“We shall learn more of the nature of man by watching his behavior through sixty centuries than by reading Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant. “All philosophy,” said Nietsche, “has fallen forfeit to history.” That panorama…resembles significantly, and sometimes with menacing illumination, the civilization and problems of our day. This is the advantage of studying a civilization – that one may compare each stage with a corresponding moment of our own cultural trajectory, and be warned by the ancient aftermath.
“There is the war that consumes our interludes of peace; and the desperate effort of the soul to maintain some freedom against a despotic state is an augury [omen] of our coming task.”
“Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge…”
“There must be political order. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of Life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, belief, some faith, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives Life nobility and significance despite our moral brevity. And there must be education – some technique for the transmission of culture. Whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe – its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts – must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.
“Civilizations are the generations of the social soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilization together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.”
The disappearance of these conditions – sometimes of even one of them – may destroy a civilization.”
- Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 1; Chapter 1, p.3-4
