The Psychology of Encounters
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 1952
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith Lecturer is British historian Arnold J Toynbee. The former Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he is currently the Koraes Professor of History at London University. He considers how Europe interacts with other countries in his Reith Lecture series entitled 'The World and the West'.
In his fifth lecture entitled 'The Psychology of Encounters', Professor Toynbee examines ways in which countries respond to new cultures. He argues that the most important differences are invariably rejected, but that minor "culture strands" are often allowed to flourish, thus creating a patchwork of cultural identities.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. This lecture in the series |
| 0:06.2 | The World and the West, given by Arnold J. Toynbee, was originally broadcast in 1952. |
| 0:14.1 | This is the BBC Home Service. We're broadcasting tonight the fifth of the wreath lectures by |
| 0:20.0 | Arnold Toynbee on The World and the West. |
| 0:24.0 | In this lecture, which is called the Psychology of Encounters, |
| 0:27.8 | Professor Toynbee speaks about the havoc worked by an idea or institution or technique |
| 0:32.1 | when it is cut loose from its original setting and is spread abroad into a foreign social environment. |
| 0:39.3 | Professor Toynbee. |
| 0:41.6 | In the first four talks in this series, we've been surveying four episodes in which our |
| 0:48.1 | Western civilization has been encountered by some contemporary non-Western society. |
| 0:59.0 | Russia's, Islam, Indias, and the Far East's experiences of the West have come under a view. Our survey has shown that these four different |
| 1:06.8 | experiences of being hit by a foreign civilization have had a number of features in common. |
| 1:13.6 | And in this evening's talk, I want to pick out for further examination several features that are, I believe, characteristic |
| 1:22.6 | not only of the contemporary worlds encounters with the West, but of all such collisions between one civilization and another. |
| 1:32.7 | It seems to be something like a common psychology of encounters. |
| 1:37.6 | And this is a subject of practical interest and importance today |
| 1:41.8 | when the sudden annihilation of distance through the achievements of our |
| 1:46.0 | Western technology has brought face-to-face at point-blank range half a dozen societies, |
| 1:52.0 | that until yesterday were each living its own life in its own way, almost as independently |
| 2:00.0 | of its neighbours, as if each society had been marooned on a planet of its own, instead of living in the same world with the other representatives of its kind. |
| 2:13.9 | Let's start with the general point which came to our notice last week, when we were taking a comparative view of our Western civilization's two successive assaults upon China and Japan. |
| 2:27.3 | We saw that on the first occasion the West tried to induce the Far Eastern peoples to adopt the Western |
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