THE WORLD AND THE WEST

The Reith Lectures given over the BBC in 1952 comprise this most recent contribution, finely conceived and compactly expressed, of the great English historian to the study of the trials of our times. Pointing out that the West has been the aggressor of the World during the past few hundred years, he traces the resistance to it, the effects and possible future developments of its impingement on Russia, Islam, India, and the Far East. To protect themselves from Western arms and the peoples of the World accepted Western techniques, from which followed unavoidably, as Gandhi realized, the very infiltration of the deeper elements of Western culture which the World had attempted to deflect. (The Western heresy of Communism in Russia, the British governmental system in India are examples.) Searching history for a possible future, Toynbee turns as in Civilization on Trial to the Graeco-Roman world, in which the peoples they ruled gradually made a counteroffensive with a new spiritual force. Again, he sees a possible solution to strife through religion, which will bring together the West, which has traded in religion for technology, and the World which cannot live under Western secularism. This material will be developed in Volume VIII of A Study of History, to appear in 1954.