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indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced for of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways.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