Unforgettable Lessons

“To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s folies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein [thousands]…still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.” – Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

I have written often on the importance of studying history, and Will & Ariel Durant’s short The Lessons of History is an attempt to distill such ideas. It also serves as a postlude to their massive, eleven volume, The Story of Civilization. In Lessons, the writers take a broad overview of history, focusing on ten topics, and what history can teach us. Here I will review three of the major themes from The Lessons of History.

We All Play an Important Part

The Durants write, “The historian records the exceptional because it is interesting — because it is exceptional.” Often these records are of the “great man” or the “hero” or the villain. However, no one exists in a vacuum. No one’s life can avoid changing the course of history. When the Durants write, “Events take place through him as well as around him; his ideas and decisions enter vitally into the course of history,” they could be writing about any of us. We are all “effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.” As I have written here, we are a part of an unbreakable chain of history and often don’t know when we are part of an event of significance.

For Every Action, There is a Reaction

For every event or series of events in history, which create situations and societies, there is always a necessary reaction. That is, if certain situations occur, they, by necessity, produce certain other situations. As the Durants note, “Our excesses will bring another reaction; [for example] moral disorder may generate a religious revival” or “the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution.” In their discussions they show how despotic governments will produce movements to overthrow them. Socialist governments try to prevent the inevitable by introducing more freedom. In capitalist nations, the politicians sneak in socialism as long as they can, until the people issue a correction. Are these the unavoidable cycles of history? Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning is Here shows how these cycles occur repeatedly, in a predicable fashion, as certain conditions of society necessitate certain reactions. But these reactions (if they are bad) aren’t necessarily unavoidable if we recognize the cycle we are currently in.

Our Responsibility to the Next Generation

Something lost in recent decades, is the responsibility of one generation to actively mentor and teach the next. Historical study in education is an afterthought. Governments see schools as a way to socially engineer children, rather than to educate them. Parents are busy being friends to their children. The university system, once a staggering achievement of Western Civilization, is in full-fledged collapse.

The Durants write:

“Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns…but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible…”

Susan Wise Bauer wrote:

“History, in other words, is not a subject. History is the subject. It is the record of human experience, both personal and communal. It is the story of the unfolding of human achievement in every area — science, literature, art, music, and politics.”

And from Neil Howe:

“Generations connect us to history because they remind us that ours is not the first or only peer group to encounter this season of history at this phase of life. We know that others have done so before us. Perhaps we can learn from them. We also know that others will do so after us. Perhaps we can help them prepare.

“Generations also connect us to our families because they remind us that we all have forebearers who encountered this season of history at some phase of their lives. We may wonder how their location in history affect what happened to them as children, what happened to the children they raised, or what happened to alter the direction of their lives at a critical moment.

“…we will finally recognize what Ibn Khaldun observed at the very dawn of modernity: ‘The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.’”

And the Durants conclude:

“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. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.”

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Notes:

1. The Durants begin (pp. 11-12) with noting the pitfalls of studying history: Incomplete knowledge, bias, and how histography is not a science. Limitations must always be kept in mind, but I would suggest trying to study history with concepts of scientific study (and all academic endeavors): Leave all bias at home, do not interpret history through modern eyes, but through the eyes of those who lived in those times, and follow the truth to wherever it may lead.
2. On page 46, they write “the growing awareness of man’s miniscule place in the cosmos has furthered the impairment of religious belief.” I don’t think this was true when this book was written (1968), but certainly not now. Science has shown, in defiance of chance, the universe exists as it does to allow Earth to exist as it does, when and where it does now. See The Privileged Planet, Why the Universe is the Way it Is, Designed to the Core, and Improbable Planet.
3. On page 53, they write the Crusades were intended to find a route to the East. This is ridiculous. They also write the failure of the Crusades led to the discovery of the Americas. Columbus was partly motivated by finding allies and wealth to stop Islamic invasions. However, the Crusades’ “failure” to take back the formerly Christian lands of the Near East (Middle East), misses the big picture. They kept the Islamic armies occupied and prevented larger of invasions of Europe, which were occurring over long periods in Spain and the Baltics. Those incursions were eventually stopped, but with great losses (such as the fall of Constantinople). History would have unfolded very differently had they failed. See Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West.
4. Thanks to Katy Poon for recommending The Lessons of History.