History According To Durant

I know my aim, not that anyone remembers or cares, at the beginning of this year was to introduce my ruminations on history. I never delve into it because quite frankly - despite my apparent belief in my opinions - I fear it is too aloof. Although I like history, I don't try to draw or seek a spinal chord in order to try and explain contemporary issues. Sure, there are interesting coincidences but I'm not so sure man is that predictable. I never really was all that comfortable with the "we're bound to repeat history" theory either. History to me is, in addition to being the ultimate art form, unclear. We can lucidly build models about the past so as to gain a clearer picture of it but we can never really know.

I remember asking a Roman classics professor in a library, "What Roman character and personality traits passed on to the modern Italians? Or are they different despite sharing the same land?" While he seemed to enjoy the question (or pretended to), he responded by saying it was impossible to tell. I don't remember the rest. I may have been distracted by a girl.

Anyway, the direction of political science now is to create formulas to explain political behavior. That always struck me as insipid. History,luckily, isn't so foolish. It has a funny way of obliterating man's attempt to subdue nature.  

That being said, here I introduce Will Durant - who is of French- Canadian heritage - historian and philosopher. Just a couple of quotes:

Democracy had to pay the price of popular sovereignty in art as well as in politics. The taste of innumerable average men became the guide of the manufacturer, the dramatist, the scenario writer, the novelist, at last of the painter, the sculptor, and the architect; cost and size became norms of value, and a bizarre novelty replaced beauty and workmanship as the goals of art.

I think most observers of art and pop culture would concur. We can add funding for the arts. By this I mean not major orchestras or ballets but for artists who would better serve themselves and society at large in a different discipline or domain. The "you can do whatever you want" should be tempered with some realism. People should explore their dreams but be honest when they sense it won't happen. I did.

Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology; it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual; and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding.

This part certainly finds a spot in my mind. There's nothing more grating than a person earning a lot of money in a position of power acting and thinking like ingrates. You're talking to a guy who believes even if you're a sports commentator, you should be well-read in the classics, know literature and be well-rounded in your knowledge of general history. It never ceases to amaze me hear sports commentators not even know the history of sports they speak of!

A certain tension between religion and society marks the highest stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion" Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and -- after some hesitation -- the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike, to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile, among the oppressed, another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

Let's call this "vicious circle."

Durant asked a question in The Lessons of History, above all, that captures my interest and one I've fluttered around with on this blog. It went like this: Will Oriental fertility, working with the latest Occidental technology, bring the decline of the West? It does have a Russel feel to it, in that we may indeed be asleep at the switch.

Birth rates in the West is a serious problem especially considering the high birth rates of new immigrants. We can also add the crushing weight of public entitlements to the mix which is draining our treasuries.