Month: July 2020

Chapter 4 (cont):
– Religion: Sources, Objects, Methods, Moral Function

Chapter 5: The Mental Elements of Civilization
– Letters
– Science
– Art

My closing thoughts on Will Durant’s introduction the The Story of Civilization

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Primitive people did not always have religion; even modern-day primitives are sometimes puzzled by the questions posed by researchers. Some modern primitives have no concept of deities at all, others recognized only malevolent gods, and didn’t even bother to try to appease them, for what good could it do? Some Native Americans believed in the concept of gods, but didn’t worship them, an approach also taken by Epicurus. The Abipone took the practical approach – contemplating only the practical tasks of life. As varied and universal across time and place the atheist views are, Durant classifies them as exceptions. The rule is that cultures for various reasons, and to various purposes (reasons and purposes being useful to distinguish) have almost always developed religion.

According to Lucretius, fear is the mother of the gods. According to Durant, fear of death most of all gives birth to religion, as do “wonder at the cause of chance events,… hope for divine aid… , and gratitude for good fortune.” The belief in a soul distinct from the body is inextricably bound with the fear or death. The extension of the concept of soul to all things leads to the first common form of religion – animism – the artifacts, and sometimes the facts, of which survive in modernity around the world, from the fairies of Ireland to the halos of Christian art.

Of the multitude of objects with souls available to worship, the first two were likely the moon and the sun. For the moon governed the cycles of fertility, both of our mothers and of the land, and formed the basis for our reckoning of time (again, into the modern day). We don’t know when sun-worship began, but it may have been tied again to the calendar and to the rise of agriculture. Every major religion had a sun god, whether the Mongol Tegri, Chinese Ti, Vedic India Dyaus pitar, Greek Zeus, or Persian Ahura. Today, we still beseech “heaven help us” and sports stars raise a finger to the sky for good luck and thanks. Likewise, with sky as the father, earth is the mother, and the creation story is almost universally the mating of earth to sky. Most early deities, being gods of earthly things, were female. The emergence of more male gods may have paralleled the emergence of patriarchal society.

There is hardly any superstition so old but it can be found flourishing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious labor and luxury of a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium to millennium.

SoC, p. 59.

Relatively early in written history, we see religion treating poorly those with scientific theories about the world around us, as Anaxagoras was exiled from Greece in the 5th century BC for hypothesizing the the sun wasn’t a god, but just a big ball of fire. And in the time when Durant was writing this volume (1927-1932), most of Japan (the Land of the Rising Sun) believed that the Emperor was the living incarnation of the Sun God. Perhaps it is the arrogance of the present (an End of History fallacy writ large) that causes us to believe ourselves the exception to the cycle of history.

From the sky to the earth to the animals, the souls of the gods themselves seem to have been seen as the departed souls of dead men. The relationship is preserved even today in our language. Spirit in English means both soul and ghost. Cultures worldwide have prayed to their ancestors in much the same way that modern Christians invoke the assistance of the saints. Ancestor worship continues in modern times. Gods who began as indifferent evolved to fearful, and eventually become loving fathers and ancestors. “The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.” As written history begins, exceptional individuals were deified, and their stories preserved.

The first method of religion was magic. The casting of spells and the making of sacrifices encouraged the fertility of woman and the earth herself. Festivals of promiscuity compensated for the infertility of (male) individuals. The earth was fertilized with the blood of beasts and almost every culture at one time appeased their gods through human sacrifice. Frequently the sacrifice (man as god) was consumed in order to confer its power to rest of the group. Magic made the priest when the knowledge needed to confer the rites grew large enough as to demand specialization. The priest has alternated with the warrior in ruling society, except when priest and warrior merged, and in so doing, transitioned from the creation to the use of religion as a means to power.

Religion uses tabu and myth to support morality. Tabu, the Polynesian word, places acts and objects off limits. Chief among these is woman. Myth seeks to reinforce behaviors that help society. The vast knowledge, and sometimes nearly as comprehensive ignorance, including knowledge of food and hygiene, of the ancients was codified in the tabus and myths of its religions. “The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than create new ones.” Although for the practitioner, religion frequently serves as the basis of moral conduct, religion itself evolves not as the foundation of morality, but as an aid to it, by sanctioning the conduct demanded by environment, economic, and social circumstance.

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. … Institutions which were at first in the hands of 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 anti-clerical. 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.

SoC, p. 71
** We are here.

Durant has one section left in his ‘brief’ introduction. The tracing of the Mental elements of civilization: letters, science, and art that in turn support, enhance, and finally serve to help disassemble civilization, until after a period of darkness, a new one emerges.

Language likely emerged from gestures and sounds – probably concrete nouns and probably through imitation. The Tecuna tribe in ancient Brazil had the perfect verb for to sneeze – haitschu. In English we still retain roar, rush, murmur, hiss, hum, cackle, and many others. The killer app of early language was when we transitioned from the specific to the general, from that tree to all things that are like that tree. The ability to understand and communicate abstract concepts is critical to planning, and critical to writing itself. Without abstraction, how can we understand that marks on a clay pot indicate information about something other than the marks themselves?

The first writing is of course uncertain. Some believe that it was trade marks inscribed in clay vessels. Current thought (almost 100 years after Durant wrote) is that it was accounting ledgers in support of trade; records of transactions conducted and payment owed. It may be that writing was necessitated to prove debts incurred and paid. And immediately the intellectual class bemoaned its impact on the minds of youth. King Thamos, of Eqyptian legend, lamented: “Children and young people who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.” The outsourcing of memory to writing may have lessened the mental dexterity of the individual, but at the level of civilization it enabled the accumulation of knowledge beyond what could be held in memory. At first, letters remained closely guarded by the priestly class. But eventually, and especially with the advent of movable type, it allowed knowledge to flow to any mind willing to grapple with it, challenge it, and improve it. Writing allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Durant traces the beginnings of science to counting, though one could certainly argue that the practical knowledge of edibles and poisons, tool-making and trade, hunting and coordination, migration and time-keeping came first. While counting was necessary for the beginning of measurement, our language (calculus – little stone) reveals the incredibly short distance between its beginnings and now. The root words for measure and month are almost certainly the same as for moon, that first God to regulate our understanding of time. Ancient man had no physics, but understood perfectly well (better than we moderns) how to construct a bow and aim an arrow. Ancient doctors knew little or no chemistry, but know which plants were beneficial and which poisonous. Ancient Peruvians had a 90% success rate trephining the skull to relieve pressure from injury; in Paris in 1786 the procedure was invariably fatal.

If modern primitive societies are representative of the ancient, Art seems to have originated in the decoration of the body through pigments, dyes, tattooing, and other forms of modification. Painting may then have moved to pottery, which seems to have rapidly progressed from practical to artistic itself, under the guidance of the first potters, who were likely women. Clothing may have been initially more ornamental than practical. Sculpture likely arose also from the potter’s art, music as an extension of dance, and drama and the opera as an extension of music. Art is the expression of beauty, and the only standard of beauty is the eye of the beholder. Those eyes are invariably influenced by their environment, economy, and social norms. And so it goes.

As we reach the end of Durant’ introduction to civilization, he concludes that pre-civilized man had already created every element of civilization but writing and the state (and it seems to me that Durant earlier included writing in the pre-history, though that may just be a quibble about semantics). Our civilization is built on the shoulders of “savages,” without whose “hundred thousand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been. We owe almost everything to them – as a fortunate, and possibly degenerate, youth inherits the means to culture, security, and ease through the long toil of an unlettered ancestry.”

In reading Durant’s beautiful prose and the patterns and connections he makes, I am struck most by one thought running through the entire narrative as an invisible thread holding it all together. Paradoxically, that invisible thread is this: there is no absolute good or bad, there is only that which is useful and practical for a culture in their time and environment. For a philosophy expert writing history to arrive in a position of moral relativism is only mildly interesting, since plenty of philosophers espouse relativism (though few want to live it, and fewer still are historians). Durant’s great gift was in answering relative to what: relative to what is needed. This seems to echo an answer Durant gave during an interview* near the end of his life: when discussing natural selection, he observed that Darwin was right, it is the survival of the fittest. The problem is that we can’t know ahead of time the definition of fittest. The fittest are those that survive. We may want to consider this before we judge those who went before us and upon whose shoulders we firmly, and often ungratefully, stand.

Note:
* The interview is published as part of the audiobook version of The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Both Will and Ariel recorded many interviews, most of them together. It is a rare treat to listen to their answers, and a rare delight to hear them interact.

Chapter 4 (cont): The Moral Elements of Civilization
– Sexual Morality
– Social Morality

Faithful readers (there are a few)… I’ve been married to 28 years. There is little good that can come of me describing the varying sexual morals through history – lots of sex, young and old, with lots of partners; marriage variously non-existent, short, serial, and polygamous; virginity proof of unworthiness or infertility; and monogamy arising only recently, as a form of slavery and production of offspring to work the fields. So I won’t.

Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced for of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged – or slowly changing – impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circumstances of social life.

SoC, p. 51

Durant, who studied philosophy deeply before writing history, seems to come down on a version of moral relativism. However, his is more grounded than the moral relativism that sometimes pervades public discourse today – that which holds that the fact of many different moral systems means that none of them can be correct, and that as a result all are equally valid (a view that I do not hold). Durant’s version is more practical, grounded in the influences of environment and the stages of development of civilization. Morals serve to guide behavior in ways that are advantageous first to survival, and probably only incidentally, to the development of civilization. And in fact, that development serves to disrupt the morals that helped it along, until gradually they are supplanted by a new set, no less true than the old, but due to changing circumstance, environment, and experience, more useful. As the state emerges and the size of a culture grows, morals (as a commonly understood part of life) require additional weight, and law and religion provided that structure.

Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mystery and supernaturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science.

SoC, p. 56

Chapter 3: The Political Elements of Civilization
– The Origins of Government
– The State
– Law
– The Family

If the average man had had his way, there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

SoC, p. 21

In primitive societies, all governance was local: the province of the family patriarch; ad-hoc councils of elders in larger groups when specific events demanded such organization. If war was waged between tribes, a war-time Chief might emerge. In peace, he usually went back to the role of patriarch of his own family; the tribe needed little central leadership.

War acted as Darwin’s agent of natural selection, raising the level of competition and selecting for those who excelled in “courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence, and skill.” As in our time, it was a driver of innovation, and introduced new concepts of organization. Insofar as agriculture created property, war (frequently over property rights) created the state. As agriculture led to trade, and trade to writing, the state barely precedes the written word. In its creation, we mark the transition from kinship to domination.

Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.

SoC, p. 24

Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask Will Durant about these words during these interesting times, when so many (or at least so few, loudly) are decrying as unjust the very land upon which many of our monuments stand, and when so many attack those very monuments. Is this a natural part of the ebb and flow of history, the result of too long a time spent in affluence and peace? Whither the end of the unrolling of rights of conquest, as every piece of land on our globe has changed hands untold times amongst cultures extinct, revived, decaying, or thriving?

The state grows to consume authority over more and more of life, as men decide that they’d rather one unjust authority than many. The insatiable appetite of the state, in its early form almost universally authoritarian and autocratic, soon creates the need for law.

Law, which arises from property, trade, marriage, and government, grows out of the primitive concept of vengeance that each person was entitled to exact whatever revenge they could enforce through their personal power and influence. Early legal systems, such as the Code of Hammurabi, gave structure to, and by so doing, preserved the right of retribution, which can still be found in our modern legal systems. As the law grew, it substituted compensatory damages for retribution for lesser crimes. Some societies instituted ordeals between the aggrieved parties, less for determination of guilt perhaps than in the hope that the contest would end the dispute in such as way as to stop the chain of revenge. The growth of law led next to courts, originally elders tasked with hearing disputes and determining the justice required. From here, it was another short step to the concept of law and court as a means to prevent wrongs first, and to punish when necessary. Paradoxically, Durant concludes that laws increased our freedom:

Rights do not come to us from nature, which knows no rights except cunning and strength; they are privileges assured to individuals by the community as advantageous to the common good. Liberty is a luxury or security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

SoC, P. 29

If this sounds strange to modern ears (and it assuredly did to mine), we must recall that in primitive society, the individual existed only as a member of clan. Few individual rights were recognized, rather the individual was governed strictly by environment and custom. Expected to contribute freely to the clan; expecting to draw freely from it as well. Survival was a team sport. Few rugged individualists survived long enough to express their freedom.

As family groups appear to have been too small for success in the harsh environment of our past, we believe that the clan was the normal group. Upon the emergence of the state, the clan was superceded from above by the government, from below by the family. While the family could hardly be called matriarchal, as that implies female rule, it was usually organized around the mother, her children, frequently her brother, with the males as only passing companions. As men had always to be ready for battle or the hunt, women did most of the work in the clan, most likely including the invention of pottery, sewing, weaving, domestication of animals, and horticulture. As agriculture grew, only with the attendant security of the primitive state did men begin to take up more of the work. As the concept of property grew, the desire to pass that property to the next generation drove a shift to a fully patriarchal society.

Chapter 4: The Moral Elements of Civilization
– Marriage

Marriage as we know it is a very recent concept, indeed in some parts of the world it is perhaps less than a century old, and in others retains much of its more normal historical purpose. Durant traces the concept of marriage with some difficulty through pre-history and into early history, during which time, every conceivable approach has been tried, has served well for a time, and has ultimately transformed as environment and the development of civilization itself steered it.

Durant holds marriage as the first step in the moral development of civilization. Early primitive societies seem to have lacked much concept of marriage altogether; as with land rights, all was communal, in some cultures to the extent that marriage, sex, and procreation were not believed to be connected. When men were primarily hunters and warriors, they tended to die early, leaving a surplus of women, and as a result monogamy was not yet seen as practical alternative to celibacy. As agriculture created the need for cheep labor (slaves), and simultaneously led to the patriarchal inheritance of land and property, marriage to one, or frequently several women allowed a man to have children to work and inherit the land. Universal also was the concept of exogamy – of marrying from outside the clan. Today we understand the genetic advantages of exogamy; primative people’s motivations are unclear. Over time, exogamy evolved from capture, to capture with later payment, to purchase and parental arrangement, which survive in some cultures to this day. Curiously, this evolution seems to parallel in concept (if unsure in time) with the evolution of law from revenge to compensatory damages.

The concept of romantic love as part of the marriage institution is even more recent. Over most of our history, marriage has existed as an economic arrangement. The distance and longing of adolescence that lead to courtship and romance having not existed in the freer communal societies over the vast majority of our history. As Durant closes, “Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.” I can imagine the outrage if Durant were to post that sentence to Twitter in 2020. And I wonder if the outrage we would see is, in the broader historical context, evidence in support of his conclusion.

Pages i – x, 1-25
Preface
The Establishment of Civilization
Chapter 1: The Conditions of Civilization
Chapter 2: The Economic Elements of Civilization

How does one attack a work of this magnitude? I can imagine Will asking himself as he sat down to start volume 1 in 1927.

Does one start with the earliest known history? If so, when was that? It seems even today to be a fast-moving target, with new archaeological discoveries re-writing our pre-writing history almost weekly.

Does one start with an event, such as the first agriculture or the domestication of livestock? Again, it seems that these are moving targets.

Will (Ariel not yet being a co-author) chose to start by providing a brief (90 or so pages) of introduction defining what is meant by civilization. What are its necessary elements? How do we think those emerged? How did the establishment of each element influence the others? What did it mean for how our ancestors lived and related to each other and their environment.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol 1, pg. 1.

In the first seven words of his work, Durant provides definition and purpose. In his view, humanity builds social order for the purpose of creating cultures. He elaborates: civilization “begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.” An aspirational definition, perhaps shaped by his deep study of philosophy.

Chapter 1: The Conditions of Civilization

Durant briefly describes the external factors that ‘condition’ civilization: geological conditions and geographical conditions. The eras between ice ages encourage civilization; ice ages shrink it. Geological events disrupt civilization, or perhaps hasten its disruption, shaking off entire cities and empires with earthquakes and natural disasters. Geography shapes civilization by providing or denying natural resources; by providing or denying trade routes and commerce; by providing or denying safety from disease and predation. And geology interacts with geography, turning once fertile areas arid, creating harbors and passes for commerce. Durant, perhaps ahead of his time, takes the time to explicitly discount race as a condition of civilization, noting that advanced civilizations have arisen at every time, in every climate, and have been built by every race. He goes further to posit that race is more likely to emerge from the conditions of environment and civilization over time than to influence its development in any way.

In addition to external factors, there are other prerequisite conditions for the emergence of a civilization. Durant counts among these political order, common language, unifying moral code, unity of basic beliefs (perhaps – he is less sure on this one), and education of some type to transmit culture to the next generation. If any of these conditions are missing or becomes so, then civilization is in danger.

Upon this foundation then are built the four elements necessary to constitute a civilization: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. There is some overlap between Durant’s prerequisites for and elements of civilization, which I haven’t yet sorted out. It will be interesting to see if and how Durant proceeds to sort through these.

Chapter 2: The Economic Elements of Civilization

If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry began with fire.

Will Durant, SoC, pg 6

In this short chapter, Durant takes us on a journey from hunting and gathering to herding, domestication, agriculture, cooking, industry and specialization, to trade and the beginnings of economy. Along the way, we see a parallel journey from communism (little ‘c’ – living in groups that act as communes sharing all resources, owning no land and few personal possessions, greeting travelers with open hospitality) to agriculture as the cause of property rights and slavery and compelled labor (‘jobs’) to specialization of skills and uneven distribution of resources leading to the developments of markets, barter systems, transport of goods and eventually coinage and finally to the destination of politics as an emergent system to enforce property and trade rights. It is a journey alternately necessary, inspiring, and tragic.

Two powerful thoughts may serve well to encapsulate these journeys:

The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears.

SoC pg. 6

Durant takes care to differentiate between the term ‘savage,’ frequently used within his lifetime, and ‘primitive,’ denoting our ancestors who had not yet invented writing. And he acknowledges that while modern society may exceed our primitive ancestors in accumulated specialization, at the individual level, the primitives possessed greater ingenuity and were much more capable of survival and thriving in concert with the environment than any ‘civilized’ person today is likely to be.

Here, too, the main problems were solved before written history began.

SoC, pg 15

Written about the problem of building trade routes, a recurring theme of the first section of the book so far, and one that captures too the ingenuity of our species. The main problems, having all been solved before written history, suggest that for all of our pride in the advancements of modern society, they are but refinements of knowledge older than the millennia. We fund ourselves not smarter or more creative than the ancients, merely the beneficiaries of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, much of which we might struggle to recreate (as has happened in the not-too-distant past) should the need arise. A humbling idea indeed.

Where to begin? That is always the first question, and the one that became the seed of Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume history entitled The Story of Civilization.

Will Durant, even before writing his exceptional The Story of Philosophy, had planned to write a history of the 19th century. Soon, he realized that in order to understand the 19th, he needed to build on the foundation of the 18th. In order to understand the 18th, the 17th. And it was turtles all the way down. Soon he had committed to attempting a history of civilization, and attempt that Durant himself calls “a venture which has no rational excuse, [that] is at best a brave stupidity.”

Embarking on what would become a life-long project, starting in 1927 and finishing 11 volumes later in 1975, Will (assisted by his wife Ariel for the last five volumes) sought to break through the “usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections” and instead to paint a view of the whole interwoven fabric of human culture. He realized at the outset that this would open him to criticisms from the experts and expressed this in his usual rich language – “any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique.” Of course, he knew that his was not an original thought:

Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an expert in council. It is foolish to speak on every kind of work.

Ptah Hotep, ca. 5000 years ago

I’m not sure how I first stumbled across Will and Ariel’s work. A few years ago, I read their The Lessons of History, in which they attempt to distill the story of our civilization into its key themes. I found the approach roughly similar to what Yuval Noah Harari attempted with some popular success in Sapiens, but found the scope and the insight of Lessons to be greater and more timeless that Harari’s popular version.

Reading Lessons of course made me aware of Story. Being a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work has made me shift my learning bias from current to Lindy. And viewing current events has made me painfully aware of modern society’s ignorance of our history, and the vast gaps in my own knowledge of history. I had little interest in history during most of my formal education, and a growing interest as I have gained experience in life and in the world.

As I approached my 50th birthday, I decided that I should fill in some of my historical gaps, and seek to understand more fully how the world in which we live became the world in which we live. How to do this? Of course there are as many approaches as there are opinions. Will Durant himself gave his best answer in an essay in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, in the form of a reading list designed to provide a classical education in an hour of daily reading across four years. Harvard has their 5-foot shelf of knowledge. The Long Now Foundation has curated lists of books to reboot civilization. Other options abound.

So today, I embark on a journey through the history of our civilization, a history written over half a century and completed nearly that long ago. There will be times when our modern sensitivities seek to overturn or reject the Durants’ view of history. There will be many instances where more is known than was available to the authors; some of which matters, and much of which may not; some of which serves to enhance, some to revise, still other discoveries that upend what was previously understood. There is danger in discarding too much in favor of our modern preferences, for the history of our civilization is vast, the experience of our ancestors deeper than our own, and the luxuries of our modern sensibilities recent, unusual, and quite likely fleeting. Let us not judge to hastily in our adolescence the wisdom of our forebears.

Today I start at the beginning…