Has The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant been sitting on your reading list? Pick up the key ideas in the book with this quick summary. Why would freedom lead to greater inequality? Why did the Industrial Revolution increase individualism? These are the big questions that play a big part in the political, moral, and economic discussions of today’s world. So, what if there was a cheat sheet we had access to that could help us answer them? It turns out there is: history. History is more than just a recording of what’s occurred in the world so 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. Through an examination of the five millennia that preceded today, The Lessons of History shows what has worked, what seems to be present in all our history, and which new paths we might down. In this summary of The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, you’ll discover

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

The Lessons of History Key Idea #1: Geography has been a big influence on civilization, but its influence continues to decline as technology advances.

Think about your hometown. Is it near a river, the sea, or a lake? Does it have good railway connections? The answers to these simply questions can reveal a lot about a place. This is because the geographical conditions in which we build our cities actually have a huge influence on their development. This has been true throughout all of human history; people have always settled near rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans. This isn’t simply because of the water and food they provide either: bodies of water also enable transportation and trade. Consider Mesopotamia. This ancient city is generally regarded as the birthplace of human civilization, and it was founded on settlements established between two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. The land that sat between these two rivers allowed cultures like the Sumerians and the 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 due to its proximity to the Tiber, Arno, and Po. Geographical conditions can change, however. Climate extremes have been the force to drive out countless civilizations, and the cause of decline for many others. Civilizations can fall if rain becomes scarce, which is what happened in parts of Central Asia. Conversely, if rain becomes too heavy, as it has in parts of Central America, jungles might overgrow to the point of smothering entire cities. However, in more recent years, technology has shifted out relationship to geography. Through the evolution of a civilization’s technology for doing things like transporting goods, the impact of the geography on the civilization itself decreases. The invention of essential machines such as planes, trains, and cars has made it much easier to transport goods. We were no long bound to trading along rivers and seas, since planes can move goods right over our heads. This is actually why England and France began to lose their commercial advantage once cars, trains, and planes went mainstream. England and France no longer have the great advantage their coastlines once gave them, while countries like Russia, China, and Brazil are no longer impeded by their huge land mass.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #2: Life is a competition and humans are not born equal.

Did you ever get to pick teams in gym class as a kid? If so, you probably tried to pick as many athletic people as you could. History, like gym class, is competitive by nature, and not everyone is equally matched. Our ancestors are the reason behind out naturally competitive nature. Our ancestors’ survival depended on fighting and killing, and we inherited this tendency for violence from them. People tend to cooperate with one another, yet this social cooperation exists for the sole purpose of giving us a competitive edge. We mostly function in groups, from families, to communities, to nations, due to the fact that this group orientation allows us to compete with other groups. We’ve formed states as groups of people organized together for protection against other states. States are only able to stop fighting if they join forces so that they can become members of an even larger protective group that will benefit their survival. Our tendency for competition involves a few different factors. First, it’s necessary to recognize that inequality is only natural – and reducing it actually comes at the cost of freedom. Genetics are the reason behind people’s unique physical and mental strengths – and weaknesses. While we’re able to improve ourselves over time, our genes are unable to change. This means that people have naturally inequal from birth. Through the ever-growing complexity of society, our natural inequalities grow even greater. Modern societies have a larger demand for people who specialize in certain skills, so the only way to create more equality is to restrict freedom. Let’s take that into consideration for a moment. The more free people get over time, the greater the inequalities between them, due to the fact that freedom allows certain people to gain unfair economic power. In the nineteenth century, for example, England and the United States adopted a laissez-faire policy of economics, a form of economics in which the government intervened in the economy as little as possible. During this period, inequality increased dramatically.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #3: The advancement of a civilization has nothing to do with race.

What is it about Europe that enabled such technologically advanced societies to flourish? History has taught many white people that their race has 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 who is 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 was responsible for creating civilization. Gobineau argued that environmental advantages alone couldn’t explain the rise of civilization due to the fact that North America’s Native Americans had the same favorable conditions the Ancient Egyptians had. He also wrote that political institutions alone didn’t create civilization, as ancient Greece was based on democracy while Egypt was monarchical. This means that, according to Gobineau, civilization is something solely determined by race, and only the white race could create it. He also held the belief that white civilization wasn’t able to do as well when white people mixed with other races. This meant that he believed white people in the United States at the time were superior due to the fact that they hadn’t mixed with the native population, setting them apart from the European settlers in Latin America who had. Gobineau’s arguments are easy to disprove. The world has been home to advanced cultures developing far apart from each other. China had a highly developed civilization long before Egypt or Rome’s rise, and the great civilizations of the Incas, Mayans, and Indians in Central and South America are well documented. In fact, much of Ancient Greek and Roman civilization had roots further east. In the second millennium BC, Ancient Greece actually drew a lot of influence from Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). This means that characteristics of this culture were then passed down to the Romans we know from history books.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #4: Our personalities, morals, and social customs are a product of the time and culture we’re raised in.

It would be really hard to picture relating to the people who lived in ancient times; they just seem fundamentally different. Throughout history, however, nothing has changed much in the vein of human nature. Human nature comes directly from the culture we grew up in. Human nature has likely changed over the thousands of years we’ve populated the Earth, which we can see through evolution, but our basic instincts to eat, sleep, and reproduce have stayed the same. The only thing that’s radically changed over time is our technology. If a citizen of Ancient Greece time traveled to the modern world, they’d be quite similar to us physically, but their understanding of culture would be drastically different. Human evolution is social, not biological. changeover time, our species has experienced a huge amount of change: from the economy, to politics, to intellect, and even morals. But remember: cultural environment determines social behavior. So, if a baby could be adopted from Ancient Greece into present-day France, they’d grow up as a citizen of modern-day France. So how does cultural innovation occur? Well, it’s all a result of trial and error. Innovative individuals introduce new ideas to society, and if the majority of people like them, society will follow them. If not, the ideas are discarded. The prophet Mohammed inspired people so much that the religion he founded grew to become the largest in the world. Napoleon, Marx, and Lenin are some other examples of individuals who changed the course of societal history. Some ideas, like Mohammed’s, stuck with society, while others, like Napoleon's, were eventually left to, well, history.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #5: Ethical values are a product of historical conditions which change as time goes on.

A person from the Middle Ages certainly wouldn’t have the same moral values as we have today. For example, they might believe that it’s perfectly okay to burn someone they’ve accused of witchcraft. Why is this? Moral standards evolve over time; they aren’t set in stone. Our morality as a species changes as our historical and environmental conditions change. Our moral code has gone through some big changes over the course of the three major economic phases of human history: hunting, agriculture, and industry. When we were in the hunting phase, males were responsible for hunting for survival, which meant that the death rate among males was actually higher. This means that there were far fewer men, leading to men being expected to reproduce with several women. During this period, characteristics like greed, brutality, and sexual aggression were traits needed for survival. In the era of agriculture, new virtues grew in importance. Males had to be industrious, cooperative, and peaceful rather than brave, aggressive, and violent. Children were actually an economic asset to the family, which meant that bigamy and abortion was highly discouraged. Families were seen as a farm’s unit of production, which meant parental authority was vital since children worked with their parents and had to obey them. The Industrial Revolution changed human morality yet again. During the industrial period, as children grew up, they were encouraged to leave home to go find work as an individual. Individuality took precedence over unity. Children were no longer an economic advantage, so marriage became less important. Cities actually discouraged marriage and began encouraging free love instead. Modern morals are still subject to change, as they’ve changed throughout history. It’s possible that in 100 years, people will have a completely different viewpoint on what’s right and wrong than we have now.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #6: While the Catholic Church has lost much of its moral authority, its presence survives due to the hope it provides for the desperate.

In the modern world, it’s easy to view the Catholic Church as an outdated institution, but despite this, it still has thousands of believers that help it to remain strong. There are a few reasons for this. The Church’s original goal was to promote morality and charity, yet it grew corrupt during 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. Soon, corrupt leaders grew to be aligned with the Catholic Church, using it as a political tool to gain power. Over time, the Church started focusing more on the promotion of orthodoxy and religious doctrine via the Inquisition instead of focusing on promoting the values of morality and goodwill. This is the reason the Church wasn’t involved in one of the most important moral issues of today’s world: the abolition of slavery. Other groups and institutions – often spearheaded by philosophers – took the lead on that instead. Although the Catholic Church has lost a lot of its power, it does remain strong today due to the hope that it provides people with. In our modern world, people are more secularized than ever and the Church has little influence over their daily lives. Laws no longer come from God; they’re created by politicians instead. Academically trained teachers have taken the place of priests, and the Church is losing more followers by the day. Although this is the current pattern, the Church does still provide people with a certain level of comfort, giving them hope for the future. People will always find solace in that, even if their society changes drastically. It is unlikely that the Catholic Church will completely disappear anytime soon.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #7: Concentration of wealth is natural, and can only be prevented through compulsory redistribution.

It’s common knowledge that taxes exist so that 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. Competition is as the root of life, and the more skills and abilities you have, the better you’ll do in this form of lifelong contest. This naturally results in a minority of people commanding the majority of the wealth. The thing is, a society’s distribution of wealth is determined by its moral values and economic freedom. Since democracy is the form of government that allows for the most freedom of its citizens, it also puts the most wealth in the hands of the minority population. That’s why, in the United States in 1968, there existed a gap between the rich and the poor that had only ever been surpassed in the elitist city of imperial Rome. However, when a society’s concentration of wealth hits a critical point, its necessary for redistribution to occur. History tells us that redistribution occurs when the strength of the poor in terms of their numbers allows them to rival the power of the wealthy, whether that redistribution comes about through legal reformation or by force. This critical point means that leaders of the ruling group sometimes need to push for reform, redistributing the wealth themselves. That happened in Athens in 594 BC, when the lower classes considered a revolt. The wealthy prepared to defend themselves with force, but Solon, an Athenian noble statesman, was then elected to reform the system. He took care of the problem by reducing the value of the currency, which reduced debt and allowed for easier survival economically and the avoidance of an entire revolution. However, things tend to go differently when the rich refuse to share their wealth. When the Roman Senate refused to redistribute wealth at a similarly critical point to that in Greece, it resulted in Rome being ravaged by a civil war between the classes that persisted from 133 BC until 30 BC.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #8: While socialist experiments have failed throughout history, they may actually work if they’re paired with capitalism.

Socialism has been attempted by many societies as a way to redistribute wealth, but it has always failed. Socialism doesn’t quite work on its own, but it can work when paired with other concepts. Why is this? Throughout history, all socialist experiments have failed. Today, we know modern socialism, and while similar systems have existed in the past, none have actually worked out. The Incas in South America, for example, founded their society on the belief that their sovereign was the delegate of the Sun God. The Incas considered themselves all employees of the state in exchange for security and food, which means that, the state then controlled and tracked all agriculture, labor, and trade. This pairing of socialism and monarchy lasted until Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in 1533. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the most classic socialist experiment, which only succeeded because the country was under siege, and at that time, national security was more important than individual freedom. This particular revolution was specifically successful due to a continued fear of war among their citizens. A generation of peace eroded the government and, in 1989, the USSR fell. It turns out, though, socialist ideals might work out if they’re put into practice alongside capitalism. And, merging these two concepts might actually create a more sustainable social system. Today’s socialism allows people to have more physical and intellectual freedom, thus stimulating their overall production. Capitalist societies, on the other hand, limit some of the absolute economic freedom in their societies, and encourage the redistribution of wealth via a welfare state. The threat of capitalism has encouraged socialist thinkers to broaden freedom and the threat of socialism has encouraged capitalist thinkers to increase equality. However, on the future, it’s possible that we might see a merging of the two systems.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #9: While democracy is the best form of nature, it’s quite fragile and requires an educated population of citizens.

Today, much of the West is democratically governed. The truth is, though, democracy is actually a relatively new concept in human history. Let’s examine some of the previous governmental systems humans have developed. Over time, governments have been mostly made up of people in elite minorities, such as oligarchies and monarchies. Most of these people derived their power from birth (aristocracies and monarchies work this way) and others were granted power from religious institutions, as in theocracies. Most “democracies” in history were not truly democratic, as universal suffrage wasn’t established until the twentieth century. In Attica, the region of Ancient Greece where the idea of democracy was born, only 43,000 of the 315,000 citizens were allowed to vote. Women, slaves, and almost all of the working population were excluded. Despite this, democracy has still always been proven to be more beneficial, even in these democracies where much of the population was denied the right to vote. Democracy allows for the development of both science and enterprise, as it provides the freedom necessary for scientific and academic research. Democracy does make it easier for people to move up in the social hierarchy, which means that more intelligent people have the chance to develop and share their ideas. While democracy is important, it’s also incredibly fragile. Because it can break apart easily, it needs to be maintained. Even the most stable democracies are constantly under the threat of being overthrown by a dictator. If a country is threatened by war or an economic crisis, it’s easier for an individual to take advantage of it and rise to power in a democracy. A democratic society’s only defense against this is education. People can only resist such corrupt leaders if they have the education to understand what’s going on.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #10: War has a constant presence throughout history and peace is actually quite unnatural.

In all of recorded human history, only 10 percent of humanity’s time on earth has been war free. War seems like a natural condition for humans. But why? State and individuals actually behave in similar ways, but without the restraints they receive from larger societies. Individuals are constantly competing with each other for resources like food, land, and shelter, however, we don’t have quite the need for violence in today’s world as in the past because the state provides people with protection at the basic level. In exchange, individuals accept their society’s behavioral codes, such as morals and laws. States function with the same survival needs, however, they have none of the same basic protection. There’s no superstate, international law, or moral code that can protect states and stop them from fighting with each other. Because states don’t have international restrictions, war is actually the natural way for them to pursue what they desire. War isn’t just about securing resources for the state, however. There are some conflicts that are simply too complex to be resolved through negotiation alone, which means that states turn to war to solve these problems. In 732 AD, for example, Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad army in the Battle of Tours, thus halting the Islamic invasion of France and Western Europe. Had he not resorted to war, Europe might look very different today. War is a fundamental part of our world – it’s actually peace that’s unnatural. The only way for states to unite and behave peacefully with each other is to face a common threat. In fact, if all states were to somehow group together peacefully, competition would gradually disappear and, sooner or later, the global alliance would be subverted from within. Of course, world peace is a noble goal, but unless every country in the world were all of a sudden compelled to unite against some external danger, it will probably never be truly possible.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #11: Civilizations are constantly facing challenges, and how they handle them determines if they flourish or decay.

The planet is littered with the ruins of history, from Babylon to Carthage, Machu Picchu to Pompeii. Some societies prosper, while others decay. History repeats itself, but only in the overall arch of its story. History tells us that all civilizations go through the same basic cycle: they begin, flourish, decline and disappear. The future will, of course, bring new states to fruition as old ones perish. New theories will be developed, propagated, and discarded; there will always be new inventions and new generations rebelling against them to create something new. Today, civilizations are more complex than they’ve ever been before. Of course, it can’t be guaranteed that the future will necessarily follow the exact patterns of the past. Every civilization on earth is constantly facing new challenges with the chance to overcome them in new ways. As it turns out, civilizations actually grow stronger when they’re confronted with difficulties. This could mean anything from changes to the physical environment to changes in climate, invasions from the outside world, or internal challenges like a conflict between the rulers and the ruled. States are able to overcome challenges, but only if their leaders are able to effectively respond to them. This happened in 1941 when the United States was threatened by the Nazis. When they mobilized against the Nazis, the entire nation grew to be more prepared in facing other challenges in the future. The thing is, if a civilization and its leaders aren’t able to properly confront a challenge, it can lead to a decay of that society. An example of this is when the great trading states of Pisa and Venice reached a decline after the discovery of the Americas in 1492. The leaders of these two nations simply weren’t able to adapt to this huge transition in global trade: the ability to trade by crossing the ocean, rather than being confined to rivers and seas. When a civilization declines, its memory can live on, however. While Ancient Greece is long gone, Plato is still more widely read in modern times than in his own time.

The Lessons of History Key Idea #12: Civilizations may fall, but the achievements made within them live on, providing the foundation for new civilizations.

Imagine having to reinvent the wheel or the printing press every 100 years. If we did, democracy and society would also go back to square one each time. Fortunately, this isn’t the case: we’re able to record both history and knowledge and build upon them. While civilizations may fall, some of their achievements will survive. We no longer have any of the great ancient civilizations, however a huge number of their inventions still live on in modern society. We still use fire, the wheel, and writing systems. Agriculture, morality, and charity aren’t modern concepts – they too come from the ancient world. On top of that, our base of knowledge we have today comes from thousands of years of human innovation. This means that while we haven’t changed much biologically, human beings born today benefit greatly from everything achieved in the past. These achievements include human rights and equality, transparent judicial systems, and religious and intellectual freedom. And of course, a lot of these achievements have improved over time. For example, modern British democracy is far more advanced than the democracy of Ancient Greece. And people in present-day Europe are generally free to express their political views without fearing for their life – a luxury foreign to people in the Dark Ages. Also, education used to only be for the rich and influential, while today, it’s available to the public. This means that today, the average level of knowledge is higher than at any past point in history. When this book was published, education was mandatory in the majority of countries. Despite this, the idea of free education for the general public is still relatively new. If it continues to be successful, in the future, everyone may have easy access to education. While we aren’t born with an inherent advantage over past civilizations, we are born with a richer heritage. That heritage actually represents the progress of civilization. This means that with every passing generation, our heritage becomes richer.

In Review: The Lessons of History Book Summary

The key message in this book: While its true that history repeats itself, it only does so in a very general way. Civilizations come and go, however we’re able to pass knowledge down to future generations, which leads to richer human knowledge and technology over time. Every new generation faces new challenges, building upon the heritage of each past human being who came before us. As education becomes available to the masses, future generations will benefit more and more. Suggested further reading: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time takes a look at both the history of scientific theory and the ideas that form our understanding of the universe today. From big bangs and black holes to the smallest particles in the universe, Hawking offers a clear overview of both the history of the universe and the complex science behind it, and presents it in a way that’s easy to understand for even the newest readers of scientific theory.