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Zusammenfassung von The Lessons of History

Name: The Lessons of History
Rating: 4.3 (349 reviews)
Author: Will Durant and Ariel Durant

Will Durant and Ariel Durant

The celebrated collection of essays compiling over 5,000 years of history by two of the greatest thinkers of our time

4.3 (349 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Discover what history can teach us about ourselves.

Why would freedom lead to greater inequality? Why did the Industrial Revolution increase individualism? These are big questions that play a big part in the political, moral and economic discussions we have today. But what if there was a cheat sheet we could use to answer them?

It turns out there is: history. History isn't just a record of what has happened to humanity thus far; it's a great way to understand why and how it happened, a way for us to learn and understand how one thing led to another. By reviewing the preceding five millennia, The Lessons of History shows what has worked, what seems to be present in all our history and which new paths we could go down.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how the Battle of Tours completely changed Europe’s future;
why rivers and waterways used to be the foundations of civilization; and
why agriculture created a need for parental authority.

Geography has a big influence on a civilization, but its influence declines as technology advances.

Think about your hometown. Is it near a river, the sea or a lake? Does it have good railway connections? Answering such simple questions can teach you a lot about a place.

That’s because a city’s geographical conditions play a big role in its development. This has been true throughout all of human history; settlers have always been attracted to rivers, lakes, oases and oceans, not only because of the water and food they provide but because of transportation and trade, too.

Consider Mesopotamia. Generally accepted as the cradle of human civilization, it was founded on settlements established between two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. The space between these rivers allowed cultures like the Sumerians and Babylonians to flourish and build their empires.

Many other empires have been built beside rivers: ancient Egypt has been called the gift of the Nile and ancient Rome grew because of the Tiber, Arno and Po.

Geographical conditions can change, however. Extreme climates have forced countless civilizations to move and caused others to decline. Civilizations can fall if rain becomes scarce, as happened in parts of Central Asia. When rain becomes too heavy, as it did in parts of Central America, jungles can overgrow and smother cities.

But technology has changed our relationship to geography. As a civilization’s technology for transporting goods improves, it becomes less influenced by geographical factors.

Cars, trains and especially planes have made it much easier to transport goods. Trade routes aren’t bound to rivers or seas when planes can move goods directly overhead.

This is why the commercial advantage of countries like England and France began declining as cars, trains and planes were developed. England and France no longer have a great advantage because of their coastlines, while countries like Russia, China and Brazil aren’t impeded by their huge land mass.

Life is a competition and humans are born unequal.

Did you ever get to pick teams in gym class as a kid? The most athletic children are always chosen first. History, like gym class, is competitive by nature, and not everyone is equally matched.

We inherited our competitive nature from our ancestors. For them, survival was a matter of fighting and killing, and they passed this proclivity for violence down to us.

The advancement of a civilization has nothing to do with race.

What is it about Europe that enabled such technologically advanced societies to flourish? Throughout history, many white people have assumed that their race made them congenitally more intelligent. But civilization isn’t a product of race. It’s a product of geography.

Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, the French aristocrat and novelist widely regarded as the father of modern racial thinking, believed that people of different races had inherently different physical and mental abilities. He believed that the Aryan race was superior to all others and responsible for creating civilization.

Our personalities, morals and social customs are a product of the time and culture we’re raised in.

It’s hard to imagine identifying with the people who lived in ancient cultures; they just seem fundamentally different. Throughout history, however, human nature hasn’t changed that much. It’s always been a product of the culture we grew up in.

Evolution tells us that human nature has probably changed over the thousands of years that we’ve populated the planet, but our basic instincts to eat, sleep and reproduce have stayed the same. It’s only our technology that’s radically different.

Ethical values are a product of historical conditions and they change over time.

A person from the Middle Ages certainly wouldn’t have the same moral values as we have today. For instance, they might say it’s perfectly acceptable to burn someone for witchcraft. Why is this?

Moral standards evolve over time; they aren’t set in stone. Human morality changes according to historical and environmental conditions.

The Catholic Church has lost its moral authority, but it survives because it provides hope for the desperate.

The Catholic Church might seem like an outdated institution in the modern world, but it still has thousands of believers and remains strong. There are a few reasons for this.

Though the Church originally strove to promote morality and charity, it became corrupt in the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, the Church fought against slavery, family feuding and other national conflicts and forms of violence, but, gradually, they reversed their stance on such issues.

Concentration of wealth is natural and can only be prevented through compulsory redistribution.

Taxes, as everyone knows, exist so a society can redistribute its wealth. Let’s look at what history can teach us about this.

In society, wealth concentrates, to varying degrees, wherever people bring the requisite skills and abilities to bear. Life is a competition, and the more skills and abilities you have, the better you’ll compete. This naturally results in a minority of people commanding the majority of the wealth.

Socialist experiments have failed throughout history, but they may work if paired with capitalism.

The redistribution of wealth through socialism has been attempted by many societies. But it has always failed. Socialism doesn’t work on its own, but it can work when paired with other concepts. Why?

Throughout history, all socialist experiments have failed. The socialism we know today is modern, but similar systems have existed in the past, and none have been successful.

Democracy is the best form of government. But it is fragile and requires an educated population.

Today, most of the West is democratically governed. Democracy, however, is a relatively new concept in human history. Let’s examine some of the previous governmental systems humans have developed.

Throughout history, governments have mostly comprised people in elite minorities, as in oligarchies and monarchies. Such people derived their power from birth (aristocracies and monarchies work this way) and others were granted power from religious institutions, as in theocracies.

War has been constant throughout history and peace is unnatural.

Throughout all of recorded human history, only 10 percent of humanity’s time on earth has been free of war. War seems like a natural condition for humans. But why?

States behave like individuals, but without the same restraints imposed on them by a larger society. Individuals compete with each other for resources like food, land and shelter, but there’s not as much need for violence today because the state provides most people with basic protection. In exchange, individuals accept their society’s behavioral codes, such as morals and laws.

Civilizations fall but their achievements live on and provide the foundation for new civilizations.

Imagine if we had to reinvent the wheel or the printing press every 100 years. If we did, democracy and society would also go back to zero each time. Fortunately, this isn’t the case: both history and knowledge can be recorded and built upon.

Even if civilizations fall, some of their achievements live on. None of the great ancient civilizations still exist but many of their inventions live on in our society. We still use fire, the wheel and writing systems. Agriculture, morality and charity aren’t modern concepts – they come from the ancient world. The knowledge base we have today is the product of thousands of years of human innovation.

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Worum geht es in The Lessons of History?

The Lessons of History (1968) gives an overview of more than 5,000 years of human history. It covers changes in morality, religion and governmental systems like socialism and capitalism, and traces the historical trends of war. Along the way, it offers a variety of lessons on what history means for the present.

Wer The Lessons of History lesen sollte

History and politics enthusiasts
Anyone interested in human progress

Über den Autor

Will Durant was a writer, historian and philosopher. Ariel Durant was a researcher and writer. The couple is best known for The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume overview of all Western history. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work.

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