Leaving Western Civ Behind WILLIAM H. MCNEILL I PROPOSE TO SURVEY MY EFFORT to understand Plato, Augustine, Luther, Voltaire, Marx, human history, seeking to clarify how I got to Flaubert, and many others. The Human Web (2003) from earlier world- views proffered by teachers and then altered My undergraduate years and elaborated by me, starting in childhood The course was put together by Ferdinand and proceeding all the way to the senility that Schevill, an elderly history professor who lec- PERSPECTIVES begins to beset me today. tured three times a week to a class of several In the beginning was Sunday school, where hundred. Schevill’s lectures had a clear and kindly teachers told us comprehensive point of view, juxtaposing Bible stories and did reason against faith, St. Socrates against St. their best to keep us quiet, except when we Paul, with clear and emphatic preference for My college years sang hymns. Christian doctrine was left out: Socrates and the human reason he stood for as contributed lasting no original sin, no redeeming grace, no hell the best available guide to human affairs. I either; and heaven remained very misty. The already had inklings of this secular—really, assumptions core message boiled down to this: Jesus loved eighteenth-century—viewpoint from high I used when us, and we should love him in return, just as school, where we had used Carl Becker’s text- working out all we loved and depended on our own mothers. book for modern European history. But it was my subsequent Not much of a worldview, but all a Canadian only under Schevill’s influence that what I Presbyterian Sunday school in the early 1920s will call the “Western Civ” model of the hu- notions about felt it safe to impart. man past came home to me. It was a conver- human history Years of subsequent churchgoing with my sion experience, and I remain grateful for it parents did not expand this core very notably, inasmuch as it introduced me to the European so much so that I first learned about original cultural heritage in a coherent—though highly sin and redemption by reading a translation of selective and superficial—fashion. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo assigned as required Throughout my undergraduate career, reading for an introductory humanities course 1934–38, the University of Chicago was staffed at the University of Chicago in 1934. That by professors born into Christian (and some course constituted a major landmark of my in- Jewish) families who had fallen away from in- tellectual maturation, exposing me, as it did, herited religious doctrines with varying degrees to a wide variety of other eye-opening authors of completeness and self-consciousness. So of the Western tradition week after week: my undergraduate years filled out details of Schevill’s secular viewpoint, but did not change WILLIAM H. MCNEILL is professor emeritus of fundamentals. Those years were also when history at the University of Chicago. This article the approach of World War II became in- was adapted from the first William H. McNeill creasingly obvious and I was much taken by Lecture in World History, sponsored by Berkshire the notion that international affairs consti- Publishing Group and delivered by the author on tuted a process that overrode human wishes or June 26, 2009, at the World History Association conscious intentions, and that we were reen- Conference in Salem, Massachusetts. acting a pattern already familiar from ancient 40 L IBERAL E DUCATION S UMMER/FALL 2011 University of Chicago Greek and Roman history. A cycle of civiliza- that social change very often arose from en- tional growth, crisis, and decay seemed to be counters with strangers who possessed some at work resembling the concept of nemesis, obviously superior skill or knowledge that which Herodotus used to explain Xerxes’ de- locals could borrow and adjust to their own feat. As an undergraduate I already planned use. So my college years contributed lasting to write an extended history of ancient and assumptions I used when working out all my modern times, setting forth the cyclical pat- subsequent notions about human history and tern I had glimpsed. how we got to where we are. PERSPECTIVES The nearest I came to expanding my outlook beyond the European past occurred almost by The influence of Arnold Toynbee chance in 1936 when I enrolled in a summer A massive intellectual jolt came my way in course entitled Folk Society, taught by the an- the spring of 1941, during my second year of thropologist Robert Redfield. He was then seek- graduate study at Cornell University, when I ing to contract a scientific, essentially timeless, chanced upon the first three volumes of typology of human societies; and later published Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History—all his views in a book entitled The Folk Culture that had then been published of the eventual of Yucatan (1941). But in 1936 he was still ten volumes. I discovered that Toynbee had working his ideas out for himself, and this lent been a generation ahead of me in glimpsing a a special freshness and vivacity to his lectures. repetitive cycle of ancient and modern Euro- Redfield’s basic notion was that isolated pean history, having reacted to World War I village communities could and did work out a in much the same way as I reacted to the out- more or less complete array of customary re- break of World War II. Moreover, Toynbee sponses to all normal human experiences, had worked out details of classical and modern whereas cities, where strangers abounded, could civilizational growth, crisis, and collapse far not sustain firm customary rules, thus opening more precisely than I, and, wonder of wonder, the way for new forms of behavior—successful then searched the record of other civiliza- sometimes, but more often disruptive and psy- tions—twenty-one in all—to test whether chologically harmful. By arranging particular they, too, exhibited similar rhythms of growth communities along a scale from those almost and decay. Not surprisingly, he found what he (but never completely) encapsulated within a looked for, and with masterful ingenuity—in- cake of custom to the polar opposite of a com- deed, with almost superhuman omniscience— munity lacking all customary forms of behavior proceeded to set forth a schema for human (another impossibility), Redfield hoped to history as a whole. understand all that happened among actual Those volumes of Toynbee’s A Study of His- human beings, and to be able to identify per- tory effected a second conversion, for they sistent points of strain within both civilized showed me how parochial my studies had and custom-bound societies. hitherto been. I suddenly realized that the Incidentally, Redfield’s course also intro- book I had planned would have to take on the duced me to the Plains Indians of North four-fifths of humankind excluded from the America and how they had altered their en- Western civilization with which I had previ- tire way of life by embracing new possibilities ously been exclusively concerned. Though I created by the spread of horses northward was then within sight of the completion of my from Spanish Mexico decade by decade, PhD, I had disconcertingly discovered that transmitting from tribe to tribe the skills and my education was just beginning, if I were accouterments needed for hunting buffalo on ever to understand the human past as a whole. horseback . This became for me an archetype To be sure, even in my first raptures, I rec- of intelligent human response to encounters ognized points of difference with Toynbee. He with new and obviously advantageous possi- referred to civilization as a “state of the soul,” bilities—encounters, I assumed, that must but I preferred to emphasize more tangible re- have played a large part in human history alities—technology, not least, together with from the very beginning. social complexity, occupational specialization, I still adhere to the idea that impersonal and other traits anthropologists were accus- process outweighs conscious purpose in human tomed to invoke. I was also sure that separate affairs. Likewise I have never since doubted civilizations were never insulated and unable 42 L IBERAL E DUCATION S UMMER/FALL 2011 I suddenly realized to learn from one another as that the book learned a great deal from one Toynbee claimed, interacting I had planned would another in our staff discus- only exceptionally through re- have to take on sions. So my college teaching naissances and what he called was a stimulating experience, “aparentation and affiliation.” the four-fifths of all the more so because we also The Plains Indians’ reaction to humankind excluded had to articulate our claim to a Spanish horses in Mexico was from the Western place in the curriculum before enough to show me how mis- civilization with which the college faculty as a whole guided he was. against doubters who disdained PERSPECTIVES A few months later, in I had previously our discipline and denied our September 1941, when I had been exclusively right to exist. completed note-taking for my concerned Nonetheless, I did not wish dissertation but before I started to confine my attention to to write it, my Chicago draft board summoned Western Civ permanently and had not forgot- me to join the army. Accordingly, for the next ten Toynbee. Thanks to my wife, whose father five years and two months my life altered dras- had been Toynbee’s closest friend at Balliol tically, and historical ideas and ambitions all College, Oxford, I met him for the first time but disappeared from my consciousness. in my father-in-law’s house in March 1947, Then in June 1946 I was discharged from a week after Time magazine had devoted its the army and returned to Cornell University cover story to his vision of rising and falling to write my thesis and qualify for an academic civilizations, and declared that he had fully career.