open Democracy News Analysis - Toynbee and Road Maps, - Comments

RonPrice on "Toynbee and Road Maps"

RonPrice — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:57:35 +0000

After 15 months it seemed appropriate to add a little more on "the Toynbeean perspective" for many a reason which I won't go into in this brief preamble here at the "Open Democracy" site: _______________________________________ Gibbon wrote, he said, about what was perhaps "the greatest and most aweful scene in the history of mankind." In this poetic I write about what surely is an even more aweful scene in humankind's history. I write about the variations on a single theme, discord and harmony, the yin and yang of historical polarities in the macrocosm and the microcosm of my own life and the life of my community, my society rotating, synchronizing, as it all does around a Movement that claims to be the emerging world religion on the planet Earth. Gibbon excludes the history of art, science and literature in his immense survey of the victory of barbarism and religion. In this work of mine, I exclude a great deal. For in these years of the great burgeoning, since the passing of Baha'u'llah, it has become impossible to even read all the material on even one part of the story. Toynbee describes the experience of Lord Acton who tried to write a history of liberty but, in trying to read all the relevant print, never wrote the book. As Leonardo da Vinci advises, though, I trust I have eschewed "a line of study in which the work done dies together with the worker."1 But I am also aware, as Lucretius notes, that my work may come to an end and the future may come to see what I write as nothing,2 or, as Shakespeare puts it more colourfully, what I write may die with my bones. And so, although like Gibbon I leave much out in this study, I see what I write as part of my task to execute, within the time that God allots to me on Earth, a mission to do God's will by working in these early decades of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. I see this thing that I do, as the poet Robert Browning once wrote with a note of God-fearing humility, as something done by someone who: ........seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it. The secret of writing history, then, is a little like the secret of sketching and that is to know what to leave out. I'm not so sure I have done that well in following this principle of sketching.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia. _____________________________

Toynbee and Road Maps,

RonPrice — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:34:25 +0000

Anyone who has had a read of Toynbee's "A Study of History" in 11 volumes and some 6000 pages knows that he brings to the discussion of Arab-Israeli conflict some very useful perspectives. I've been reading Toynbee for over 30 years and find him to be a universal historian.-Ron Price, Tasmania....I wrote the following piece yesterday after reading some Toynbee_____________ _________________ THE FIRE GOING OUT Bahais believe they are taking part in the career of the growth of a world civilization. As Toynbee points out and as human experience thusfar suggests, the exercise is a dangerous one. Toynbee argues that the danger is constant and acute because it lies in the very nature of the course which a growing civilization is constrained to take.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.4, Oxford UP, 1962(1939), p.122. Toynbee goes on to say that certain creative personalities who set a civilization in motion and carry it forward feel the need to carry their fellows with them or to make a movement out of something which is a halt.2 This tour de force requires strenuous communion and intimate intercourse to impart the divine fire from one soul to another. There is an inward spiritual grace through which the unillumined soul is fired. But the firing takes place through the principle of mimesis and the process is essentially precarious unless it is crystallized in the form of habit or custom.-Ron Price with thanks to Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Alcan, 1932, p.251. You said it Arnold, as you so often do buried in volumes of your endless pages of your Study of History. Its a dangerous exercise for the individual too, Arnold, one continually revealed by abnormal changes and chances, accidents of life like shipwrecks and fires I have observed for half a century in the lives of others and my own dear self: theres often demoralization of an inner man and heroism--difficult it is to admit & even define in our age, often subtle, with initiative lost, a kind of burn-out, a kind of salt losing its savour, a flagging of the Promethean elan, the fire going out. --Ron Price June 6th 2006 _______________________ Message was edited by: RonPrice