Civilization Rhymes Because Human Nature Does Not Change

December 19, 2020

Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History compresses their eleven-volume Story of Civilization into a single devastating observation: history shows no alteration in fundamental human nature. Means, instruments, and scale change, but motives and ends remain the same. All technological advances are new means of achieving old ends acquiring goods, pursuing one sex by another, overcoming competition, and fighting wars.

"Most of history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice."

The patterns are stark. Life is competition even cooperation is a form of competition, as we cooperate within groups to strengthen them against other groups. Life is selection nature has not read the Declaration of Independence. Inequality is not only natural and inborn; it grows with the complexity of civilization. Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies: only those in below-average economic situations demand equality; the rest demand freedom. The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable redistribution the slow heartbeat of the social organism.

Religion repeatedly dies and rises again because natural inequality creates poverty and misery that only faith can alleviate. Men cannot exist without religion. Puritanism and paganism alternate like a pendulum across history. The industrial revolution was the critical trigger for secularization but modern excess may well trigger moral renewal.

On government: democracy is the hardest form because it requires the widest spread of intelligence, "and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign." Violent revolution rarely achieves lasting change it destroys the system's ability to handle complexity, which is why revolutions typically produce simpler forms of government (dictatorships, monarchies). Wealth is order and procedure of production and exchange, not accumulation of goods violent revolutions do not redistribute wealth, they destroy it.

War is the default. Out of 3,500 years of recorded history, about 268 have been without war. Peace is preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

Takeaway: Civilizations do not die they pass their artifacts to successors who keep them alive. More people read Plato today than Greeks were alive in his time. Progress is real but neither continuous nor universal, and it is measured by increasing control of the environment by life, not by any moral arc.