PDF Summary:The Lessons of History, by Will Durant and Ariel Durant

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But, at the end of the day, despite the influence of earth, man is the one that makes civilization by transforming the possibilities into fact.

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Freedom and equality are diametric opposites. When one wins, the other disappears. If people are given freedom, their natural differences in ability will materialize in different outcomes. If people were forced to show equal outcomes and equal abilities, this reduces individual freedom.

This is problematic for egalitarians, who desire equality among all. The best that egalitarians can hope for is an equality of environment, where educational opportunity and the legal system are equal among people.

Life is competition, and societies compete with one another. A society in which equality is force and individual variation is quashed will face a survival disadvantage, compared to one that harnesses the greatest potential of all its individuals. The latter will win the competition between groups, and subjugate the former.

3: Life Must Breed

Nature selects for abundant reproduction. Individual animals that reproduce more perpetuate themselves, outnumbering those that reproduce less.

High birth rates tend to accompany less developed civilizations. At times, a low birth rate nation is “chastened by some more virile and fertile group.”

Differential birth rates change...

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Civilization is not determined by the race. Instead, civilization development is a factor of geographic opportunity and economic and political development.

In turn, civilization makes the people. People who live in new areas adopt the new culture. Ethnic mixtures over centuries create a new type of people and culture.

A race-centric view of history is narrow-minded. A broadened education is the cure for a racially biased view of history. Civilization is a “cooperative product” - all people have contributed to it in some way.

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Character and Inequality

The poor have largely the same impulses as the rich, with only less resources or ability to implement them. Time and time again, the poor who successfully rebelled adopted the very conventions of the people they overthrew.

Society is made up of the imitative majority and the innovating minority. A minority of people are “heroes of action,” pushing past the customs of culture to adapt society to new situations. The words of Churchill may have been worth a hundred battalions. The influence of a Gandhi may lift a society of poor millions to surprising ambition and power.

History in general is the conflict of minorities. The majority celebrates the winner and “supplies the human material of social experiment.”

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• With work no longer dependent on pure physical strength, females entered the workforce.
• Families separated, with individuals moving away to cluster in cities where industries were concentrated.
• Economic maturity to support a family came later, delaying marriage. Delaying marriage made chastity difficult. Nonreproductive sex was helped by contraception.
• The formalization of spread religious doubts, leading to the rise of secularism.
• Materialistic philosophies arose.

(Shortform note: Doubtless the character has changed again with the Information Age with computing and the Internet. We now prize niche personalization instead of mass consumption. Regional and national boundaries have blurred with the ease of global communication. Social groups have been redefined around interest, rather than mere geography - you connect with people who are like you, rather than people who happen to live around you.)

Moral Vices

Sin has flourished in every age, including prostitution, gambling, alcohol.

While our times may seem to have unprecedented moral laxity, it may not actually be unique in history. It may even be self-correcting - our children might come to see...

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But as with all humans, religious leaders can be weak, leading to a variety of abuses of power:

• Religion was used to justify the Inquisition, holy wars, and the Crusades. (Shortform note: no doubt the actions were publicly advertised with the intent of spreading the gospel, but with the underlying incentive of accreting more power and followers and suppressing dissent.)
• Political kings forced the Church into hypocritical acts, like dissolving the Jesuit order.
• The Church committed fraud through bogus relics and dubious miracles; “False Decretals” forged documents to give historical credence to “papal omnipotence.”
• The Church played little part in the abolition of slavery, which the authors considered the hallmark achievement of modern morality.

The recurring nature of abuses triggered skepticism of religion, contributing to its declining influence over the past centuries.

Other forces also weakened religion’s foothold:

• Religion once explained the supernatural. Science increasingly began explaining the supernatural, thus decreasing the reliance on religious explanations. It began with the Copernican model of the solar system, then...

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In a society, the degree of wealth concentration depends on the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws. Democracy, which allows the most liberty, accelerates inequality.

Concentration of wealth and redistribution (violent or peaceful) cycle in civilizations like a heartbeat. Concentration may reach a point where the strength in the many poor rivals that of the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium requires either legislation redistributing wealth, or by revolution distributing poverty.

• Athens in 594 BC saw inequality, and statesman Solon instituted reforms to reduce personal debts and establish progressive income tax. The rich protested this as confiscation, but within a generation the consensus was he had saved Athens from revolution.
• The Roman civil wars were motivated in part by uprising of the plebs.
• The Reformation was in part a redistribution of Catholic Church wealth by reducing payments to the church and appropriating church property and revenues.
• In the 1930s-1960s, the United States was able to peacefully redistribute wealth through taxation and social programs.

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• high taxation causes indolence, resentment, and escape of high earners to lower-tax societies
• revolt is spurred by those whose profits are cut short (often the rich, who mobilize the masses on their behalf)
• disasters (natural and manmade) cause upheaval and discontent

In the modern day, communism has taken on capitalist flair to stimulate productivity. Inversely, capitalist societies have taken on socialist programs to curb discontent with inequality. And so capitalism and communism look more like each other than they did decades past.

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• The gap between rich and poor widened. The rich flaunted their wealth, the poor schemed to redistribute through legislation, taxation, and sometimes murder of creditors and the rich. The rich in turn entrenched against the poor.
• The rich distrusted democracy as “empowered envy,” and the poor distrusted it as a farce, with putative equality of voting obscuring the underlying inequality of wealth.
• This bitterness left Greece divided when Philip of Macedon conquered in 338 BC, leading many to welcome his coming as preferable to revolution.

And in Rome:

• 300-200BC: The Roman oligarchy with army conquered the Mediterranean. Conquered peoples were brought to Italy as slaves. Native farmers joined the proletariat in cities. The General returned with spoils.
• By 50BC: Money replaced land as political power, rival factions purchased candidates and votes. Citizens who voted the wrong way were sometimes killed. Government became corrupt.
• Aristocrats engaged Pompey to maintain power; commoners sided with Caesar, who won and established dictatorship. He was killed by aristocrats, but Augustus came and became a dictator.

Commentary on Government

Does...

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There are two schools of thought. The philosopher will suggest that the destructiveness of military weapons is unprecedented, and humanity should try a new approach in defiance of history. The philosopher suggests the President should be conciliatory, agreeing to mutual peace and commitment and avoiding subversion and betrayal. We should seek mutual understanding and chances to learn from one another, attempting a radical experiment in history.

In contrast, the general laughs, thinking the philosopher has forgotten all of history and the competitive nature of man. The general believes some fundamental differences cannot be negotiated away, that subversion will continue happening regardless of what is said on the surface, and that world order will arise from a victory so decisive that it will dictate international law. Groups unite only in the face of a common enemy, and mankind will become one only if it faces a foreign enemy together.

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Does history necessarily repeat itself? By and large, it has, because human nature is a relative constant. Humans react in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations like hunger and danger.

But the authors argue we are in an unprecedented time of development, where individuals are more differentiated than in primitive societies, and many novel circumstances will arise that demand novel responses. They say, with cautious optimism, that “there is no certainty that the future will repeat the past.”

Inevitably civilizations will fall, but this is not something to be bemoaned. What is gone is the frame; what was created in that civilization can be immortal. Civilizations pass its accomplishments onto their heirs. To wit, more people read Homer today than did in his time.

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An Optimistic Note

The achievements of civilization (fire, wheel, language, agriculture) have passed from one to the next. They connect eras to each other, back to the beginnings of biology.

The amount of achievement in human history is staggering. Interrupt this transmission for 100 years and we return to being savages.

Education is the transmission of a multifactorial heritage - our modes of thought, morals, technology, and culture. This heritage is richer than ever before, including all of Greek thinking and the Italian Renaissance.

History is the creation and recording of this heritage. Progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use.