Short and powerful synthesis of insights drawn from their extensive (Pulitzer Prize winner) work, "The Story of Civilization." Distills decades of historical study into a series of reflections on the patterns and themes that have shaped human history. Published as 1968, so it makes it very [[Lindy effect|Lindy]], which is what you want in a history book! The book is broken down to chapters, which examine history from different lenses: geography, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, growth and decay, and progress. Each chapter could be digested almost in a standalone way, though altogether they make a nice overarching narrative. ### 1: History is always oversimplified > The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend. I go back to the 2016 election. As Nate Silver [wrote](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/), it's not a simple narrative. It's a thousand factors that played into that win, from James Comey letter to her emails. But in hindsight we will look back as an inevitability. And so every narrative will be simplified. Something that is 51% true will be treated as 100% true. ### 2: Geography and History This is the Tomas Pueyo take on history (LINK), that geography is destiny. It's interesting that it's written from the perspective of the 1960's, there was probably an over-expectation on how much flight would change everything. > When the Greeks grew too numerous for their boundaries, they founded colonies along the Mediterranean (“like frogs around a pond,” said Plato) ### 3: Biology and History > [...] first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life—peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food He frames everything in terms of competition, and competition as the basic tenet of organisms. Cooperation is actually a form of competition, just group competition. This aligns with [[The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich|WEIRDest]] and [[Darwin's Cathedral]] with the concept of [[Groups as organisms]]. He quotes Malthus (of [[Malthusian trap]] fame) directly: > If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war. ### 4: Race and History He hits the same point as Joseph Henrich in [[The WEIRDest People in the World]], namely the concept of [[Software vs hardware (Baldwin Effect)|Culture as Firmware]]. > Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses; hence development, in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation—the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination. On the tension between freedom and equality, put better than anywhere I've seen it: > For freedom and 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 nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. ### 5: Character and History They talk about "Great man theory of History" by Thomas Carlyle > Events take place through him as well as around him; his ideas and decisions enter vitally into the course of 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. If he is a prophet like Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and surprising power. A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects. Makes a great [[Chesterson's Fence]] case for conservatism: > Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. 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. Essentially makes a [[Hegelian dialectics|Hegelian synthesis]] between conservative (keep the old) and progressive (down with the old) worldviews: > 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 ### 6. Morals and History History is split into three eras * Hunting * Agriculture (after neolithic revolution) * Industrial (after industrial revolution) They say that at each turn, the morals of the society changes, and the "old guard" laments the coming of then ew: > So we cannot be sure that the moral laxity of our times is a herald of decay rather than a painful or delightful transition between a moral code that has lost its agricultural basis and another that our industrial civilization has yet to forge into social order and normality We think that history is cruel, but not necessarily so they say: > the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional. If all those individuals who had no Boswell had found their numerically proportionate place in the pages of historians we should have a duller but juster view of the past and of man ### 7. Religion and History Love this take on Religion: > It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich. Quotes Lucretius: It was fear that made gods (e.g. fear from storms), and then priests leveraged it for moral. They claim that it was a rival to state, but in some places (e.g. Judea) not quite -- religion **was** the state. When there's a new religion, that religion creates a hierarchy, but then the hierarchy itself works to reinforce itself and promote orthodoxy rather than morality. The masses are upset and it opens room for another charismatic person to come in. This is similar to [[Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen(annotated)|Disruption theory]]. He points to arbitrariness of the good/bad from a nature's POV: > Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan. Religion is [[Antifragile|robust]]. Also revolution time France was *weird*: > 1793 Hébert and Chaumette, wrongly interpreting Voltaire, established in Paris the atheistic worship of the Goddess of Reason; a year later Robespierre, fearing chaos and inspired by Rousseau, set up the worship of the Supreme Being; in 1801 Napoleon, versed in history, signed a concordat with Pius VII, restoring the Catholic Church in France > Joseph de Maistre answered: “I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.” ### 8. Economics and History Economics is the engine behind many more of historical patterns than one thinks: > Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles; economic ambition, not the face of Helen “fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,” launched a thousand ships on Ilium; those subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of a phrase. Differences between wartime and peace time: > Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy. ### 9. Socialism and History They make the case that because freedom and inequality are enemies, and because of the different skillsets between different people, the natural draw is towards inequality (my note: not pure meritocracy, it also has the [[Matthew Effect]]). Then he argues, there's a redistribution. He phrases it beautifully: > the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty He talks about a couple of cases, like the Greek Solon (add link) who redistributed wealth, but the Jacqueries just committed massacres He talks about the fall of Rome, and turning to medieval serfdom. That had to do with heavy taxation: > Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure [...] Thousands of Romans, to escape the taxgatherer, fled over the frontiers to seek refuge among the barbarians. Seeking to check this elusive mobility, and to facilitate regulation and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the peasant to his field and the worker to his shop until all his debts and taxes had been paid. In this and other ways medieval serfdom began They're surprisingly sympathetic to communists, and even put the insane Anabaptists in a positive light, which makes me suspect that they had at least some sympathies to communism: > John of Leiden led a group of Anabaptists in capturing control of Münster, the capital of Westphalia; there, for fourteen months, they maintained a communistic regime (1534–35) ### 10. Government and History They start from the [[Hobbes and Rousseau]], and conclude the necessity of government: > Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. They argue that "democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government." and point out that there really wasn't a democracy until the 19th century: > In strict usage of the term, democracy has existed only in modern times, for the most part since the French Revolution. As male adult suffrage in the United States it began under Andrew Jackson; as adult suffrage it began in our youth. In ancient Attica, out of a total population of 315,000 souls, 115,000 were slaves, and only 43,000 were citizens with the right to vote.55 Women, nearly all working-men, nearly all shopkeepers and tradesmen, and all resident aliens were excluded from the franchise. ### 11. War and History The opening here is a banger (emphases mine): > War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history **only 268 have seen no wa**r. We have acknowledged war as at present the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species. "**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. He talks about the fact that [[People's army brought universal suffrage]]. This is an interesting thought: the only people who get to participate in decision making are the people who oversee the fighting. So feudalism means aristocratic wars via mercenaries, democracy means people's armies duking it out (but causation is reversed). They pose a hypothetical debate between the philosopher who tries to put forth a vision for peace, and a general: > The general smiles. "You have forgotten all the lessons of history," he says, "and all that nature of man which you described. Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged negotiations (if history may be our guide) subversion would go on. A world order will come not by a gentlemen's agreement, but through so decisive a victory by one of the great powers that it will be able to dictate and enforce international law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius. They also talk about something interesting: in the past (up until nation states), a war between two nations didn't mean an enmity between the peoples: > This conscription of the soul to international phobia occurred only in the most elemental conflicts, and was seldom resorted to in Europe between the Religious Wars of the sixteenth century and the Wars of the French Revolution. During that interval the peoples of conflicting states were allowed to respect one another’s achievements and civilization; Englishmen traveled safely in France while France was at war with England; and the French and Frederick the Great continued to admire each other while they fought each other in the Seven Years’ War. ### 12. Growth and Decay This is the rise and decay of civilizations, the theory that "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.". They point to the delay between the peak of the culture (that was inherited) to the decay of it, a [[Wile E Coyote Effect]] of sorts for civilizations. > Roman morals began to “decay” soon after the conquered Greeks passed into Italy (146 B.C.), but Rome continued to have great statesmen, philosophers, poets, and artists until the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 180). Politically Rome was at nadir when Caesar came (60 B.C.); yet it did not quite succumb to the barbarians till A.D. 465. Durants argue that decay is nuanced though, civilizations do not entirely die ("non omnis moritur") -- and culture survives even though civilizations shift: > Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the 'dear delight' of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities. ### 13. Is Progress Real? Durants save this for last and appropriately so. As an individual wonders whether they're moving forward, so does a species - is any given year, decade, or century "better" in some way? There's a desire to believe that the "moral arc of the history bends towards justice", but is that the case? They find it difficult to define progress to begin with, while nailing the concept of [[Dukkha]]: > But perhaps we should first define what progress means to us. If it means increase in happiness its case is lost almost at first sight. Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; They ultimately do define the progress as our growing heritage: > The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire's for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it. ### Zooming out They say that history repeats itself (or it rhymes), and Lessons of History is the best distillation of this treatise. You see similar patterns play over the centuries, in different ways, and yet with a sense of progress. It's neither optimistic nor pessimistic about human nature, it's just what it is; but it does give a sense of humility when we're looking at this body of collective heritage that we're carrying. In final analysis, the book is good for every student of history because it gives context for every *other* history book I'll read. Whether it's about turn of the century Austro-Hungary, or about the decline of Rome, it's helpful to know the repeating themes of history and see what of the specific events are rhyming with them, and what is idiosyncratic to that time and place. ![[Lessons.jpg]] #published 2025-04-18