Husband and wife team Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years writing their celebrated eleven-volume history The Story of Civilization. In the process they made note of the recurring patterns of human behaviour so that they might illuminate “future probabilities, the nature of man and the conduct of states”. The result was an essay entitled The Lessons of History.
There’s nothing like a few thousand years of history to put today’s dilemmas into some perspective, so here’s a summary of the top eight lessons from The Lessons of History.
1. Biology
Life is competition; peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Co-operation increases with social development, but mostly because it is a form of competition. Groups – family, community, club, church, party, ‘race’ or nation – co-operate in order to strengthen the group in its competition with other groups.
Life is selection. Inequality grows with the complexity of civilization. Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies. When one prevails the other dies. The best one can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
Life must breed. If the human brood becomes too numerous for the food supply, nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence and war.
2. Race
History teaches us that nearly all peoples have contributed to civilization; 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.
Racial prejudices have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated by differences of acquired culture – of language, dress, habits, morals or religion. There is no cure for such prejudice except a broadened education.
3. Character
History shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind over time. Human nature does not alter between classes: the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity to implement them. Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they condemned in the forces they deposed.
4. Religion
Religion prevails in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; atheism progresses as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, family and morality without endangering the stability of the state. One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection.
5. Economics
Every economic system relies upon some for-profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Concentration of wealth regularly recurs in history. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength in the few rich: then the unstable equilibrium generates a crisis which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing property.
6. Government
Since individuals love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation. So the prime task of government is to establish order.
Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government because it requires the widest spread of intelligence. Ignorance lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mould public opinion. If race or class war creates hostile camps which change political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword.
7. War
The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: the desire for food, land, materials, fuels and mastery.
War is a constant of history and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
History shows that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of nations.
8. Growth and Decay
Why is history littered with the ruins of civilization? History repeats itself in the main because human nature only changes at the pace of geological time, and individuals are equipped to respond to stimuli in stereotyped ways.
A civilization declines when its political or intellectual leaders fail to meet the challenges of change.
What are we to make of these lessons? Every group or nation is at a different point in their history. You may recognize your circumstance in some of the lessons. For me, a key take away is the value of widespread education. What is it for you?
The writer is a co-author of Court of the Grandchildren, a novel set in 2050s America.
Image by christal21 from Pixabay
For more posts on this theme:
History! Read it and weep! – The transitions between dominant empires over the last five hundred years.
Every time history repeats the price goes up – Why societies collapse.
Fall of Civilizations – Case studies through the ages.
