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Sumeric civilization was a similar response to a similar challenge. But not all challenges are the same. Minoan and Hellenic civilizations were responses to the challenge of the sea. Mayan civilization was a response to the challenge of the exuberant tropical forests.
Toynbee's title for one of his chapters on challenge and response is three Greek words which mean: "The beautiful is difficult." But some challenges are too difficult. That is the meaning of those bodies dangling over space from the rock wall. For the Eskimos, the challenge of Arctic life left no energy for further change. The Polynesians failed because they responded to the challenge of the sea with no instrument better than a canoe. The energy of the Nomads was consumed in providing pasture for their herds.
Two ideas have dominated historical thinking in our time: Environment and Race. Race is not the decisive factor, says Toynbee, for men of many races have successfully met their challenges in different ways. It is not environment that makes societies of men what they are. It is the response men make to challenges that determines what they may be.
The Creative Minority. For not all challenges are environmental. There are human challenges. These occur when a civilization is faced with death and a section of the old society secedes from, the morbid body to help form a new civilization. Young civilizations emerge vigorous from the old. But, like men, their very energy bears within itself the seeds of its decay. This pathological progress is the drama of A Study of History.
Toynbee finds that the pathology repeats itself in somewhat similar forms in nearly all civilizations. At first, the civilization is led by "a creative minority." The masses, stimulated by the common challenge that has called the society into being, and by the creative leadership that has guided its response, follow without undue questioning. But response to a challenge calls forth a further challenge. Thus the challenge of overpopulation on a thin soil, to which the Athenians responded by taking to the sea as a commercial empire, called forth a new challenge resulting from Athens' new relations with its vassals and with Sparta.
Nor does successful response to one challenge presuppose success in response to the next. On the contrary, one success tends to make the responder self-satisfied. He comes to believe that the successful response to Challenge I is inevitably the successful response to Challenge II. (Usually it is not.) The elasticity of thought and effort, which is essential to successful response, is lost. The forms (government, culture, habit) in which the successful response has been made tend to freeze and impose themselves on the solution of the new challenge, for which they are wholly unsuited. The creative minority ceases to be creative.