Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

by Will Durant

to imprison, confiscate, and kill. The local priests and nuns still remembered (and often practiced) Christianity, but the hierarchy forgot it in a lust for unassailable and infallible authority.

The Church had begun with the Prince ...

had bidden Peter put his sword back into its sheath; it had become a warrior using swords, pikes, and guns against the Albigensians of France and the Jews of Spain. The lowly carpenter of Nazareth had been replaced by a pope more richly housed than most emperors, and controlling more wealth than most states. In disputes between oppressors and oppressed the hierarchy had almost always supported the oppressors and suppressed the oppressed. The success of humanists and humanitarians in freeing the mind and the serf emboldened men to demand the taming of this dogmatic, obscurantist, intolerant, and reactionary power.

Finally, that’s interesting thought

Has the weakening of that power been the main cause of our moral decline? No. It has been one factor among many, but not the chief.

Do we think that the morality of people in the middle centuries was of a higher level and more normal than what we experience today?

The principal and overspreading cause of our moral “decay” has been the Industrial Revolution. Almost every aspect of that economic

rural mutual surveillance to concealment of the individual in

almost ended the force of neighborly opinion to control personal

the family was the unit of economic produ...

Under industrialism the corporation and the employee are the units of production; the fam...

contemporary industrial society, where the deferment of economic maturity has delayed marriage and made continence difficult.

was less reason than now to defer marriage or to practice birth control. 5. The postponement of marriage and the

sanction of fear from the prohibition of extramarital relations.

broken down moral restraints in the conduct of business. 7. The wealth spawned by improved methods

indulge in moral escapades that their ancestors could not afford. 8. Improvements in communication and

publicity that stimulates similar deviations elsewhere; and...

new generation increasingly familiar with the historical and geographical diversity of moral codes and their human

Technology has extended and depersonalized war, and has vastly developed man’s

The survivors, returning to civil life, keep some of the habits and temper of war, find it difficult to endure poverty amid surrounding wealth, and apply in the cities the techniques and principles learned in the camp and on the battlefield.

PTSD

Nationalism overrides morality, defers social reform, and becomes a religion stronger than any church.

Therefore we should speak of a moral change rather than a moral decay; the present age is experimenting, at its own peril, to find how far individual freedom can comport with the stability of society, the protection of women, and the security of person and property.

our industrial society will gradually develop a secular ethic that—with lessened poverty and widened education—will function as effectively as a theological morality. We must not imagine that past generations

we must not run away from our perilous liberty to seek mental quiet and asphyxiation in the womb of a loving but tyrannical Mother Church.

underestimated the role of sympathy—fellow feeling—in moral sentiments, as analyzed

desire, instinct, and passion are the motive forces behind human behavior, even behind human reason. But I defined

Imagine what a natural ethic could do if as much time and care were spent in teaching it as the Church spends in inculcating a supernatural code.

Wow he does not like religion at all does he he is making fun of the spirituality that the church teaches as something as a waste of time compared to other things it could be taught two youngsters

They will never satisfy the moralist, for morality is unnatural, goes against the grain; we are equipped by nature for a hunting life in woods and fields, rather than a mechanical life in cities, offices, and factories. But the problem of moral degeneration must be solved, for in the last analysis morality and civilization are one.

I’m not sure that we are programmed to hunt and fish and survive in the woods. Perhaps that was true in the past but we have evolved out of that because that is so I matter to us and daunting and freight mean so that we are more used to mechanical life in the cities offices and factories then we are hunting and fishing for game

I conclude from the foregoing disquisition that our moral “decay” is the natural if gradual dissolution of a once-puritan moral code that lost both its agricultural basis and rural environment, and that is slowly, with costly trial and error, evolving into a new code that is better adjusted to contemporary industry and technology, with a background of urban or suburban life, lengthened adolescence, smaller families, advanced education, religious doubt, free press, profuse publication, widened and accelerated communication and transport, and an unprecedented dissemination of comforts, opportunities, and wealth. These conditions have evoked revolutionary ventures, and youth has borne their brunt.

it is the nature, function, and obligation of youth to rebel, as it is of old age to provide balancing resistance and checks, and of middle age to find some viable compromise between stability and liberty,

old age, rooted in past conditions, is not equipped to meet external change with internal adjustments;

Huh?

I myself generally cling to the old code,

The boy welling with hormones and coursing blood wonders why he should not solicit the cooperation of a similarly fretting girl in achieving detumescence.

insist that a gentleman will refrain from coitus with any young lady whose social status and marital marketability would be injured by his passing triumph.

What in the world does this mean?

believe that parents should alleviate the lengthened economic

adolescence of their children by financing, at a regularly diminishing rate, the early years of marriage, but on condition that the children should agree not to marry without the consent of their parents.

Such BS IN 2018

I believe that most divorces lead to difficulties as acute as before; we carry into a second union

the same character that shared in breaking the previous bond. I admit that the steady

children. I am not asking you to compound the overpopulation of the globe; three babies will meet your quota and will allow for one loss. Otherwise you may use any form of birth control that will not impair the health of your mate or yourself.

Next to sharing the joys and sorrows of your spouse, the profoundest experiences of your career are the tribulations and delights given us by our children and their children. I count it as an unforgettable

the judgment of the community, as expressed by its elected legislators, rightly overrides the judgment of the individual. The

That’s a rare word, I’ve never seen that before

intelligence itself involves discrimination between desires that may be pursued and those that should be subdued.

An entire department of the government should be devoted to auditing the books, and examining the conduct, of every other branch of the government.

This is scary stuff

We need not make our penal code a machinery of punishment and revenge; we should treat criminals as victims of mental disturbance or arrested development. Let us put them not in prisons that are nurseries and colleges of crime, but

securely enclosed state farms where steady labor in the open air could make for health and stability and accumulate a fund to finance

That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man;

That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own;

Rooted in freedom, children of the same Divine Father, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

Need to expand the definition to include women

Now, we felt, we would go down in history on a level with Thomas Jefferson. Proud of its success and its eloquence, our little band rested on its oars, while racial chaos rose on every side. Of course Meyer and I were innocent idealists, who

never felt the wounds of economic servitude, political disbarment, and social contumely. We had no conception of the white man’s fear of black power growing in the North. We had underrated the spread and comfortable acceptance of propaganda proclaiming the inherent inferiority and limited educability of the black mind. We had never lived in a district where realty values had suffered from minority infiltration. We saw many successful black physicians, lawyers, clergymen, and office holders, and rejoiced in their mounting number and rapid advancement, but we had never felt the horror of a lynching, the humiliating rejection from hotels and restaurants, the hopeless

We lost ourselves in our individual tasks, and subsided into the unconscious satisfaction of belonging to the