Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant — Book Summary, Notes, and Takeaways

 

Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

Rating: 9/10

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High-Level Thoughts

This short read details 12 lessons learned by Will and Ariel Durant in their chronicle of human history. From biology to economics to politics to competition, the author’s illustrate the driving forces behind human organizational structures. A fascinating read that left me curious about studying economic, political, and philosophical history. Highly recommend.

I. Hesitations

  • "Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice."
  • History is 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 material, and a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.
  • We may ask under the corresponding heads — astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, 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 a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

II. History and the Earth

  • Human history's first lesson in humility is its relative insignificance in the astrological hierarchy.
  • Human's sensitivity to geology and its role in shaping the first societies and tribes cannot be understated. But man has been able to overcome geological handicaps. Climate on the other hand, man has had far more trouble dealing with. Man has mastered the earth, but are destined to become fossils in its soil.
  • Geography is the matrix of history, shaping where humans settled, how civilizations were built, who rose to power, etc. But the story of the past 100 years has been the lessening of geographical barriers as global commerce and travel has lowered barriers to entry.

III. Biology and History

  • The laws of biology are the fundamental laws of history. These laws are simple. They hold true at the individual level or with interacting groups made up of individuals.
  • Life is competition.
  • Life is selection, which is a result of competition.
    • "Since Nature has not read fully the American Declaration of Independence, we are all born unfree and unequal, subject to our physical and psychological heredity."
    • Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution
    • Inequality is not only natural, it grows with the complexity of civilization.
    • "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."
    • "Only a man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end, superior ability has its way"
    • "Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can home for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity"
  • Life must breed.
    • Nature has a passion for quantity as a prerequisite for the selection of quality.
    • Nature has three agents for restoring the balance of its breeding: famine, pestilence, and war.
    • "Essay on Population" — Thomas Malthus
      • Malthus pointed out that the issuance of relief funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to marry early and breed improvidently, making the problem worse."
      • But refuting his claims is done through spreading agricultural knowledge, educational opportunities, and contraceptives. As of now, the wealth have adopted contraceptives while the less-educated haven't — how is that going to impact population dynamics over 100 years?
    • Ideally, parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

IV. Race and History

  • "essai sur l'inegalite des race humains" — Essay on the Inequality of Human Races by Joseph-Arhur de Gobineau — the original claim that one race, the Aryan, was by nature superior to the rest. Similarly "The Passing of the Great Race" — Madison Grant
  • But it's clear that race has not been the causal component but the coincident component of superior geographical and economic opportunities, as the Chinese, Mayan/Aztec/Incan, etc developed superior societies as non-Aryans.
  • "It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people."

V. Character and History

  • What is the constitution of man? The fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind.
  • We are born with six instincts that have both positive and negative sides.
    • Action vs. Sleep
    • Fight vs. Flight
    • Acquisition vs. Avoidance
    • Association vs. Privacy
    • Mating vs. Refusal
    • Parental care vs. Filial dependences
  • These same instincts govern almost all human action and have done so for as long as we have been recording history. What is changing is economic, political, intellectual, and moral implications.
    • Change in these areas is brought about by the initiative individuals, whom is then joined by the innovative minority, only finally to be followed by the imitating majority.
    • The innovating minority is held in check as new ideas are sent through the mill of objection, scrutiny, opposition, etc.

VI. Morals and History

  • Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts its members and association to behavior consistent with its order, security, and growth. A study of history stresses the universality of moral codes and concludes to their necessity.
  • The moral codes of the hunter gatherer, the agriculturalist, the industrialist, and the informationalist have all been different and evolve somewhat linearly. It is often that factors that drove success in the previous time now bind in the current, as prior virtues become present vices.
  • The most commonly changed moral code has been familial. Children used to be an asset, birth control immoral, and output maximized. Monogamy, early marriage, etc. This has ruled for 1500 years. But gradually, the Industrial Revolution altered this. Children were no longer assets, marriage delayed. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Education spread religious doubts, and the old agricultural moral code began to die.
  • There are some commonalities and unchanging truths. For example, sin has flourished throughout every age. Gambling, prostitution, history is simply "a collection of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
  • History is however biased to report the bad and keep the good in the shadows. For every one piece of good in history there might have been 50 bad, even though this was unlikely the real ratio. Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

VIII. Economics and History

  • History is economics in action — Karl Marx. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities. Marx did not claim that individuals were always actuated by economic interest, but may have underestimated the role played by noneconomic incentives in the behavior of masses (political, military power)
  • "The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all." — The Fuggers of Augsburg, the Medici of Florence, the Rothschilds of Paris and the Morgans of New York. Having studied the fluctuations of prices, these men know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard."
  • "Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities is gathered in a minority of the men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability and has regularly occurred throughout history."
    • In progressive societies, the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability n the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty"
    • Despotism may retard this concentration, democracy accelerates.
    • Solon in 600 BC Athens was elected by the populists whom were indebted too much. He immediately devalued the currency, sparked inflation, and lowered the inequality. What are some of the past times this extreme inequality (as we are seeing in the US) has shaken out, and how can we forecast where it is likely headed now?
  • "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"

IX. Socialism and History

  • Economic history has been driven between the fear of capitalism compelling socialism to widen freedom and incentive while the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. The next 100 years will be defined by how technology is able to take the positives from each of these while limiting the negatives.
  • Nearly ever economic period has been marked by some attempt at state-run enterprises, each of which failing but for different reasons such as lack of incentive, crippling taxation, rise of populism and extreme political thought, etc.
    • Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt under Ptolemies, Rome under Diocletian (see "Ancient Rome at Work"), Emperor Wu Ti in China (see "Chinese Civilization"), many more inside.
  • There are enough references in these past two chapters to books on economic history than one would possibly know what to do with, but every one of them look like incredible reads.

X. Government and History

  • "The first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos."
  • Plato reduced political evolution as a cycle of monarchy to aristocracy to democracy to dictatorship and then back to monarchy.
  • The Roman run of rules of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius "the finest succession of good and create sovereigns the world has ever had."
  • "These and a hundred other conditions gave to America a democracy more basic and universal than history had ever seen. Not through the perversity of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development, and through the nature of man. 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."
    • But this becomes a problem when things get too concentrated and a rise of the majority overpowers the power of the minority. The number one way to prevent this? Education. If you can at least set up the less gifted with the opportunity to advance, and supply this opportunity liberally, democracy can continue to flourish.
    • Similarly with health care. If you can supply the less fortunate with basic education and health care, you can quell almost any large scale rebellion as you can only get so upset about inequality if your basic needs are covered very comfortably. This is why I am starting to get around UBI a bit as a way to provide a bit of comfort to potential uprising, at least in the shorter term.

XI. History and War

  • In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. Peace is an unstable equilibrium.
  • The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals. The state has our instincts without our restraints, since there is no entity above them to keep them in check. (And thus, relating to Life 3.0, if states were the second most sovereign power underneath an all-supplying AI ruler, we could indeed operate more peacefully).
  • The implications of war for the future of humanity are so nontrivial compared to the past. Therefore the efforts of peace are magnified exponentially so. Page 85 has maybe the most unbelievable future thoughts on conflict I have ever read, but is just so against the fundamental human nature we are constantly battling.
  • There is perhaps only one thing that can lead to peace on Earth, and that is the contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars, soon thereafter interplanterary war ensues. Then, and only them, will we of this Earth be one.