35 Life-Changing Learnings from “The Lessons of History” by Will & Ariel Durant (Book Summary)

I’m no history buff, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant (Amazon).

After hearing this book referenced on virtually every podcast lately (despite the fact that it was originally published in 1968), I figured it was finally time to check it out. It doesn’t disappoint. The Durants essentially provide the “summary of summaries” on recorded human history in just over 100 pages—no fluff and no BS.

Who are the Durants? Just a couple humans who spent over 50 years writing The Story of Civilization and were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968…and then the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. No big deal.

“I’m a realist. I accept life is composed of difficulties and delights. I accept the difficulties as a natural price of existence, but I accept the delights as goodies which I really don’t deserve.” — Will Durant

After reading the book, I also found a transcript of two hours of interviews with the Durants that Farnam Street posted. It’s great supplemental content to the book. Shane Parrish, founder of Farnam Street, says The Lessons of History “contains as much wisdom per page as anything we’ve ever read.” I agree. I’ve incorporated highlights from the interview content into this book summary to give you the richest look possible into the Durant’s historical expertise. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in listening to the audio of the entire book, you can do so below in just over 3 hours:

Quick Housekeeping:

• All quotes are from the authors unless otherwise stated.
• I’ve added emphasis to some quotes in bold.
• Although this book is called The Lessons of History, the authors explicitly note a few lessons (e.g. “the first biological lesson of history is…”) and implicitly describe the majority of the others. I’ve taken the liberty in this summary to attempt to list out all the explicit and implicit lessons of history together.

Historical Considerations & Introduction to The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant

• “Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads—astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war—what history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.“
• “We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written…is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional.”
• “Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.”
• “History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.”
• “The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.”
• “We do not know the whole of man’s history; there were probably many civilizations before the Sumerian or the Egyptian; we have just begun to dig!“

35 Life-Changing Learnings from The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant

1. The first lesson is modesty. The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.

• “Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty.”
• “History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea.”
• “The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive.”

2. Life is competition. Even cooperation is a tool and form of competition.

• “The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life—peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food.”
• “Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group—our family, community, club, church, party, ‘race,’ or nation—in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups.”
• “War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.”

3. Life is selection. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.

• “The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution; identical twins differ in a hundred ways, and no two peas are alike.”

4. Life must breed. Nature has no use for anything that cannot reproduce abundantly.

• “The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality; she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few; doubtless she looks on approvingly at the upstream race of a thousand sperms to fertilize one ovum. She is more interested in the species than in the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high; and she (here meaning Nature as the process of birth, variation, competition, selection, and survival) sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.”
• “If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.”
• “Naturally, you would expect that the educated would inherit the Earth. The fertile inherit the Earth…it teaches the law of biology that you have to breed as well as breathe.”

5. History is color-blind. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people.

• “History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.”
• “The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.”
• “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.”
• “‘Racial’ antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. 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.”

6. History (and nature) do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad.

• “Like other departments of biology, history remains at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive.”
• “If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichaean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee.”
• “Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions 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.”

7. Every vice was probably once a virtue.

• “Probably every vice was once a virtue—i.e., a quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.“
• “History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.”
• “The word sin is relevant only in the context of the individual versus a group.”
• “In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt; probably less now than generally before.”
• “Man has never reconciled himself to the Ten Commandments.”

8. In the long view of history, moral codes are universal and necessary.

• “Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order, security, and growth.”
• “A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity.”

9. Morals produce order out of natural chaos. Society is based on social order.

• “The real function of morals … is to produce order out of natural chaos in all the fields of human life.”
• “Society is based on social order, which is based on character and moral discipline which is usually associated with religious belief.”

10. Morals deteriorate when religious belief weakens.

• “Usually in history the moral life of a people deteriorates along with the weakening of its religious belief.”
• “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

11. Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals.

• “Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently…‘it was fear that first made the gods’—fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state. It told the people that the local code of morals and laws had been dictated by the gods.“
• “Though the Church served the state, it claimed to stand above all states, as morality should stand above power. It taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty can be a tool of greed and crime.”
• “History has justified the Church in the belief that the masses of mankind desire a religion rich in miracle, mystery, and myth.”

12. As education spreads, theologies lose credence.

• “As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an external conformity without influence upon conduct or hope. Life and ideas become increasingly secular, ignoring supernatural explanations and fears. The moral code loses aura and force as its human origin is revealed, and as divine surveillance and sanctions are removed…In antiquity and modernity alike, analytical thought dissolved the religion that had buttressed the moral code. New religions came, but they were divorced from the ruling classes, and gave no service to the state. An age of weary skepticism and epicureanism followed the triumph of rationalism over mythology in the last century before Christianity, and follows a similar victory today in the first century after Christianity.”
• “The growing awareness of man’s minuscule place in the cosmos has furthered the impairment of religious belief.”
• “The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution.”
• “Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.”

13. Religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection. It’s seemingly indispensable in every land and age.

• “One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection. How often in the past have God and religion died and been reborn!“
• “Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age.”
• “It may be that all through history, religions have helped society to control those animal instincts to enable the social instincts to cope with them and to make civilization possible.”
• “The function of religion is quite different I think. It is to give man a belief that will enable him to tolerate life.”

14. History is economics in action. Mankind is judged by its ability to produce (except in war).

• “History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action—the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities.“
• “Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.”

15. Concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable (leading to redistribution or revolution).

• “We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.”
• “In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”
• “As long as there is poverty, there will be gods because human beings need some consolation and some inspiration to hope.”

16. The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historic rhythm in the concentration and dispersion of wealth.

• “Marx was an unfaithful disciple of Hegel: he interpreted the Hegelian dialectic as implying that the struggle between capitalism and socialism would end in the complete victory of socialism; but if the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is applied to the Industrial Revolution as thesis, and to capitalism versus socialism as antithesis, the third condition would be a synthesis of capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western world visibly moves. Year by year the role of Western governments in the economy rises, the share of the private sector declines. Capitalism retains the stimulus of private property, free enterprise, and competition, and produces a rich supply of goods; high taxation, falling heavily upon the upper classes, enables the government to provide for a self-limited population unprecedented services in education, health, and recreation. The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.“

17. Revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it.

• “Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the “credit system”) in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old.“
• “History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.”

18. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind.

• “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.”

19. Intellect is a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power.

• “Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. 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.”
• “So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.”
• “The intellect is an individualist. It learns how to protect the individual long before it ever thinks of protecting the group, that has to come later, comes with the maturing of the mind.”

20. Ideas are the strongest things of all in history.

• “Ideas are the strongest things of all in history, because even a gun was originally an idea.”
• “The ideas of today are the politics of tomorrow, and the philosophy of today is the literature of tomorrow.”
• “An idea could, however important it might be in history at a certain time, it may lay dead and sallow for centuries having no influence and no meaning at all so that the idea is in itself that important until the idea meets the personality and the zeitgeist of the time spirit. When those three unite, you’ve got something going.” (Ariel Durant)

21. Man’s ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps.

• “Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home.”
• “The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.”

22. A hero is the product of a situation (rather than the result being a product of the hero).

• “The hero is a product of a situation rather than the result being a product of the hero. It is demand that brings out the exceptional qualities of man.”
• “The role of character is for the individual to rise to a situation. If it were not for the situation, we would never have heard of him. So that you might say that character is the product of an exceptional demand by the situation upon human ability.”

23. Social instincts are weaker than individualistic instincts because they are much younger.

• “The individualistic instincts were formed in the hunting stage through hundreds of thousands of years. The social instincts were formed in the agricultural stage which is only 25,000 years old. They are weaker than the individualistic instincts, enormously weaker.”

24. Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

• “Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.”

25. Freedom and equality are enemies. When one prevails the other dies.

• “Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”
• “Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.”
• “Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups.“

26. Paradoxically, the first condition of freedom is its limitation.

• “Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands. Power naturally converges to a center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread.“

27. There is a delicate balance between freedom and order.

• “When we made ourselves free, we forgot to make ourselves intelligent.”
• “I think freedom has reached a point where it is creating disorder and forgetting that order was its mother. It is destroying its mother.“
• “If you have excess order, you still have order, but if you have excess liberty, you have chaos.”
• “Freedom and order are equal in desirability.”
• “The age of criticism is an age of freedom. The age of order is an age of stability.”
• “Social order, I suppose, means a combination of order and liberty, and those two seem to be both necessary to the basis from which all the flowers of civilization grow; the literature, the art, the science, the philosophy, the music, the morals.”

28. A government that governed least originally liberated individuals, but many of the formative conditions have disappeared.

• “A government that governed least was admirably suited to liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a wilderness to a material utopia, and from the child and ward to the rival and guardian of Western Europe. And while rural isolation enhanced the freedom of the individual, national isolation provided liberty and security within protective seas. These and a hundred other conditions gave to America a democracy more basic and universal than history had ever seen.“
• “Many of these formative conditions have disappeared. Personal isolation is gone through the growth of cities. Personal independence is gone through the dependence of the worker upon tools and capital that he does not own, and upon conditions that he cannot control. War becomes more consuming, and the individual is helpless to understand its causes or to escape its effects. Free land is gone, though home ownership spreads—with a minimum of land. The once self-employed shopkeeper is in the toils of the big distributor, and may echo Marx’s complaint that everything is in chains. Economic freedom, even in the middle classes, becomes more and more exceptional, making political freedom a consolatory pretense. And all this has come about not (as we thought in our hot youth) through the perversity of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development, and through the nature of man. 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.”

29. Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government.

• “Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple.“
• “If we were to judge forms of government from their prevalence and duration in history we should have to give the palm to monarchy; democracies, by contrast, have been hectic interludes.”

30. Democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government.

• “All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place. Under its stimulus Athens and Rome became the most creative cities in history, and America in two centuries has provided abundance for an unprecedentedly large proportion of its population. Democracy has now dedicated itself resolutely to the spread and lengthening of education, and to the maintenance of public health. 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. The rights of man are not rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue that may nourish and test a man’s fitness for office and power. 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.“

31. War is one of the constants of history. Peace is an unstable equilibrium. 

• “War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. We have acknowledged war as at present the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species…war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.“
• “Even a philosopher, if he knows history, will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of a nation. In the present inadequacy of international law and sentiment a nation must be ready at any moment to defend itself; and when its essential interests are involved it must be allowed to use any means it considers necessary to its survival. The Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.“

32. The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals.

• “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. The state has our instincts without our restraints. The individual submits to restraints laid upon him by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference, because the state guarantees him basic protection in his life, property, and legal rights. The state itself acknowledges no substantial restraints, either because it is strong enough to defy any interference with its will or because there is no superstate to offer it basic protection, and no international law or moral code wielding effective force.”
• “In the individual, pride gives added vigor in the competitions of life; in the state, nationalism gives added force in diplomacy and war.”
• “As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction.”
• “Tradition is the memory of the race. Insanity is the loss of memory.”

33. The earth will unite as one only if/when there is interplanetary war.

• “States will unite in basic co-operation only when they are in common attacked from without. Perhaps we are now restlessly moving toward that higher plateau of competition; we may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.”

34. Civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear.

• “On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear—or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams.”
• “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.”
• “Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming.”

35. Civilizations don’t really die.

• “But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the ‘dear delight’ of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.“
• “Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As life overrides death with reproduction, so an aging culture hands its patrimony down to its heirs across the years and the seas. Even as these lines are being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.”
• “We are the Romans who imported Greek civilization. We imported European civilization, and our chief function in history is apparently to be a transmission line for that great heritage.”
• “American civilization like any other is a transitory thing. It’s a moment in geological time…Now the details will be enormously different…But the details are rather unimportant in determining the future of a civilization…The essential things to America are will the moral life of the American people survive the enormous test that it is undergoing from the growth of intellect and the weakening of inhibitions, and will it survive changes in trade routes and the discovery of raw materials and so forth.”

“There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations.” — Will Durant

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