Will and Ariel Durant wrote
“The Lessons of History” (Simon and Schuster, New York. 1968) after they
completed their 10 volume History of Civilization. Their observations are
profound. Their observations are so appropriate for our current conditions that
I wish this book is read and discussed at high schools all over the world. I
wish political leaders and thought-leaders read and ponder the observations of
these historians. The authors express their observations with superb choice of
words. They construct their sentences with precision and elegance. Besides,
this book is a distillation of wisdom of the entire humanity since the dawn of
history.
Here are some of the
quotes:
Definition of Civilizations is “social order promoting
cultural creation”.
“On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin,
flourish, decline and disappear – or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving
streams”.
“Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in
individuals or in states”.
“For, freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting
enemies, and when one prevails the other dies”.
Speaking about
religion, they quote Lucretius: “it was fear that first made the gods”, and
“Nature and history do not agree with our conception 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”.
In their chapter on Government and History, they say:
“A right is not a gift of God or nature, but a privilege, which it is good for
the group that the individual should have”.
“Since men love freedom, and the freedom of
individuals in society require some regulation of conduct, the first condition
of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos”.
“When
a group or civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a
corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual
leaders to meet the challenges of change”.
Speaking
of “Is Progress Real?”, they comment as follows: “…all technological advances
will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends……… Comparing our ancestors during Renaissance,
they “may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly change instrumentalities
without improving our purposes” and “…. We are the same ‘trousered’ apes at two
thousand miles an hour as when we had legs”.
“Have
we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to
national, ideological or racial hostilities”……”Have we given ourselves more
freedom than our intelligence can digest?”
“Consider
education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor
merely the necessary preparation of the individual to keep his earn in the
world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical and aesthetic
heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of
man’s understanding, control, embellishment and enjoyment of life”.
Finally, I wish to quote the last sentence from
the last paragraph of the book, which was the actual stimulus for my blogs and
books. It says: “If a man is fortunate
he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage
and transmit it to his children”. Will and Ariel Durant certainly did.
