The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection.

skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state.

Does history warrant Renan’s conclusion that religion is necessary to morality—that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars?

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”

So the Industrial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals, the liberation of literature from dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the replacement of romanticism by realism in fiction—and the economic interpretation of history.

“the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity.

Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men.

Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

In free enterprise the spur of competition and the zeal and zest of ownership arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men; nearly every economic ability sooner or later finds its niche and reward in the shuffle of talents and the natural selection of skills; and a basic democracy rules the process insofar as most of the articles to be produced, and the services to be rendered, are determined by public demand rather than by governmental decree.

Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.

Why did modern socialism come first in a Russia where capitalism was in its infancy and there were no large corporations to ease the transition to state control?

The Revolution took a Communistic form because the new state was challenged by internal disorder and external attack; the people reacted as any nation will react under siege—it put aside all individual freedom until order and security could be restored.

Here too 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.

the third condition would be a synthesis of capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western world visibly moves.

History has a good word to say for all of them, and for government in general.

Power naturally converges to a center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread, as in Poland under the liberum veto; hence, the centralization of power in the monarchy by Richelieu or Bismarck, over the protest of feudal barons, has been praised by historians.

See what has happened to morals, manners, style, and art since the French Revolution.

As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction, as in the Paris massacres of September, 1792.

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.

dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor distrusted it as a sham equality of votes nullified by a gaping inequality of wealth.

A government that governed least was admirably suited to liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a wilderness to a material utopia, and from the child and ward to the rival and guardian of Western Europe.

Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states.

In the individual, pride gives added vigor in the competitions of life; in the state, nationalism gives added force in diplomacy and war.

One war can now destroy the labor of centuries in building cities, creating art, and developing habits of civilization.

Even a philosopher, if he knows history, will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of a nation.

Should the leaders of America consider only the reluctance of this epicurean generation to face so great an issue, or should they consider also what future generations of Americans would wish that these leaders had done?

Such interludes of widespread peace are unnatural and exceptional; they will soon be ended by changes in the distribution of military power.

States will unite in basic co-operation only when they are in common attacked from without.

Perhaps we are now restlessly moving toward that higher plateau of competition; we may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.”

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.

the results are less predictable. There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.

In organic periods men are busy building; in critical periods they are busy destroying.

He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification must forgo all desire to comprehend history.

On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear—or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams.

What are the causes of development, and what are the causes of decay?

Probably most states (i.e., societies politically organized) took form through the conquest of one group by another, and the establishment of a continuing force over the conquered by the conqueror;

In any case a challenge successfully met (as by the United States in 1917, 1933, and 1941), if it does not exhaust the victor (like England in 1945), raises the temper and level of a nation, and makes it abler to meet further challenges.

When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.

As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.

Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming.

But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead;

Even as these lines are being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.