the point of social saturation. War, in fact, can be seen as a 
process of achieving equilibrium among unequal technologies, a 
fact that explains Toynbee’s puzzled observation that each 
invention of a new weapon is a disaster for society, and that 
militarism itself is the most common cause of the breaking of 
civilizations.

     By militarism, Rome extended civilization or individualism, 
literacy, and lineality to many oral and backward tribes. Even 
today the mere existence of a literate and industrial West 
appears quite naturally as dire aggression to nonliterate 
societies; just as the mere existence of the atom bomb appears 
as a state of universal aggression to industrial and mechanized 
societies.

     On the one hand, a new weapon or technology looms as a