Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years working on a monumental series called The Story of Civilization. They only lived long enough to write ten fat volumes, beginning at the beginning and ending with Rousseau and Revolution. In 1968, near the end of their writing lives, they wrote The Lessons of History, which summarizes what they learned from such an exhaustive study of our past. The book is out of print but copies are available on the net.
This is a thin book, barely 100 pages (each volume of their series was almost ten times this), organized around the factors that shape history according to the Durants:
- History and the Earth
- Biology and History
- Race and History
- Character and History
- Morals and History
- Religion and History
- Economics and History
- Socialism and History
- Government and History
- History and War
- Growth and Decay
- Is Progress Real?
Interesting that they begin with "History and the Earth" in the context of present concerns about global warming. We so often forget we are guests of Nature.
Their final optimism, if it is that, is tempered by a grandiose view, an optimism for the species rather than for a particular expression of it by one civilization:
We should not be greatly disturbed by the probability that our civilization will die like any other. As Frederick asked his retreating troops at Kolin, "Would you live forever?" Perhaps it is desirable that life should take fresh forms, that new civilizations and centers should have their turn. Meanwhile the effort to meet the challenges of the rising East may reinvigorate the West.
The Durants have nothing to say about past civilizations rising to challenge newer ones, past civilizations now armed with modern weapons. Imagine nukes in the Dark Ages. What a world.
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