Notes from The Lessons of History
American husband-and-wife historians Ariel and Will Durant spent 40+ years studying 5,000+ years of recorded human history and they assembled that knowledge into The Story of Civilization, which spanned 13,000+ pages and 11 volumes. Their work earned them the Pulitzer Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the late 1960s, they published a summary of the key lessons and themes from these volumes into a book called The Lessons of History, which I wanted to recommend to you today. This book made my all-time top 5 list, a list I plan to share soon.
At 100 pages in length, The Lessons of History is a quick read. If you were scoring books on an “insights per page” basis, this book might top the list, perhaps rivaled only by books like Meditations (also on my top 5 list). While Lessons of History takes just a few hours to read, it gives you plenty to chew on afterward.
Below I share some of my favorite passages from the book. I’m happy to send the book your way for the holiday season, so just reach out to me if I can send a copy to your door.
In the opening chapter Hesitations, the book begins with an acknowledgment of how bold an ambition it is to summarize 5,000 years of history into a 100-page book (undoubtedly the first thing on one’s mind as they open the book):
Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the body of earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads –astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, policics, and war – what history has to say about the nature, conduct and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress hundreds of centuries in a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.
In History and the Earth:
In the word of 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.”
In Race and History
A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a cooperative product, that nearly all people 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 Character and History
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. 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. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.
In Religion and History
As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
In Economics and History
At the other end of the scale history reports that “the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”
and
Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
and
In progressive societies, the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number of many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution redistributing poverty….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 Socialism and History
The socialism of Diocletian was a war economy, made possible by fear of foreign attack. Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.
and
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to wide freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
In Government and History, the book offers a view into the conditions that might have led to a sticking democracy in America.
We may infer from these classic examples, that ancient democracy, corroded with slavery, venality, and war did not deserve the name and offers no fair test of popular government. In America, democracy had a wide base. It began with the advantage of a British Heritage: Anglo Saxon law, which from Magna Carta onward had defended the citizens against the state; and Protestantism which had opened the way to religious and mental liberty. The American Revolution was not only a revolt of colonials against a distant government; it was also an uprising of a native middle class against an imported aristocracy. The rebellion was eased and quickened by an abundance of free land and a minimum of legislation. Men who owned the soil they tiled, and (within the limits of nature) controlled the conditions under which they lived, had an economic footing for political freedom; their personality and character were rooted in the earth. It was such men who made Jefferson president – Jefferson who was as skeptical as Voltaire and as revolutionary as Rousseau. 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. And while rural isolation provided liberty and security within the protective seas. These and a hundred other conditions gave to America a democracy more basic and universal than history had ever seen.
and
If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal.
In History and War
In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war.
and
“Polemos pater panton,” said Heracleitus; war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
and
A nation must be ready at any moment to defend itself; and when its essential interests are involved it must be allowed to use any means necessary to its survival. The Ten Commandments must be silent when self preservation is at stake.
In the closing pages of this chapter, the authors offer a view on what an American president might say to China and Russia over the coming decades, followed by the response of a general. The president begins:
“We respect you and our differences…We must not allow mutual fear to lead into war for the murderousness of our weapons will bring us into a situation unfamiliar to human history…
We are not afraid your systems will displace ours nor ours yours…While maintaining adequate defenses we can arrange non-aggression…Let us join in persistent conferences for adjustment of our differences…If you and we can succeed at this, we shall merit a place for centuries to come in the grateful memory of mankind.
But the general smiles. You have forgotten the lessons of history…Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiations …a world order does not come by gentleman's agreement, but through decisive victory by one great power, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius. You have told us that man is a competitive animal, that his states must be like himself, and that natural selection now operates on an international plane. 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.
In Growth and Decay
If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence). If we ask what makes a creative individual, we are thrown back from history to psychology and biology – to the influence of the environment and the gamble and secret of the chromosomes.
In Is Progress Real?
The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.
and
To those who study history….the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors, it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesman, investors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing…If a man is fortunate he will before he dies, gather up as much as he can of civilized heritage, and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for the inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.
While there is no chapter in the book summarizing love in history, I think it’s worth calling out that Ariel and Will may have left us one extra lesson. The two got married in 1913 when Ariel was 15 years old. They spent 68 years together, studying and publishing for the majority of those years. When Ariel passed away in 1981, Will passed away just 2 weeks later (often referred to as the widowhood effect). For all of their shared interests of writing, philosophy, and history, Ariel summarized their love in a conversation with their granddaughter sharing these simple, and timeless words – “it was our differences that made us grow.”
Highly recommend the book. Please let me know if you end up reading it.