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07241_Field_TCUM T806.txt
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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