Is it possible that, after all, “history has no sense,” 1 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? (Page 6)
“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.” (Page 6)
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. (Page 7)
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding” (Page 7)
Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. (Page 9)
in the words of Pascal: “When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.” 7 (Page 9)
Will Oriental fertility, working with the latest Occidental technology, bring the decline of the West? (Page 11)
When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history. (Page 11)
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. (Page 11)
Man, not the earth, makes civilization. (Page 11)
History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. (Page 12)
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. (Page 12)
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. (Page 13)
Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. (Page 13)
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. (Page 13)
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. (Page 13)
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. (Page 13)
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. (Page 14)
Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. (Page 14)
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. (Page 14)
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. (Page 14)
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. (Page 14)
The advances of agricultural and contraceptive technology in the nineteenth century apparently refuted Malthus: in England, the United States, Germany, and France the food supply kept pace with births, and the rising standard of living deferred the age of marriage and lowered the size of the family. (Page 16)
The multiplication of consumers was also a multiplication of producers: new “hands” developed new lands to raise more food. The recent spectacle of Canada and the United States exporting millions of bushels of wheat while avoiding famine and pestilence at home seemed to provide a living answer to Malthus. (Page 16)
Malthus would answer, of course, that this solution merely postpones the calamity. There is a limit to the fertility of the soil; every advance in agricultural technology is sooner or later canceled by the excess of births over deaths; and meanwhile medicine, sanitation, and charity nullify selection by keeping the unfit alive to multiply their like. (Page 16)
Is there any evidence that birth control is dysgenic— that it lowers the intellectual level of the nation practicing it? Presumably it has been used more by the intelligent than by the simple, and the labors of educators are apparently canceled in each generation by the fertility of the uninformed. (Page 16)
But 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. (Page 16)
Even the children of Ph.D.s must be educated and go through their adolescent measles of errors, dogmas, and isms; nor can we say how much potential ability and genius lurk in the chromosomes of the harassed and handicapped poor. (Page 17)
It is amusing to find Julius Caesar offering (59 B.C.) rewards to Romans who had many children, and forbidding childless women to ride in litters or wear jewelry. Augustus renewed this campaign some forty years later, with like futility. (Page 17)
In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo- Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments. (Page 17)
similar process is helping to restore Catholicism in France, Switzerland, and Germany; the lands of Voltaire, Calvin, and Luther may soon return to the papal fold. So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies; just as the defeat of the Moslems at Tours (732) kept France and Spain from replacing the Bible with the Koran, so the superior organization, discipline, morality, fidelity, and fertility of Catholics may cancel the Protestant Reformation and the French Enlightenment. There is no humorist like history. (Page 17)
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. (Page 24)
Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states. (Page 26)
We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind. (Page 26)
We might describe human nature through the “Table of Character Elements” (Page 26)
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. (Page 26)
In positive personalities the positive tendencies predominate, but most individuals are armed with both sets of instincts— to meet or to avoid (according to mood or circumstance) the basic challenges or opportunities of life. (Page 26)
But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind. The (Page 26)
Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed. (Page 27)
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. (Page 28)
Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; (Page 28)
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. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination. (Page 28)
A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse- tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects. (Page 29)
In our table of character elements imitation is opposed to innovation, but in vital ways it co- operates with it. As submissive natures unite with masterful individuals to make the order and operation of a society, so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority, and this follows the originative individual, in adapting new responses to the demands of environment or survival. (Page 29)
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety- nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. (Page 30)
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. (Page 30)
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. (Page 30)
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. (Page 30)
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. (Page 31)
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. (Page 31)
Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions. If we divide economic history into three stages— hunting, agriculture, industry— we may expect that the moral code of one stage will be changed in the next. (Page 31)
Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. 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. (Page 31)
History does not tell us just when men passed from hunting to agriculture— perhaps in the Neolithic Age, and through the discovery that grain could be sown to add to the spontaneous growth of wild wheat. We may reasonably assume that the new regime demanded new virtues, and changed some old virtues into vices. Industriousness became more vital than bravery, regularity and thrift more profitable than violence, peace more victorious than war. (Page 32)
Children were economic assets; birth control was made immoral. On the farm the family was the unit of production under the discipline of the father and the seasons, and paternal authority had a firm economic base. (Page 32)
For fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorceless monogamy, and multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and its white colonies. It was a stern code, which produced some of the strongest characters in history. (Page 32)
Gradually, then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines. (Page 32)
Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later; children no longer were economic assets; marriage was delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. (Page 33)
The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village; he could hide his sins in the protective anonymity of the city crowd. (Page 33)
The progress of science raised the authority of the test tube over that of the crosier; the mechanization of economic production suggested mechanistic materialistic philosophies; education spread religious doubts; morality lost more and more of its supernatural supports. The old agricultural moral code began to die. (Page 33)
In our time, as in the times of Socrates (d. 399 B.C.) and Augustus (d. A.D. 14), war has added to the forces making for moral laxity. After the violence and social disruption of the Peloponnesian War Alcibiades felt free to flout the moral code of his ancestors, and Thrasymachus could announce that might was the only right. (Page 33)
After the wars of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavius, “Rome was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation caused by war;… women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries… A shallow sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism.” (Page 33)
So we cannot be sure that the moral laxity of our times is a herald of decay rather than a painful or delightful transition between a moral code that has lost its agricultural basis and another that our industrial civilization has yet to forge into social order and normality. (Page 35)
Roman morals began to “decay” soon after the conquered Greeks passed into Italy (146 B.C.), but Rome continued to have great statesmen, philosophers, poets, and artists until the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 180). Politically Rome was at nadir when Caesar came (60 B.C.); yet it did not quite succumb to the barbarians till A.D. 465. May we take as long to fall as did Imperial Rome! (Page 35)
Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid. It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God. It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich. (Page 37)
Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows. (Page 37)
Apparently (for we are merely guessing, or echoing Petronius, who echoed Lucretius) “it was fear that first made the gods” 25—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. (Page 37)
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. (Page 37)
Pagan cults and Christian creeds proclaimed that earthly rulers were appointed and protected by the gods. Gratefully nearly ever state shared its lands and revenues with the priests. (Page 38)
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. Over all the competing governments of Christendom it promulgated one moral law. Claiming divine origin and spiritual hegemony, the Church offered itself as an international court to which all rulers were to be morally responsible. (Page 38)
ascribe order, splendor, beauty, or sublimity. 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. (Page 40)
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. (Page 40)
The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our ways today. (Page 42)
A thousand signs proclaim that Christianity is undergoing the same decline that fell upon the old Greek religion after the coming of the Sophists and the Greek Enlightenment. (Page 43)
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! (Page 43)
Atheism ran wild in the India of Buddha’s youth, and Buddha himself founded a religion without a god; after his death Buddhism developed a complex theology including gods, saints, and hell. 29 (Page 43)
Probably our excesses will bring another reaction; moral disorder may generate a religious revival; atheists may again (as in France after the debacle of 1870) send their children to Catholic schools to give them the discipline of religious belief. (Page 44)
Does history warrant Renan’s conclusion that religion is necessary to morality— that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? Joseph de Maistre answered: “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.” (Page 45)
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion. France, the United States, and some other nations have divorced their governments from all churches, but they have had the help of religion in keeping social order. (Page 45)
Only a few Communist states have not merely dissociated themselves from religion but have repudiated its aid; and perhaps the apparent and provisional success of this experiment in Russia owes much to the temporary acceptance of Communism as the religion (or, as skeptics would say, the opium) of the people, replacing the church as the vendor of comfort and hope. (Page 45)
“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.” 32 (Page 45)
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. (Page 46)
