Finally

   Toynbee contended that in the atomic age, humanity would have to choose between political unification and mass-suicide. He believed the chief obstacle to political unification was a long-standing destructive habit of the West which he referred to as the habit of “divisive feeling” to which we tended to easily succumb as opposed to reaching for our more recently adopted habit of “world-mindedness.”  The good news, he said, was that just as new habits could be adopted, old ones could also be modified or abandoned. He stressed that as a general rule we humans would opt to abandon even our most deeply rooted habits once it became clear that clinging to them would spell disaster.  […]