Morals and History
The Lessons of History, Chapter VI
By: Will & Ariel Durant
Overview
The immorality of brutal oppressive leaders and their wars are all too obvious. It is the daily fare of history. But the morals of the “common people” have frequently been much higher. The history of kindness, brotherliness, and good family life has never really been told.
Highlights
“Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which is seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order, security, and growth. “
The Industrial Revolution changed economics and family life as “… men, women and children left home, family authority, and unity, to work as individuals … The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were ‘emancipated’ … The authority of father and mother lost its economic base …” and the old morals based on an agrarian life began to die.
Wars and economic problems also exacerbated the decline in morals, but behind the wars, poverty, misfortune, and murder of history, there were millions of good homes and happy marriages with children. The gifts of charity have “almost equaled the cruelties of the battlefields and jails.” But this history is seldom written. “Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?”
Lesson
The morals that make a civilization civilized are not found in ambitious leaders but in the common people, and form the principal check on evil in the world. These morals are based on generations of experiment in the laboratory of history. If they are lost, and the common people become as corrupt as many of the leaders, civilization will cease to exist.