Will Durant spent a lifetime looking at civilizations and philosophies.
Celebrated historian Will Durant was a dispassionate handler of history and peoples. He dissected cultures and societies respectfully yet without attributing anything special to participants beyond their human attempts to solve life the best they could.
I remember a line from his (and his wife Ariel’s) epic multi-volume set of books, “The Story of Civilization,” in which he talked about an early, early effort of Western mankind to make sense of what was happening to them. He observed that the primitive society concluded that it needed a god, so it created one.
The comment was interesting because it came across as neither derisory nor laudatory. Durant didn’t suggest that deity was a man-made concept, nor did he infer that the human impulse to know deity came, in fact, from God. His observation was matter-of-fact and in keeping with Durant’s modest view of the work of historians: “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
I wonder what the historian, who died in 1981 at age 96, would have said about 21st-century America. He was rigorously informed. He researched civil authorities, flirted with radical ideas of governance—as well as the priesthood—lobbied for women’s suffrage and human rights, and otherwise immersed himself in his own era of Western civilization. Durant was not a bystander to history.
Consider his droll comment on the variety of human beings: “Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.” How would that remark be received today? Did Durant allude to the differences in humankind to make a point about inequities? Or was he wryly affirming that equality is inborn and supersedes outward distinguishing features?
Socialist paradise-builders always want to substitute equity for equality. The historian took note of that: “Liberty and equality are enemies: the more freedom men enjoy, the freer they are to reap the results of their natural or environmental superiorities; hence, inequality multiplies under governments favoring freedom of enterprise and support of property rights.”
He continued: “Equality is an unstable equilibrium, which any difference in heredity, health, intelligence or character will soon end. Most revolutionaries find that they can check inequality only by limiting liberty, as in authoritarian lands.”
Today’s #hashtag historians dwell on stuff like equity and equality as if they are discoverers of it. Understandably, many of the voices regurgitating what they consider to be revelatory are of young people. Dismissing truth as an anachronism is a special province of youth, who possess zero perspective. For mature people to try to blister history this way is more problematic.
Witless as it is, however, the clamor continues. Personal identity is given preference over individual merit. Cynical political arguments are heralded as virtuous. Here’s another Durantism: “It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”
Foolishness reigns. Will Durant is gone, but future historians undoubtedly will conclude that the current period of our nation’s political history was a monumentally foolhardy one.
A friend of mine has been reading Will Durant's books this last year or so.
Good commentary! Political chaos reigns!