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challenge-and-response（挑战与应战）
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response.Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when “creative minorities” devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects;or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows.Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Toynbee argued that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made.Karl Jaspers and the Axial Age（轴心时代）Axial Age or Axial Period(Achsenzeit, “axis time”)is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the period from 800 to 200 BC, during which, according to Jaspers, similar revolutionary thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Occident.The period is also
sometimes referred to as the Axis Age.Jaspers, in his The Origin and Goal of History, identified a number of key Axial Age thinkers as having had a profound influence on future philosophies and religions, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged.Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmiion of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof
of any extensive intercommunication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India, and China.Jaspers held up this age as unique, and one to which the rest of the history of human thought might be compared.Jaspers' approach to the culture of the middle of the first millennium BC has been adopted by other scholars and academics, and has become a point of discuion in the history of
religion.
