5 Lessons from History We’re Learning the Hard Way
Will and Ariel Durant on the traditions we dismantle, the tyrannies we repeat, and the beliefs we struggle to replace.
Will and Ariel Durant wrote what is essentially the encyclopedia on human civilization, an eleven-volume Story of Civilization. Then they did us the generous favour of condensing it into a brief read of about a hundred pages called The Lessons of History. I pulled five lessons out of it.
One of them is that roots are more vital than grafts, meaning the conservative is as valuable as the radical. The point is that you need both. Conservatism without the radicals and the fringes becomes stale. It gets solidified, there’s no movement, there’s no life. But if the radicals are in control, and they aren’t just a voice within society questioning certain things, then they start to overthrow everything.
For anything to actually grow and ascend, it first needs to be rooted. It needs a sense of structure, it needs to be stable. You can’t get grafts without the roots.
A great thought process that illuminates this is G.K. Chesterton’s Fence. If you come across a fence and you aren’t sure of its purpose, before you tear it down you should first be able to make a really good case as to why that thing exists, so that you know what you are removing. And that is our age for sure. People are ripping down fences, not knowing what they were ever erected for in the first place, and it has been disastrous.
In the video I go through the other four lessons: why revolution is cultural amnesia, where I actually disagree with the Durants on Christ and Genghis Khan, what a Roman emperor’s price controls say about the claim that socialism has never really been tried, and how holy days gave way to holidays.
Everything we think about as peace and prosperity is really the byproduct of traditions.
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