Book Notes - The Lessons of History

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Preface

• The following essay...repeats many ideas that we, or others before us, have already expressed; our aim is not originality but inclusiveness; we offer a survey of human experience, not a personal revelation.

I. Hesitations

• Is it possible that, after all, “history has no sense,” that it teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale? At times we feel so, and a multitude of doubts assail our enterprise.
• Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy – an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.
• “History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks our rules, history is baroque.” Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.

II. History and the Earth

• To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.
• Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.
• Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along their effluent canals.
• The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trader, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into face; and only a similar combination (as in Israel today) can make a culture take form over thousand natural obstacles.
• Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

III. Biology and History

• So 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 are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition.
• The second biological lesson of history if that life is selection.
• 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 Right 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.
• Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.
• 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. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty mush be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. 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.
• The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed.
• Though he was a clergyman and a man of good will, Malthus pointed out that the issuance of relief funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to marry early and breed improvidently, making the problem worse.
• Malthus would answer, of course, that this solution merely postpones the calamity.
• Until that equilibrium of production and reproduction comes it will be a counsel of humanity to disseminate the knowledge and means of contraception. Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.
• …much of what we call intelligence is the result of individual education, opportunity, and experience; and there is no evidence that such intellectual acquirements are transmitted in the genes. Even the children of Ph.D.s must be educated and go through their adolescent measles of errors, dogmas, and isms; not can we say how much potential ability and genius lurk in the chromosomes of the harassed and handicapped poor.
• There is not humorist like history.

IV. Race and History

• (Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, 1816-1882) The rise, success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality of the race. The degeneration of a civilization is what the world itself indicates – a falling away from the genus, stock, or race.
• (Madison Grant, 1865-1937) The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War depleted the Nordic stock and left it too thin to resist the higher birth rate of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples in Europe and America. By the year 2000, Grant predicted, the Nordics will have fallen from power, and with their fall Western civilization will disappear in a new barbarism welling up everywhere from within and from without.
• Some weakness in the race theory are obvious.
• History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.
• The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the product of geographical opportunity and economic and political development rather than of racial constitution, an much of their civilization had an Oriental source.
• 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. The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul.
• 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.

V. Character and History

• Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitution of states.
• We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind.
• In this analysis human beings are normally equipped by “nature” (here meaning heredity) with six positive and six negative instincts, whose function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group, or the species.

• Each instinct generates habits and is accompanied by feelings. Their totality is the nature of man.
• …natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations.
• …by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them. Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.
• Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological.
• New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses; hence development, in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation – the social correlates of variation and mutation.
• In our table of character elements imitation is opposed to innovation, but in vital ways it co-operates with it.
• Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power.
• Out of every hundred ides ninety-nine will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace.
• 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 ides should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ides should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trail heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.

VI. Morals and History

VII. Religion and History

VIII. Economics and History

IX. Socialsim and History

X. Government and History

XI. History and War

XII. Growth and Decay

XIII. Is Progress Real?