FULL VERSION

PART ONE
The Lessons of History
by Will and Ariel Durant

AS HIS studies come to a close, the historian faces the challenge: of what use have they been? Have you learned more about human nature than the man in the street can learn without so much as opening a book?

Have you derived any illumination of our present condition, any guidance for our judgments and policies, any guard against the rebuffs of surprise?

Is it possible that history teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of mistakes the future is destined to make on a larger scale?

At times we feel so, and a multitude of doubts assails us. Our knowledge of the past 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; the rest is prejudice.

Furthermore, we do not know the whole of man's history; there were probably many civilizations before the Sumerian or the Egyptian. So we must operate with partial knowledge, and be content with probabilities. In history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect.

Perhaps, within these limits, we may ask 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 few pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Gifts Of The Earth

HISTORY IS subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches somewhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea. Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course. To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.

Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps; he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara: he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can still ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build. Let rain become too rare and civilization disappears under the sand, as in Central Asia; let it rain too furiously and civilization will be choked with jungle, as in Central America.

Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases and oceans draw settlers to their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade. Egypt was the "gift of the Nile." Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the Elbe and the Rhine, France along the Rhone, the Loire and the Seine.

When the Greeks grew too numerous for their boundaries, they founded colonies along the Mediterranean, "like frogs around a pond," said Plato. For 2000 years--from the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) to the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588)--the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean were the rival seats of the white man's ascendancy. But after 1492 the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama invited men to brave the oceans. The Atlantic nations rose, and finally spread their suzerainty over half the world.

The development of the airplane will again alter the map of civilization. Countries like England and France will lose the commercial advantage of abundant coastlines. Countries like Russia, China and Brazil, hampered by the excess of their landmass over their coasts, will cancel part of their handicap by taking to the air. Coastal cities will derive less of their wealth from the clumsy business of transferring goods from ship to train or from train to ship. When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.

Unfree And Unequal

HISTORY IS a fragment of biology. Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. The startled animals scurry away at our coming; the birds scatter; the fish disperse in the brook.
Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat. Then all the chronicles and achievements of man fall humbly into perspective; all our economic competition, our strife for mates, our hunger and love and grief and wars, are akin to the seeking, mating, striving and suffering that hide under these fallen trees or leaves, or in the waters, or on the boughs.

Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence. If some of us seem to escape the strife it is because our group protects us; but that group itself must meet the tests of survival.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition--peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale.

We are acquisitive, greedy and pugnacious because our blood remembers milleniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation's way of eating. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group, they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed, and some fail. Since Nature has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal; subject to our physical and psychological heredity, diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character.

Inequality is not only natural, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker. If we knew our fellow men thoroughly, we could select 30 percent of them whose combined ability could equal all of the rest. Life and history do precisely that. Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom an equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the 19th century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows. Only the 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.

The third biological lesson is that life must breed. Nature has a passion for quantity as a prerequisite to the selection of quality. She is more interested in the species than in the individual. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high; and she sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.

If the human brood was too numerous for the food supply, Nature had three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence and war. In his Essay on Population (1798) Thomas Malthus explained that without these periodic checks the birth rate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food. The recent spectacle of Canada and the United States exporting millions of bushels of wheat, while avoiding famine and pestilence at home, would seem to provide a living answer to Malthus. If existing agricultural knowledge were everywhere applied, the planet could feed twice its present population.

But Malthus would answer that this solution merely postpones the calamity. There is a limit to the fertility of the soil; every advance in agricultural technology is sooner or later canceled by the excess of births over deaths; and meanwhile medicine, sanitation and charity keep the unfit alive to multiply their like.

To which hope replies: The advances of industry, education and standards of living in countries that now endanger the world by their fertility will probably have the same effect there, in reducing the birth rate, as they have had in Europe and North America. Until that equilibrium of production and reproduction comes, it will be the counsel of humanity to disseminate the knowledge and means of contraception. Ideally, parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

History Is Color-Blind

THERE ARE three billion non-white people on the earth, and less than half that many whites. However, many palefaces were delighted when Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, in an essay during the 1850s, announced that one race, the "Aryan," was by nature superior to all the rest.

Some weaknesses in any race theory are immediately 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 could point to the lordly structures of Mayan and Aztec cultures in pre-Columbian America. A Hindu would recall that the dark Dravidian peoples in south India produced great builders and poets; the temples of Madras, Madurai and Trichinopoly are among the most impressive structures on earth. Even more startling is the towering shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat. History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization under almost any skin.

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people.

Varied stocks, entering some locality from diverse directions at diverse times, mingle their blood, traditions and ways. Such a mixture may in the course of centuries produce a new people; so Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Normans fused to produce Englishmen. When the new type takes form, its cultural expressions are unique and constitute a new civilization--a new physiognomy, character, language, literature, religion, morality and art.

American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture. Between 1700 and 1848 white Americans north of Florida were mainly Anglo- Saxon, and their literature was a flowering of old England on New England's soil. After 1848 varied white stocks began entering the country in increasing numbers; a fresh racial fusion began, which will hardly be complete for centuries to come. When, out of this mixture, a new type is formed, America may have its own language (as different from English as Spanish is from Italian), its indigenous literature, its characteristic arts. Already these are visibly and raucously on their way. "Racial" antipathies 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 antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a cooperative 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 and woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative groups.

A Secret Unity

HOW FAR has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically, there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.

The Greeks of Plato's time behaved very much like the French of modern centuries; and the Romans behaved like the English. Means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care. Nor does human nature alter as between classes. By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them. Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel responses. Here the "great man," the "hero" or "genius" plays his role in history. At times his eloquence, like Churchill's, may be worth a thousand regiments; his foresight in strategy and tactics, like Napoleon's, may win battles and campaigns and establish states. A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Lenin are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.

But 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. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires. If he is unchecked by custom, morals or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of life that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

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 and opposition. This is the trial heat which innovation must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. Out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, come a creative strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity of the whole.

Vice And Virtue

A LITTLE knowledge of history concludes that moral codes are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes.

Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions. In the hunting stage of his development, man had to be ready to chase and fight and kill. Presumably the death rate in men--so often risking their lives in the hunt--was higher than in women. Some men had to take several women, and every man was expected to help women to frequent pregnancy. Brutality, greed and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue--a quality making for the survival of the individual, family or group. Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

History just does not tell us when man passed from hunting to agriculture--perhaps in the Neolithic Age, and through the discovery that grain could be sown. We may assume that this new stage demanded new virtues, and changed old virtues into vices. Industriousness became more vital than bravery, regularity and thrift more profitable than violence, peace more victorious than war.

Children were economic assets; birth control was made immoral. On the farm the family was the unit of production under the discipline of the father and the seasons, and paternal authority had a firm economic base. At 15 the normal son understood the physical tasks of life; all he needed was land, a plow and a willing arm. So he married early, almost as soon as Nature wished.

As for young women, chastity was indispensable, for its loss might bring unprotected motherhood. Monogamy was demanded by the approximate numerical equality of the sexes. For 1500 years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorceless monogamy and multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and its white colonies.

The Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral super,structure of European and American life. Men, women and children left home to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex, and economic maturity came at a later age. Children were no longer economic assets, marriage was delayed, pre-marital continence became more difficult to maintain. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. Education spread religious doubts; morality lost more and more of its supernatural supports. The old moral code began to die.

In our time, war has added to the forces making the moral laxity. But history offers some consolation for our present state by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. Even our generation has not yet rivaled the popularity of homosexualism in ancient Greece or Rome or Renaissance Italy. Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state- regulated brothels of Assyria to the nightclubs of today.

In the University of Wittenberg in 1544, according to Luther, "the race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their rooms wherever they can, and offer them their free love." Montaigne tells us that in his time (1533-92) obscene literature found a ready market. We have noted the discovery of dice in the excavations near the site of Nine,veh; men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt; probably less now than generally before. Man has never reconciled himself to the Ten Commandments.

We have heard Voltaire's view of history as mainly "a collection of crimes, follies and misfortunes" of mankind, and Gibbon's echo of that summary. But behind the red facade of war and politics, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children.

Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins. The gifts of charity have almost equalled the cruelties of battlefields and jails. So we cannot be sure that the moral laxity of our times is a herald of decay, rather than a transition between a moral code that has lost its agricultural basis and another that our industrial civilization has yet to forge.

RELIGION does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently it was fear that first made the gods--fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds and sky. Religion became the worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation and prayer. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state.

But even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for reli,gion, since he sees it functioning in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid. It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence and, through its sacraments, has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion. France, the United States and some other nations have divorced their governments from all churches, but they have had the help of religion in keeping social order.

Only a few communist states have not merely dissociated themselves from religion but have repudiated its aid; and perhaps the provisional success of this experiment in Russia owes much to the temporary acceptance of communism as the religion (or, as skeptics would say, the opium) of the people, replacing the church as the vendor of comfort and hope. If the socialist regime should fail to eliminate poverty, this new religion may lose its fervor, and the state may wink at the restoration of supernatural beliefs as an aid in quieting discontent. As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

(Continued)
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