Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College. Vol. 20, No. 5. June 14, 1956

[Introduction]

Professor Arnold Toynbee emerged from his lecture at Victoria University College as a triumphant social success. Indeed, he might be called a new parlour game: his ideas a chessboard for continued argument. Charming, witty, dignified, fluent, he was a splendid representative of the best kind of Western Man, and his easy tolerance took in all nations, in all times, including even our own. But his cosmology, expounded over an hour or more, included only one human being: Ghandi. And his discussion of an emerging Asia, and its relationships with the Commonwealth, dismissed Red China in a phrase.

Professor Toynbee dealt with five millennia of civilization, fanning out from the world's centre: the Middle East, where the two Asian Peninsulas, Europe and Africa, jut out from the Mainland. Amusingly, he sketched the peripheral islands, to the outermost Americas; and, briefly, he credited the sailing ships of the Portuguese with the temporary dominance of the West.

Returning to his Scheme of Things, he described the return to the Natural Order. Air-routes from East to West, we were told, cross Baghdad and Beirut; and there's more oil in one tiny Arab state than in the United States. He had nothing to say about nuclear fission, except that we must live together or die.