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The Lessons of History by Will Durant

The Lessons of History by Will Durant

by Parker · 42 things on Twos

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
History is the events or record of the past.
Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty. Let rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under sand, as in Central Asia; let it fall too furiously, and civilization will be choked with jungle, as in Central America. Let the thermal average rise by twenty degrees in our thriving zones, and we should probably relapse into lethargic savagery. In a semitropical climate a nation of half a billion souls may breed like ants, but enervating heat may subject it to repeated conquest by warriors from more stimulating habitats. Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.
Water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade.
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.
The first biological lesson of history is that life is a competition.
We co-operate in our group—our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation—in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups.
We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast.
The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.
Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.
The best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunities.
A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups.
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed.
Nature sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.
Mouths and food are maintained by famine, pestilence, and war.
Medicine, sanitation, and charity nullify selection by keeping the unfit alive to multiply their like.
If the Negroes of Africa have produced no great civilization it is probably because climatic and geographical conditions frustrated them; would any of the white “races” have done better in those environments?
It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.
“Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.
The nature of man is made up of six positive and six negative instincts, whose function is to preserve the individual, the family, the group, or the species.
Means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care.
Table of character elements
It was fear that first made the gods—fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky.
History is a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive.
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
History is inflationary and money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution.
Communism was a war economy. Perhaps it survives through continued fear of war; given a generation of peace it would presumably be eroded by the nature of man.
Capitalism retains the stimulus of private property, free enterprise, and competition, and produces a rich supply of goods; high taxation, falling heavily upon the upper classes, enables the government to provide for a self-limited population unprecedented services in education, health, and recreation. The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.
Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.
The sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions.
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction; dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.
Though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal.
War, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states.
The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery.
Our comforts and conveniences may have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber.
If progress means increase in happiness its case is lost almost at first sight. Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideas we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy of our approval.
We shall define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life.
Our finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all.
Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.