Urban congestion, educational anxiety, artificial intelligence, the threat of nuclear weapons... In an era of accelerated change, everyone who cares about the fate of mankind asks: How should we cope with this era? Arnold Toynbee, the "greatest historian of recent times," predicted many of today's realities half a century ago. He witnessed and experienced the great changes in the human world in the 20th century, sought the fate of mankind with his mortal body, and asked about tomorrow in constant retrospective——
Arnold Joseph Toynbee (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975)
What will tomorrow look like for humanity? I think it's a good question Toynbee throws out.
We all know that Toynbee is a historian, but he has a particularly unique contribution to historical research, which makes him not only read in the professional history community, but also out of the professional history community, and has had a different impact on many disciplines, this unique contribution is Civilization, civilization.
The unit most studied in history is the individual, and our eyes and spotlights are always focused on the individual. Toynbee, along with a group of prominent scholars of his time, took civilization as a unit of historical research. There are actually many civilizations in the history of human evolution, and there are still some civilizations today, but the number of civilizations that have existed in history is much greater than we can count on our fingers today.
So using civilization as a perspective, how did civilization come about? What challenges and important junctures has civilization gone through? Why do some civilizations continue to this day, and some civilizations have actually been cut off in the middle and renewed?
Civilization, as the object of today's academic research, is actually favored by Toynbee, and there is a very famous school in sociology called the Civilizational Analysis school, which uses civilization as a unit of analysis. Today, in our political science, there are also schools of clash of civilizations, and on the tear line of civilization, there are all kinds of incomprehension, conflict, and non-speculation. So I think Toynbee not only contributed to the field of history, but also radiated to many disciplines today.
Fourteen years after Toynbee's death, an important discourse came from the political scientist Fukuyama. Fukuyama wrote a pivotal essay at a critical time, exactly in 1989, three years later in a book, The End of History and the Last Man. He proposed a very influential discussion of history as a whole: after the end of the Cold War, history ended. What does this mean? It means that if we look further, time can go forward, but history will not be there, and history has reached the end at this moment.
In the decade or so shortly after Toynbee's death, there was an important saying in human understanding of history, that is, we can still do history, but history only allows us to talk a little more after tea. This means that history has nothing to do with tomorrow, nothing to do with the future, history is the things that are not in the past, and it has nothing to do with the things that we really make you worthy of attention today, which is the first meaning of the end of history.
The second meaning is that historical writing is about thinking, about thinking. Today's historical writing can constantly list facts, such as where there are new documents, where there are notes of the Song people, but such new things in the real historical perspective, is just another past paragraph, no longer related to thinking, there is no need to think, things worth thinking about stop at the end of history, and then there is nothing new.
So Kojève, Fukuyama's teacher, said that you don't need philosophy, you just need play, art, and sex. Such a person is what Fukuyama calls the "last man" (the last man).
If we look at today's era, although the conclusion of the end of history is challenged, today's "TikTok era" is actually living in that "last man" state compared to Toynbee's era.
There's a lot of things we can play, there's a lot of entertainment, a lot of things that allow us to live without thinking. In this sense, Toynbee and his history slowly began to become irrelevant to us.
Why take the present as a node to read his writings more than half a century ago and pull him into our time?
In fact, the most familiar world we see today and the world we live in is a future for Toynbee. He is dead as a historian, but we, as his readers, as readers and thinkers of his historiography, can do this, to read Toynbee's thoughts on the future while thinking about this present era.
This is a book written more than half a century ago, and it is a rather thick book, and if you want to talk about it, you may not be able to talk about it in one night. Because Toynbee was in his old age when he wrote the book, he died six years later, and he had a lot to say at the time. I find the following five insights that struck me very much.
▌ Insight 1: Can humans and civilizations be manipulated and determined?
On page 305 of the book, he says that humans have the same willfulness and instability as quantum.
Quantum physics really flourished in the 2020s, and of course back to the turn of the century. At that time, it was the rise of quantum mechanics, stars were emerging, and when Toynbee wrote this book, we can see from the old man's knowledge genealogy that he is definitely not communicating with peers in a narrow field, he is actually very familiar with quantum mechanics. In Toynbee's thinking, quantum can be compared to the human race in the eyes of historians.
Quantum mechanics completely challenges Newton's paradigm, we know that Einstein made an update to Newton's calculations, but in fact Newton and Einstein can be connected, they are actually a line, they are just iterations, but quantum mechanics is a completely different thing.
Quantum mechanics is full of contradictions, which are not feasible in the macroscopic world of Newton and Einstein, and do not exist logically, but it is possible at the microscopic level of quantum. So quantum mechanics brings a shock of thought, which is reflected in Toynbee's writings, which is his insight.
In fact, today "man" is still philosophically unresolved. Are we completely decided, or can we have free will?
If according to Newton and Einstein, in fact, people do not have free will, not to mention people, the entire universe, the whole process, the whole process, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it is all like this. According to Newtonian mechanics, it is all deterministic. There is also no real randomness, even if you throw a coin, it seems that you can only look at the result in terms of probability, but assuming that there is a super capture device that captures all the data of the action, what angle, which finger, how strong it is, the surrounding terrain, wind speed, etc., you can know exactly which face will be up.
What is not decided? As long as the data is sufficient, it can be accurately predicted. According to the Newton-Einstein paradigm, what I am going to say at this moment, how I organize the sentence, how many microseconds before I say this sentence has already decided, and humans can actually study in a very mechanical way. There used to be a very popular way of studying people, that is, to see people as a machine, and then we continue to iterate, our brains can read it, write it, there is no mystery.
But quantum mechanics gives us a completely different answer, because quantum mechanics can have radical randomness that cannot be determined in advance by anything.
So Toynbee's view is an insight, and to this day, we can still use it as a very cutting-edge formulation, that is, do we think about humans in terms of quantum mechanics, or from the classical Newtonian Einstein paradigm? If from the classic, that person can actually be controlled like building blocks, today we use a variety of ways to control people, can follow various routines to PUA. But in quantum mechanics, this is all overturned.
Toynbee has a wonderful quote that says that individuals are unpredictable, but human beings as a whole can be predicted. In his view, we can still have a grasp of the entire civilization, including the tendency of civilization, the inner temperament of civilization, and the core of civilization. We have a saying today called the law of large numbers, one person cannot predict, but the way so many people act together can actually be studied.
There is a saying in physics called "emergence", that is, each individual individual we cannot know, but when many individuals are together, they influence each other, form a relationship with each other, and suddenly there will be completely different properties.
Our era today is still the age of heroes, we only look at the person at the front, all the light is given to him, but is he alone opening a business empire? No, there must be a good group of people behind him, and together they come up with a big thing, so in this sense, the overall development can be predicted, but not separately.
That was Toynbee's first insight. Are human beings determined, or are they full of surprises and differences like quantum? Tomorrow's you can be completely different from today's you, you are infinite, of course, unlimited is both, or you can be infinitely messed up and do terrible things.
▌Insight 2: The acceleration of technology will make all knowledge and norms invalid
On page 290, Toynbee talks about "the acceleration of technology," and he uses an important word—acceleration. In fact, at that time, the acceleration was not particularly obvious, and looking back today, from 1945, that is, from the threshold of the end of World War II, we call it the era of great acceleration. To this day, the acceleration in many areas of technology still amazes us.
Yet other aspects of our lives, far from accelerating, stagnate. Today we look at textbooks or news, and the important concepts for understanding the world today were all laid down by thinkers four or five hundred years ago. But at that time they did not know artificial intelligence, and did not know that people could completely become the "useless class" described by Harari.
In our time, everything is changing, because technology is changing, and other aspects of our lives were mostly stagnant half a century ago, even three or four hundred years ago, from Toynbee himself.
We are still worried about what Toynbee is worried about, we are still worried about the war he is worried about, and we are also using the terms of politics at that time, so the thinking and thinking of our time, whether it is wisdom in the political sense or wisdom in the sense of life, there is almost no progress, and we are not moving forward.
The future era awaits us, and we all know that there is a term called "technological singularity" that would have been unthinkable in Toynbee's time, but ours can. The singularity itself is an astrophysical concept that refers to a point with an infinitely small size, infinite density, infinite gravity, and infinite curvature of spacetime. At such a point, all the rules of physics, all existing knowledge, are all invalid.
In the 21st century, or even precisely by the middle of the 21st century, we may be able to see human civilization hit the "technological singularity". The exponential acceleration of some of today's technological development makes it so that at that point we encounter a situation very similar to the concept of the singularity in astrophysics, all our humanistic and social, between people, between countries, all our knowledge, norms, and rules, are all invalid.
We don't know if there's more, we don't know how to live, and as the title of my recent book on the Commercial Press says, we're going to be "stuck in the singularity." At the moment of technological singularity, we only grasp the knowledge we have, and there is no way to solve the problems we are about to face. The speed of technology does not wait for people, and on the other side, people are still living in the last state of "Douyin" and "Kuaishou", and they are not prepared for this singularity.
So, in this day and age, we are actually living for the singularity, and we have to think about the singularity. Things are happening, new things are coming, and I think Toynbee saw that accelerate.
▌Insight 3: The greatest dilemma of human beings comes from self-slavery
Toynbee believed that the important problem to be solved by future generations is the self-enslavement of humans in the artificial environment. We have come all the way from Homo sapiens, 12,000 years ago Homo sapiens began to farm life, began to rise civilization little by little, then we began to tame some plants, animals, we began to change the environment around us, and we still live in an artificial environment today.
Living in the artificial environment of agricultural life, we are very different, and we are no longer a species in the natural sense. Zhuangzi had a saying at that time called "the heaven of not opening people, but the heaven of opening the sky". He had a feeling that we lived in the "human sky". In fact, what he meant was that people living in an artificial environment have forgotten the "heavenly sky", and we have completely separated ourselves from the non-man-made nature.
Since the time of Homo sapiens, most of the various troubles that human beings have faced in the past have come from nature itself - "heaven of heaven". But by Toynbee's time, we had enough power to change the environment. Today's extreme weather, according to Zhuangzi, is "the heaven of man", caused by man-made carbon emissions.
Today there is a term called "Anthropocene", what is the Anthropocene? It is the era when a single species of human beings can change the face of the planet. The planet is no longer itself, and the planet is completely stamped with the handprint of the human species. There are human handprints everywhere, and the planet is already a man-made environment.
Toynbee did not use the term "Anthropocene," but he told you that we are in such a man-made environment where all our suffering is self-inflicted.
The suffering on our planet today, whether on a personal level or on a larger political level, all kinds of suffering are man-made, you could have chosen not to do so, but you wanted to, you could have chosen to work together in a better way, but you chose not to cooperate, you chose to suffer each other, you chose to threaten each other.
Toynbee has left what he considers to be the biggest conundrum, which is how we deal with self-imposed dilemmas.
All kinds of predicaments we have today are man-made, including today's 996, 007, which could not have been the case, but we all collectively entered this track, into the worst Nash equilibrium, even children are involving.
In fact, Toynbee has pointed out that these problems are the self-enslavement of the artificial environment, in fact, as long as game theory can be solved, we just need to change the perspective, everyone can decide together. But that's often not the case, as long as there are some people who disagree. For example, in the movie theater, everyone could sit down together, but some people in the front row stood up, and as soon as they stood up, everyone in the back had to stand.
Toynbee left us with a particularly heart-wrenching question, the constituent element of the man-made environment is people - since it is man-made, it means that people can change, but everyone is too stupid to change, everyone is crowded there, which becomes the self-slavery of the man-made environment.
▌Insight 4: In the era of clash of civilizations, how can the political order get out of the Thucydides trap?
Many of the problems in the contemporary world seem to be local, but there is a shadow behind them. Whether it is the Middle East or the Asia-Pacific region, almost every disturbance will see that shadowy presence behind it. This is the frightening and terrifying side of America.
In our time, how our order should get out of its current state, Toynbee did not provide an answer. In Toynbee's time, and even today, many people believed that there was an ideal country to trust. But the perspective of political realism gives a variety of heart-wrenching analyses.
In this sense, the problem we face is how to have a different future, at least we can meet each other halfway, at least there can be a way to talk, talk about each other's ideas, try not to deal with politics in the way of the so-called Thucydides trap.
Today, the United States can wield so much power, dominating countless human lives, dominating global trends, and dominating the planetary pattern. Anthropologist Bruno Latour says the United States does not seem to live on the same planet as everyone else. So in this sense, we all hope that Toynbee's panic will somehow dissipate.
▌Insight 5: How to build a global governance framework in the face of a world situation where war continues?
Toynbee, an old gentleman who lived through two world wars, called for a worldwide governance framework above sovereign states.
The problem is that the main body of the world today is sovereign states, sovereign states, sovereignty means supreme power. But the problem is that sovereignty speaks separately from each other and does not have a higher authority. Sovereignty comes from the Treaty of Westphalia three to four hundred years ago, a product of the 17th century, but today it has hardly changed at all.
What we dominate today is individualism. In fact, every individual in modern society is also sovereignty, that is, my life is my decision, but the problem is that you always have to live with others. In the contemporary world, it is very difficult for people to live together. It's okay when it's happy, but once there's a disagreement, it's the ultimate battle, how do you convince me, how do I convince you? Because there is no authority above, nothing is higher than sovereignty, so a problem is to tear, and a problem is to use the most ruthless way.
We read in Toynbee's book about his call to have a way, a political framework, that we are no longer different people, different people, trying to reach out to each other.
We seem to have said goodbye to the war, but we have not actually moved forward, and we always reserve the possibility of continuing the war, which is a silly thing. Why can't we go one step further? This was a thought that Toynbee had on his mind when he died.
Today I share five points, I think Toynbee's thinking is still very cutting-edge, and many of his ideas have deep concerns with this era. Today, there are many problems, such as the Amazon bushfires, Australia's primeval forests, but we cannot cooperate to deal with the crisis, we can only watch. We don't know what the future holds, but in a visible sense, Toynbee is pessimistic.
In our day, civilization precedes human beings, not a specific country, not Greek civilization or other civilizations, but human civilization. Can human civilization still thrive? How will it be? At what point will it fall?
All of Toynbee's insights are actually relevant to our tomorrow, our next step, and he guides us to how to ask us in our time, not just looking back at the past, but really asking what tomorrow will be like for mankind like him.