The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.

“The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.”

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”

“History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.”

“When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.”

Climate no longer controls us as severely as Montesquieu and Buckle supposed, but it limits us.

Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.

Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home.

like frogs around a pond,” said Plato

When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea.

Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

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. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity,

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

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 third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.

If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.

Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

much of what we call intelligence is the result of individual education, opportunity, and experience;

Even the children of Ph.D.s must be educated and go through their adolescent measles of errors, dogmas, and isms; nor can we say how much potential ability and genius lurk in the chromosomes of the harassed and handicapped poor.

So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies; just as the defeat of the Moslems at Tours (732) kept France and Spain from replacing the Bible with the Koran, so the superior organization, discipline, morality, fidelity, and fertility of Catholics may cancel the Protestant Reformation and the French Enlightenment. There is no humorist like history.

The rise, success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality of the race.

Everywhere the Nordics were adventurers, warriors, disciplinarians; they made subjects or slaves of the temperamental, unstable, and indolent “Mediterranean” peoples of the South, and they intermarried with the intermediate quiet and acquiescent “Alpine” stocks to produce the Athenians of the Periclean apogee and the Romans of the Republic.

History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.

The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the product of geographical opportunity and economic and political development rather than of racial constitution, and much of their civilization had an Oriental source.

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

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.

Each instinct generates habits and is accompanied by feelings. Their totality is the nature of man.

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.

History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.

When he had caught his prey he ate to the cubic capacity of his stomach, being uncertain when he might eat again; insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory—if only in the blood—of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill.

Probably every vice was once a virtue—i.e., a quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group.

Man has never reconciled himself to the Ten Commandments. We have seen Voltaire’s view of history as mainly “a collection of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes” of mankind,23 and Gibbon’s echo of that summary.

Behind the red façade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children.

The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails.

Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

May we take as long to fall as did Imperial Rome!

The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole; individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases.

It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich.

These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichaean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee.

Catholicism survives because it appeals to imagination, hope, and the senses; because its mythology consoles and brightens the lives of the poor; and because the commanded fertility of the faithful slowly regains the lands lost to the Reformation.