sexual manners of the Greek and Roman world. Under the early Roman Empire, from the Christian point of view, sexual morals were bad; but I don't know that they were any worse at the time when Rome was obviously n decline that they had been when Rome was flourishing. I am thinking of things like homosexuality, like looseness in marriage relations, and so on. So I am a bit skeptical about this kind of pious argument about morals. One must not simplify too much. As I said before, I don't believe sex or economics or politics or even religion is the sole key explanation of anything in human life.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you've been accused by one critic of believing that "civilization exists for the sake of religion." Is he wrong?

[A] Toynbee: As I said, one must not simplify too much. Though I do believe in the great and fundamental importance of religion, I am very unorthodox from the point of view of any religion, and I don't think religion is the only thing in life. Go to India, and you will find that economics are certainly no less important in that exceedingly and perhaps excessively religious country. But I don't mean that Hinduism is not acceptable, while my own ancestral religion is. Certainly not. I regard Christianity as being one among half a dozen approaches to the central mystery of the universe. I think each of these different approaches--Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on--has something in it that the others don't have. Therefore, I value them all--but I couldn't swallow any one of them whole.

[Q] Playboy: Could you give a name to your own spiritual beliefs?

[A] Toynbee: Yes. Religious-minded agnosticism.

[Q] Playboy: Would you elaborate?

[A] Toynbee: I believe in the reality of a spiritual presence behind the universe, but this may not be a personality--that is, not God as conceived by Jews, Christians and Moslems. I am an agnostic in the sense that I think we ought not to shirk facing up to our ignorance of the answers to the questions that are of the greatest importance to human beings.

[Q] Playboy: Would you call yourself a humanist, then?

[A] Toynbee: Certainly not. It would be ludicrous to imagine, as humanists do, that human beings are the highest form of spiritual life in existence. When human beings worship themselves as gods, they always quickly come to grief.

[Q] Playboy: As a student of Christianity, how do you feel about the ecumenical trend toward unity among the churches?

[A] Toynbee: I find this very surprising, very welcome and very encouraging. It seems to have arise in both the Protestant and the Catholic churches since the end of the Second World War. It is one of the good and hopeful things in the present-day world, and it isn't limited to the Christian churches. About ten years ago, I was in a number of Buddhist countries--Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Japan and also in that part of Inda wher Buddhism started. I noticed then a corresponding movement in that part of the world. I saw that the northern and southern Buddhists are getting together again and that the Hindus are welcoming Buddhhist pilgrims to the scene of the Buddha's enlightenment and making things agreeable for them--feeling that, after all Hindus and Buddhistst have a common past. It seems to me to be a worlde-wide phenomenon, and to be one of the positive and encouraging trends in the world today. Certain leading figures, like Pope John, have furthered this movement very much, but there must be some very strong answering feeling among the members of the churches to have made this remarkable success possible.

[Q] Playboy: Is it on this sort of evidence that you base your belief that the 21st Century will be a period of human unity?

[A] Toynbee: It is one of the things, yes. There are persuasive forces like religion; and there are compulsive forces like technology. Technology faces us with a choice between unity and destruction, I think. Because it is a compulsive force, we may be very unwilling to be driven by it. But religion may lead us toward the same goal in a happier way.

[Q] Playboy: You don't seem to feel that way about Judaism. The Jewish faith, you've written, has become an instrument of "Zionist nationalism"--which, like all nationalism, you regard as a divisive and destructive force. Because of this view, one critic has called you "an outright, if highly sophisticated, anti-Semite." Do you feel that your attitude toward the Jews has been misrepresented?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, I do. What makes Judaism what it has been since the Romans evicted the Jews from Palestine has been that the Jews have found a way of living without a country of their own in which they are in the majority--living as a minority in the midst of other people, taking part in other people's life in many ways, making a living and contributing to the economic life of other people's countries. At the same time, the Jews have kept their continuity and have remained a self-conscious community, largely thanks to their special religious organization and religious law, religious manners and custons. Zionism, on the other hand, is an attempt to turn Judaism, and the Jewish community, away from its traditional form, into just one more example of the local nationalisms of the present-day world. As it is doing this at the expense of the people who lived in the country before, I think this is perverse. Thus, I distinguish entirely between my attiude toward the Jewish people and the Jewish religion on the one hand and my attitude toward the Zionist movement on the other, just as I distinguish between my attitude twoard English-speaking people in general and my attitude toward Mr. Smith and his Rhodesian colleagues at the present moment. I am 110 percent against what seems to me to be colonialism--I mean the exploitation and ill-treatment of weaker peoples. But I am not for that reason against the nation or the race that does these things; they can always stop doing them. I am not against them in themselves and I am not against those elements in that nation who are not guilty of colonialism. So I distinguish very sharply between my feelings about the Jews and about Zionism. I feel what all decent persons feel about the extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis, but I also have a very strong feeling about the eviction of the Arabicspeaking people of palestine have been there since the Romans evicted the Jews in the First and Second Centuries of the Christian era. The Palaestinian Arabs have a right to their homes, and I feel that Zionism, by evicting them, has become guilty of colonialism. They Zionists seem to be obsesed with the idea that having their own country will somehow prevent the Germans or someone else from doing again what has been done to the Jews in Europe in the past. I think than they are thereby exposing their descendants to the risk of suffering the same sort of thing in the arab world. It seems to me to be a retrogressive step. Nationalism, anyway, is a retrogressive movement. The Jews have hitherto been cosmopolitan, and I think it is a pity that they should fall into nationalism now. This is what I am against. I value the Jewish religious contribution to the Western world; it is a most desirable element in our western civilization. But I believe that the future of the Jews, the Jewish religion and the Jewish culture lies in the Western world, particularly in the United States. It does not lie in Israel.

[Q] Playboy: Are you suggesting that the Jews should be evicted from Israel and emigrate to the United States?

[A] Toynbee: Jews in Palestine are obviously in much greater peril than Jews in western countries outside Germany. On the whole, I don't expect--and I do not want--to see the Jews now in Palestine evicted, as the Crusanders were. I want to see the minimum of suffering for the maximum number of people. Modern technology, applied to distillation of seawater, could provide subsistence in palestine both for its evicted Arab population and for the present Jewish settlers there. I want to work for a solution on these lines, however great the psychological and political diffculties may be.

[Q] Playboy: If a substantial number of Arab refugees could return to Israel, would this remove your objections to Zionizm and to Isreal?

[A] Toynbee: If they could return to Israel under decent conditions, not necessarily having just the same farms or patches of land that they had orginally, and could then become first-class citizens of the state of Israel, yes, that would remove a great many of my objections. There are people in Israle and Jews in other parts of the world who want this solution, but they are in a minority at present. Again, nationalism is the enemy both of the Jews and of the Arabs.

[Q] Playboy: You have visited most of the Middle Eastern countries at one time or another in you life. Why have you not been to Israel since its foundation?

[A] Toynbee: You have to make a choice. I wanted to see the Arab countries, and I want to go on visiting them. But, as a mater of fact, I have seen the whole of Israel, looking either across the frontier or from the air. I think that if i visited Israel on the ground, I should much admire the material economic progress that Israel has made. I think I should admire the kibbutzim particularly. But, then, I might also have admired what the Nazis would have done economically in Poland if they had kept possession of that country. Yet that would not have made me think it was a good thing that they should have conquered and annexed Poland.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of conquest and annexation, how do you feel about President Nasser's expansionist policy in North Afric and the Middle East--in Yemen and other Arab states?

[A] Toynbee: Insofar as the United Arab Republic's policy is one of expanding its own power, as distinct from serving the interests of its sister Arab countries, its policy will arouse resistance. I hope to see the Arab countries unite with one another on a footing of equality. Inevitably, Egypt--with its central position, big population and advanced civilization--will be the nucleus of any Arab union.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that Arab nationalism is less reprehensible than Zionist nationalism?

[A] Toynbee: Well, it's a defensive nationalism. The Arabs are only saying: "We want to be free in the countries we inhabit, and we don't want our countries to be taken from us." But I'm not unreservedly a suporter of the Arabs. For instance, there is one case of Arab nationalism that I deplore as strongly as I deplore Zionism--the nationalism of the Arabs of the Northern Sudan against the non-Arab Africans of the Southern Sudan. The Northern Sudan Arabs seem to me to be flagrant colonialists trying to (continued on Page 166) Playboy Interview (continued from page 76) impoe themselves, their rule their religion, language and culture on a non-Arab African people that wants to be itself and does not want to be dominated. Now, when I find sudanese Arabs doing that, or when i find Iraqi Arabs trying to sit on the heads of the kurds in Iraq, I am just as much against that as I am against the white racialists in Rhodesia or the Zionists in Palestine. I think I am consistent in this.

[Q] Playboy: Your view on Zionism are not the only ones that have stirred controversy in the course of your career. Then Dutch historian Pieter Gely, for example, has attacked you for "fallacious arguments and spurious demonstrations." He has also said that your books contain a "maddening profusion of vastly learned examples, stated in an attractive or impressive but frequently slipshold fashion and proving exactly nothing." What is your reaction to this criticism?

[A] Toynbee: We all suffer from built-in limitations of the working of the human mind. We have to work by setting up hypotheses and looking for illustrations that may or may not prove our point. Human minds cannot work in any other way. Yet even the scientist cannot guarantee that his test cases are fair samples. The important point, I think, is to make sure of being scrupulously honest, always ready to discard a hypothesis if it is disproved by a test case. I hope I am ready to do that, but you know that everyone falls in love with his own hypotheses and finds it hard to discard them. I may well be a sinner and not up to the scientific standard. But i think in a sense Geyl is unfair. He implies that he himself is not subject to these common human limitation. I should like to ask him how he sets about doing his thinking work himself.

[Q] Playboy: Have you enjoyed your many disagreements with other historians?

[A] Toynbee: It depends with whom. I have thoroughly enjoyed Geyl's criticism, because he is a jolly man, though a very pugnacious man. But I think it depends on the critic's motive. If somebody is out to argue with you because he wants to get nearer to the truth, then it is an exhilarating experience, however severe. It starts your mind ticking again. But if somebody is just out to kill you personally, then it's rather unfruitful, melancholy, really, not much use to you or to anyone else.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about British historian A.J.P. Taylor's characterization of you as "an expatriate, a rootless man...at home only among the ruins"?

[A] Toynbee: it is a historian's business to make himself at home in other times and places besides his own, in order to bring those other times and places to life again for his contemporaries.

[Q] Playboy: For much of your life you have been simultaneously involved in studying current affairs and the great events of history. How have these two careers fitted into each other?

[A] Toynbee: I don't think I could have though of following either of the two careers without following the other one at the same time. I came, I suppose, to take a comprehensive view of history because I had one foot in current history and the other in the past. It was an accident, really. I was educated in Greek and Roman history, and from that I came to be interested in the present-day Near East. I had gone there on a visit to look at things I had learned about in studying ancient Greek history. That was in 1911. If you are studying recent history, the great difficulty is to see it in perspective; you can get that perspective only from the study of less recent history. A sense of the past gives you a kind of time perspective for studying current history. Conversely, the only way you can get into the lives and feelings and thoughts of dead people is by an analogy with living people whom you know. The only time in which you can catch people alive is the present time, whoe you are alive youself. The English historian Gibbon said that a captaincy in the hampshire Militia was not without its lessons for the historian of the Roman Empire. Take another Example--Plato's complaint about Homer, which is really a testimonial: homer, plato complains, had just a taste of a carpenter's job or an armorer's job or a peasant's job, but he wrote as if he had spent a lifetime being a carpenter, an armorer or a peasant, or whatever it might be. Just that little taste of practical life illuminates a tremendous amount of history.

[Q] Playboy: Which do you think has had the greater impact on your thinking--classical education on your view of the modern world, or your firsthand knowledge about the modern world in studying the patterns of past civilizations?

[A] Toynbee: That is a very difficult question, Because the interaction has been so great. Many people would say that I have falsified my view of the ancient world by importing modern analogies into it, and vice versa--that I have seen the modern world too much in Greek or Roman terms. The Russian historian Rostovtzeff was much criticized for his book on the social and economic history of the Roman Empire. He was acused of importing the Russian Revolution of 1917 into the history of Rome in the Third Century A.D. Maybe he did import it, but it is also possible that he wouldn't have been able to see inot the inwardness of the Roman revolution except by analogy with the experiences that he himself had gone through.

[Q] Playboy: You once described a moment early in your life when you were walking along a street in London and suddenly found yourself "in communion not just with this or that episonde in history but with all that had been and was to come...aware of the passage of histroy flowing through me in a mighty current, and of my own life welling like a wave on the flow of this vast tide." Would you tell us more about this experience?

[A] Toynbee: What I experienced at that moment was something that I don't think I have experienced before or since. At that moment it felt--how shall I put it?--as if the walls of my ego were breaking down, as if I was solidarie, identical, at one, with the universe as a whole. I think this is a very difficult thing for anyone who has been brought up in our modern Western culture to understand, because our culture emphasizes the individual, the individual consciousness, individual, the individual consciousness, individual freedom and liberty, individual responsibility, individual economic interest. In the West, one is conditioned to be separate from one's environment, to be up against it, in opposition to and in tension with it. But there are many cultures--the Hindu culture is one of these--in which this experience is such a common one that nobody would notice it.

[Q] Playboy: Those who take hallucinogenic drugs have reported transcendental epiphanies of oneness and eternity. Was your own experience anything like that?

[A] Toynbee: Yes, I think it was. This is part of the make-up of religious experience. I think that part of the essence of religious experience is to feel the unity of the universe. A further element of religious experience is that you feel the universe to be centered on some--what shall we call it? I mustn't use the word God, because it won't do for Hinduism or Buddhism, so I will say--centered on some spiritual presence or power. But you can't feel that unless you feel the unity of the universe first, unless you sense the interrelation of human events in all times and places.

[Q] Playboy: You had this experience shortly before you began to write your Study of History. did it have anything to do with your decision to undertake this monumental work?

[A] Toynbee: Yes. The thing was turning in my head at that time and I was casting about to find my way into the subject. In August 1914, I was teaching Greek and Roman history as a don at Oxford, and I was very much interested I Thucydides--in his account of the great war in which he fought and about which he worte his famous history. As is read his work, it seemed to me that this was, as Thucydides believed, a turning point in Greek history, quite unlike anything that had happened before, and that it would be well worth my while to spend my life studying what happened then. But I still thought that it was an old story, something that could happen to the Greeks, perhaps, but not to our modern world. Suddenly, in 1914, my point of view was altered; a great war had now broken out in my world, too, and the things that Thucydides had described were happening to me and my contemporaries. Over 2000 Years had passed since Thucydides had lived through those events, yet somehow he had had much the same experiences as those that Westerners were about to face in 1914. I was a strange feeling. Measured by the calendar, Thucydides' experience was all old stuff; but I began to see that a simple chronological standpoint was not the only way of looking at history--that, in a psychological sense, past and present events might be regarded as being contemporary with each other. That gave me the idea of setting Greek and Roman history side by side with Western history, and seeing them not just as ancient and modern history but as two instances of the same historical experience, in stances that could be compared with each other. Then, of course, having found one such parallel, I wanted to go on to find as many other parallels of this kind as I could. The result has been my study of History.

[Q] Playboy: In the memoir you published at the age of 75, you described youself as Janus, the muthological figure who faces both backward and forward. As you stand now, facing the past and the future, as you have done all your life, do you feel detached from the current of history or do you feel some sense of involvement in the present?

[A] Toynbee: I have always felt a sense of ivolvement. My wife and I worked together for 34 years on wirting an annual survey of international affairs, and the assignment was to write a cold-blooded, objective, impersonal narrative of what was happening. But Ifound that, for myself--and I think for anybody, really--this is quite impossible. All I can do is to put my cards on the table and say: "I am a certain kind of person with a certain background, certain feelings--right or wrong--certain prejudices. So you must bear this in mind and discount it in reading what I write about controversial questions. I can't pretend that I am wholly detached." I couldn't be detached about, say, the Italian atack on Abyssinia or about the things that Hitler did. My commitment is pretty concrete; I have grandchildren and I want my grandchildren to have grandchildren who will have grandchildren. I want that very much. I want the human race to survive, and I very much admire what I have been told that Bertrand Russell said on his 90th birthday--that one ought to care very much about what is going to happen after one is dead.

[Q] Playboy: If your unflagging work schedule is any evidence, that's not an imminent prospect.

[A] Toynbee: Well, I've been blesed with both a long life and a robust constitution. But those are gifts of the gods, and the gods are unfair and capricious in the way they distribute these gifts--and withdraw them. I am very conscious of this, because about half of my generation were killed in the First World War. I escaped being killed because I got dysentery from walking about in Greece in 1911 and 1912, so I wasn't in the army in 1914 to 1918. The older I grow, and the more time I have to produce, the more I am conscious of the unproduced works of those dead contemporaries of mine, and the more painfully I feel the irrationality and senselessness of this aspect of human life--especially when people are arbitrarily killed in wars. Disease used to kill ever so many; but in that respect the expectation of life is much better than it used to be. The expectation of dying from war, however, may well be greater now than ever before. Anyway, I am conscious of this unearned gift--the length of time that I have been given to follow my calling as a historian. Time is enormously important for anyone studying human affirs. It's also a help if one's mind stay sharp. Some people being to lose their wits, to lose the cutting edge of their mind, in their 60s; other people, like Bertrand Russell, seem to be as lively at 90 as when they were undergraduates. This is very unfair, but there it is.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel as lively at 77 as you were in your youth?

[A] Toynbee: As you get older, you find that you have to limit your marginal activities. Though you can still do the same things, it takes more out of you, and you take longer to recuperte. So it is wise to concentrate on what you want to do most.

[Q] Playboy: What do you want to do most?

[A] Toynbee: Well, i very much enjoy reading; but I regard reading as an indulgence, and my work is writing; so my reading must take care of itself and find its own time. If I know I am going to try to write about something, I think a year or two ahead, and I ask myself what I shall need to have read in order to be prepared by that time to write on the subject. Then, at such times as I find for reading, I will concentrate on that future point. But I give every morning, and usually after teatime, too, to writing. I don't wait for the mood; I write every morning, doggedly, whether I feel in the mood or not. What you write in your off mood will not be as good as what you write when you are in the right modd--but you can improve it afterward; you can bring it more or less up to standard. If you wait for the mood, you may wait forever--and then you won't accomplish much.

[A] Playboy: What do you feel you have accomplished?

[A] Toynbee: Well, I have tried to present mankind's history as the unity that I believe it really is. This is the traditional Jewish, Christian and Moslem view of history. The current tendency in history, in the West generally and particularly in Britain, is to make mincemeat of history. This, in my opinion, makes nonsense of it.

[Q] Playboy: In looking back over your career, do you feel you've completed the task you embarked upon so many years ago?

[A] Toynbee: It's funny that you should ask that questio, for I have always had a sort of agenda for my life. My first agenda, when I was a young don at Oxford, was to write a small history of Greece and then a rather large book on the social and economic consequences of the Hannibalic wars. I produced the first one some years ago, and then the other day I finished that agenda by publishing in two volumes the book on the second of the two subjects that I had set for muself so long ago. Meanwhile, I have writtnen unforeseen things like the Survey of international Affairs and my stydy of History. It is a rather queer feeling to find, after 50 years or more, that I have completed my agenda. It is the same sort of disconcerting sensation as when you find that your chhildren have finished their education and grown up. When you have children growing up, it feels as if their childhood were stretching away into enternity; the variuos stages of their education seem interminable. Then, one day, with a bang, it is all finished. Now, with a bang, my agenda of intellectual work has been finished. I have discovered, though, that when one agenda is finished, another starts.

[Q] Playboy: Can you say what your next agenda will be?

[A] Toynbee: I have two permanent concerns. The first is to work for the unificationof the world on all levels of life and activity. The second is to work for the recovery of the traditional unitary view of history. I have no doubt that these two concerns, which are obviously facets of the same single concern, can be counted on to produce new agendas for me as long as I live and also keep my wits.