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…
