Summary & Key Takeaways
Many people will tell you “history repeats itself” or “history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme”. Yet, how many people truly do study history and then apply it to the current state of the world? I would argue very few. Even historians get caught up in the present and forget everything it is that they study.
If you want to buck the trend and actually learn from history, there is no better pair to learn it from than the Durants. And the best book of theirs to start with is The Lessons of History. It’s a short book that is packed with insights from their many years researching and writing about history topics.
Key Takeaways
Nature is much more powerful than humans. It can wipe away all the progress of humanity at any instant. As humans, we think we’re special and smart and all that but history shows us that a volcano, hurricane, earthquake, fire, any natural disaster can destroy all that we built in an instant.
There have been kingdoms and rulers of the world in all shapes and sizes throughout history. The greatest civilians and leaders throughout history have comes from many different races, genders, cultures, ethnicities, etc. To think any one race, gender, culture, ethnicity is better than any other is short-sighted, history has shown they can come from anyone and anywhere.
Individuals really don’t matter. In the grand scheme of something as large as human history, individuals don’t matter. The great people of history that we study are often just reflections of the moment in time, if they weren’t there to take it up, someone else would’ve. Nature and evolution also don’t care about the individual, they care about the species.
Economic success is the reason we are more familiar with some societies and cultures of history than others.
Ideas that survive and thrive throughout history are ones that tap into hope and our imaginations.
Notes & Quotes
How quickly things can be destroyed by nature
"Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build."
History's biological lessons
Life is competition
"So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition."
Life is selection
"The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection."
Life must breed
"The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed"
Nature loves variety
"Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution"
Freedom and equality cannot co-exist in nature
"For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies."
Nature: quantity > quality
"She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality."
Nature prefers the species, not the individual
"She is more interested in the species than in the individual"
History is color blind
"History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin."
Race and history
"The role of race in history is rather preliminary than creative."
"It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type."
Civilization is a co-operative product
"A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups."
Society is founded on the nature of man
"Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man"
"We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind"
Man has always behaved the same throughout history
"Known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind"
"Means and instrumentalities change; motives and end remain the same"
Man's evolution has been social, not biological
"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."
A hero is a product of his or her time
"He is not quite the god that Carlyle described; he grows out of his time and land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent and voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new ideas would be untimely and impracticable."
Note: the entrepreneur/the leader; it's all about a matter of timing and good luck; key: be prepared for the moment
Traditions and customs can be hard to overcome
"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."
Society advances through the struggle between old and new
"It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole."
Note: the struggle is what advances us. Ideas must be forged by the fires of society to be worthwhile.
Bad things come from our desire to rise
"Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall."
History usually reflects the interesting, not typical
"We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written is quite different from history as usually lead: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting."
Man is dishonest; gov't is corrupt
"In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt"
Individuals and the group
"The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole."
Correlation of heaven and utopias
"When religion declines Communism grows"
Why some idea survives through history
"Catholicism survives because it appeals to imagination, hope, and the senses."
Note: this is a goal model to follow for influence
When religion thrives
"Generally religion and Puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order"
"As long as there is poverty there will be gods."
Note: fills the void
"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." -- Joseph de Maistre
Economic success creates history
"The outstanding personalities in these movements were effects, not causes; 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."
The role of passion in economic success
"In such cases the motives of the leaders may be economic, but the result is largely determined by the passions of the mass."
Management hierarchy
"'The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.' So the bankers, watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid."
(About bankers) "Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard."
The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable
"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partical redistribution."
Freedom is inversely correlated with external danger
"Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger."
Contemporary states are very complex
"The complexity of contemporary states seems to break down any single mind that tries to master it."
Majorities have a hard time ruling
"It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized for united and specific action, and a minority can."
The true history
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
Complexity leads to concentration
"Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power."
Equality of education is key to democracy succeeding
"If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal."
Dictatorship is fed by inequality
"If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all"
Causes of war and competition are the same
"The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery."
World order comes through power, not agreement
"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."
"States will unite in basic co-operation only when they are in common attacked from without."
History repeats itself, kind of
"History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large"
All civilizations go through the same cycle
"On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear--or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams."
Challenges will be met by creative individuals
"If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence)."
Civilizations fail because of failure to adapt to change
"When the group or a 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."
Nations die, man keeps going
"Nations die. Old region grow arid, or suffer other change. Resilient man picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his memories with him."
Information overload
"We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village."
You could draw any conclusion you wanted from history
"History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances."
Note: example of narrative and hindsight biases
Control over our environment determines progress
"We must understand that each age and place needs and elicits some types of ability rather than others in its pursuit of environmental control...Our problem is whether the average man has increased his ability to control the conditions of his life."
Life advances through death
"Perhaps it is desirable that life should take fresh forms, that new civilizations and centers should have their turn."
Note: new is good in both nature and society
Civilization is not inherited
"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew."
Definition of education
"Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep 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."
Real progress is built on the backs of prior generations
"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 or that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being."
What history is
"History is, above all else the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use."