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we offer a survey of human experience, not a personal revelation.
Have you learned more about human nature than the man in the street can learn without so much as opening a book?
Have you found such regularities in the sequence of past events that you can predict the future actions of mankind or the fate of states?
the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale?
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.
“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”2 Even
Cowper’s
Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy—an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”5—or so we believe and hope.
total perspective is an optical illusion.
and be provisionally content with probabilities; in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect.
to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.
Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty.
Pascal: “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.”
sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells.
an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty.
Let the thermal average rise by twenty degrees in our thriving zones, and we should probably relapse into lethargic savagery.
Those heat climate books
suzerainty
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.
Guns germs steel
the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
civilized men consume one another by due process of law.
Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride.
our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive,
Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. 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. Life and history do precisely that, with a
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Yikes
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.
below the average in economic ability
Below average in economic ability? Yikes
in the end superior ability has its way.
Yikes
best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
Preach
This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.
Globalism
If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.
Overstated fear due to technology (GMOs)
Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.
Oh boy
the labors of educators are apparently canceled in each generation by the fertility of the uninformed.
Yikes o clock; eugenics-like
Nietzsche thought that the best blood in Germany was in peasant
That scans🙄
Birth control continued to spread in the upper classes while immigrant stocks from the Germanic North and the Greek or Semitic East replenished and altered the population of Italy.9 Very probably this ethnic change reduced the ability or willingness of the inhabitants to resist governmental incompetence and external attack.
the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.
Hmm
Some weaknesses in the race theory are obvious. A Chinese scholar would remind us that his people created the most enduring civilization in history—statesmen, inventors, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, saints from 2000 B.C. to our own time. A Mexican scholar could point to the lordly structures of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures in pre-Columbian America. A Hindu scholar, while acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some sixteen hundred years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets of their own; the
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History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.
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.
he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul.
There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.
In this analysis human beings are normally equipped by “nature” (here meaning heredity) with six positive and six negative instincts, whose function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group, or the species.
Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations.
Burkean
Here the initiative individual—the “great man,” the “hero,” the “genius”—regains his place as a formative force in history. He is not quite the god that Carlyle described; he grows out of his time and land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent and voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new ideas would be untimely and impracticable.
Hmm
A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.
so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority,
Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power.
Pinker
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.
Burke
sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
HAahahhahhha
