Let's Find Out - Lessons of History: The Cycle of Ancient Civilizations (Will & Ariel Durant) | ASMR

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

This is a reading, and sparse commentary, about the recorded cycle that societies/civilizations oscillate through, as seen in ancient Greece, revolutionary France and perhaps even in today's data-laden America. This periodic trend is marked by governments of tyranny that are overthrown into a free society, which then evolve into being burdened with anarchy and decentralized value systems. The anxiety provoked by such chaos caves to the stability of tyranny so it is welcomed once again under the guise of equal enslavement for all. Sweet dreams.

On my shelf in the back, the mostly yellow ones. That's about six books. It's only six out of a collection of about 11 very thick tomes about the history of civilization, called The Story of Civilization by a couple of philosophers and his historians named Will and Ariel Durant. They have a great, captivating, informative, well-researched, entertaining style of writing, which is why I'm collecting their books. Anyways, so it's probably a few thousand, maybe upwards of 5,000 pages of

this long epic that they try to condense the entire known history of the human race into parsed out i guess by ages from ancient india in greece and egypt to i think they made it to napoleon so the uh at least the early 1800s but anyways here's actually a picture on the back of their book here This short little book here called The Lessons of History is actually the pro-law, post-script. I don't know what they call it. It's the final chapter, really, and to sum up the lessons that they've learned from the history and their research into it. So I'm going to read you guys a short little excerpt. out of this book. Maybe talk about it.

We'll see if I feel like it. If I have energy. But anyways, yeah, let's get started. This one is called government in history, and I thought it's... I was relevant to at least... I thought it was relevant now, but really, once I think about it,

it's probably one of the more relevant things to all human beings. at any given time, at least from here and to the past. But it's the relationship between government and the individual and the historical manifestations of different types of government and the evolution of our current government and possible predictions. Predictions of possible government government organizations or rules we can dispute over forms of government.

History has a good word to say for all of them, and for government in general. Since men love freedom of individuals and society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation. To make it absolute, it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order. Organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands. Power naturally converges to a center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, spread, as in Poland under the Liberum veto. Hence the centralization of power in the monarchy of Richelieu or Bismarck over the protest of feudal barons has been praised by historians.

A similar process has centered power in the federal government of the United States. It was of no use to talk of states' rights when the economy was ignoring state boundaries and could be recognized. only by some central authority. Today, international government is developing as industry and finance override frontiers and take international forms. Monarchy seems to be the most natural kind of government, since it applies to the group the authority of the father in a family or of the chieftain in a warrior band. If it were to judge forms of government from their prevalence and duration in history, if we were to judge them, we should have to give the poem to monarchy. Democracies by contrast have been hectic interludes.

After the breakdown of Roman democracy in the class wars of Grochie, Marius, and Caesar, Augustus organized under... in effect was monarchical rule the greatest achievement in history of statesmanship. That Pax Romano, which maintained peace from 30 BC to AD 180, throughout an empire ranging from the Atlantic to the Euphrates and from Scotland to the Black Sea. After him, the monarchy disgraced itself under Caligula, Nero, and Demetian. But after them, Nerva, Trajan, or Trajan, I guess, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. The finest succession of good and great sovereigns.

Renan called them the world has ever had. If, said Given, a man were called upon to fix the period during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous. He would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Marcus Aurelius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government. That brilliant age, when Rome's subjects complimented themselves on being under her rule, monarchy was adoptive. The Emperor transmitted his authority not to his offspring, but to the ablest man he could find. He adopted this man as his son, trained him in the functions of government, and gradually surrendered to him the reins of his power.

The system worked well, partly because neither Trajan nor Adrian had a son, and the sons of Antonius Pius died in childhood. Marcus Aurelius had a son, comitist, who succeeded him because the philosopher failed to name another heir. Soon, chaos was king. It has had a middling record. Its wars of succession brought mankind as much evil as the continuity or legitimacy of the monarchy brought good. When it is hereditary, it is like to be more prolific of stupidity, nepotism, your responsibility, and extravagance, than a nobility or statesmanship. Louis XIV, and to break up Roman numerals there, has often been taken as the paragon of modern monarchs. The people of France rejoined at his death. The complexity

of contemporary states seems to break down. at any single mind that tries to master it. Hence, most governments have been oligarchies. Be chosen either by birth, as in aristocracies, or by religious organizations, as in theocrates. Theocracies, or by wealth as in democracies. It is unnatural, even as Rousseau saw, for a majority to rule.

For a majority can seldom be organized for united and specific, action. In a minority can, if the majority of abilities is contained in a minority, minority government is as inevitable as the concentration of wealth. The majority can do no more than periodically throw out one minority and set up another. The aristocrat holds that the political selection by birth is the sanest alternative to selection by money or theologian. money or theology or violence. Aristocracy withdrawals a few men from the exhausting and coarsening strife

of economic competition and trains them from birth through example surroundings and minor office for the tasks of government. These tasks require a special preparation that no ordinary

family or background can provide Aristocracy is not only a nursery of statesmanship, but it is also a repository and vehicle of culture, manners, standards, and tastes, and serves thereby as a stabilizing barrier to social fads, artistic crazes, their neurotically or neurotically rapid changes in the moral code. See what happens to morals, manners, style, and unlawically. art since the French Revolution. Aristocracies have been inspired, supported, and controlled, but they have rarely produced it. The aristocrat looks upon artists as manual laborers. He prefers the art of life to the life of art, reducing himself to the consuming toil that is usually the price of genius. He does not often produce literature, for he thinks of writing for publications, and he is not

and general as exhibitionism and salesmanship. The result has been in modern aristocracies a careless and dilettante hedonism, a lifelong holiday in which the privileges of place were enjoyed to the full, and the responsibilities were often ignored. Hence the decay of some aristocracies. Only three generations intervened between Laetat d'est mo and appraise moya deluge. I don't know what those made.

So the services of aristocracy did not save it when it monopolized privilege and power too narrowly. When it oppressed the people with selfish and myopic exploitation. When it retarded the growth of the nation by a blind addiction to ancestral ways. when it consumed the men and resources of the state in the lordly sport of dynastic or territorial wars. Then the excluded banded together in a wild revolt. The new rich combined with the poor against obstruction and stagnation, the guillotine cut off a thousand noble heads, and democracy took its turn in the misgovernment of mankind. Does history justify revolutions?

This is an old debate, well illustrated by Luther's bold break from the Catholic Church versus Erasmus' plea for patient and orderly reform, or by Charles James Fox's stand for the French Revolution versus Edmund Burke's defense of prescription and continuity. In some cases outworn and flexible institutions seem to require violent overthrow, as in Russia in 1917. But in most instances, the effects achieved by the revolution would apparently have come without it through the gradual compulsion of economic developments. America would have become the dominant factor in the English-speaking world without any revolution. The French Revolution replaced the landowning aristocracy with the money-controlling business class as the ruling power. But a similar result occurred in 19th century England without bloodshed and without disturbing the public peace. To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may follow the shock of sudden blows or mutilations,

as the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions. In either case, a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction, as in the Paris mass curse of September 1792, characterized by negative emotion. Since wealth is an order, in procedure of production, an exchange rather than an accumulation of mostly perishable goods, and is a trust, the credit system, in men and institutions rather than an intrinsic

in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks. Violet revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural natural equality, forgive me the natural inequality of men, soon recreates an inequality of possessions and privileges and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same issues as the old. That's a really interesting point. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

In strict usage of the term, democracy has existed only in modern times, for the most part since the revolution, a French Revolution. As male adult suffrage in the United States began under Andrew Jackson. Now adult suffrage in the United States, it began under Andrew Jackson. As adult suffrage, it began in our youth.

In ancient Attica, out of a total population of 315,000 souls, 115,000 were slaves. And only 43,000 were citizens with the right to vote. vote. Women, nearly all working men, nearly all shopkeepers, tradesmen, and all resident aliens were excluded from the franchise of voting. The citizen minority was divided into two-fell. The oligarchic, chiefly the land aristocracy and the upper bourgeois, and the democratic, small landowners and small businessmen, and citizens who had lapsed into wage labor, but still retain the franchise. During the ascendancy, ascendancy of Pericles around 460 BC, the aristocracy prevailed.

In Athens, had her supreme age and literature, drama, and art. After his death, in the disgrace of the aristocracy through the defeat of Athens and the Peloponnesian War around 430 BC. The Demos, or lower-class citizens rose to power, much to the disgust of Socrates and Plato. From Solon to the Roman conquest of Greece, the conflict of oligarchs and Democrats was waged with books, plays, orations, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war. At Corsica, now Corfu, in 427 BC, the ruling oligarchs, assassinated 60 leaders of the Popular Party. The Democrats overturned the oligarchs, tried 50 of them before the Committee of Public Safety,

executed all 50, and starved hundreds of aristocratic prisoners to death. Thucydides' description of Perman reminds us of Paris in 1792 and 1793. which was the French Revolution. The description is as goes. During seven days, the Corses Syrians were engaged in butchering those of their fellow citizens whom they regarded as enemies. This to me is very poignant right now with the

I have wrapped my head around about what's called identity politics and anybody who is very, very quick to judge a person's character completely based on a rapid evaluation of mostly their external appearances or their affiliation with a single party of a two-party system. It seems, it just seems very foolish on a lot of levels. If I'm judging a person because he's a white male or a black man. female or a mixed race or a you know transgender um i'm making a lot of assumptions about their entire very complex life and not much of that can be validated i don't think i don't think you could be too right about a person's entire complex personality by just lumping them into a very, very simple and low resolution category.

So anyways, the first or second blow hits, then you have followers and then you might have a cultural meme, you know, an idea that it's okay to kill your enemy. And if you perceive anybody... that rapidly without judging and taking the time to get to have an actual dialogue with them. If you perceive them as your enemy, then what's to stop you from feeding a machine that produces mass annihilation and murder of certain citizens, certain human beings deemed as enemies, without a fair trial or a fair analysis of each, individual. It just seems very simple-minded to group and lump people in the categories like that.

So it's just something I love about this book, something very, very true when you start to look into history and think on it's in such a digestible form because it's not the first time it's happened clearly and communism and the French Revolution and obviously the democratic takeover of the Periclean government are famous and unexceptional unfortunately unfortunately unexceptional examples so I don't know it's just something we can learn from I think at least I can Or at least I'm trying to remember it, I'm trying to wrap my head around events, people I deal with.

So he continues describing the demos, rising to power, 431 BC in Coursera, Corsera. So, anyways, the Corsarians were engaged in the butchering of those fellow citizens who were, whom they regarded as their enemies. They put a label on them, dehumanized them so that they could slaughter them with no guilt. Death raged in every shape, and as usually happened at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go. Sons were killed by their fathers, and supplants were dragged from the altar, slain on it, or slain on it. Revolution, thus rain, ran its course from city to city.

the places where it had arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to still greater, to a still greater excess, the atrocity of the reprisals. Coursera gave the first example of these crimes, of the revenge exacted on the governed, the government by the governed, who had never experienced equitable treatment or indeed, ought by violence from their rulers, and of the savage and pitiless successes, into which men were hurried by their passions. Meanwhile, the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two warring groups. The whole Hellenic world was convulsed.

So, that ends the excerpt by Thucydides. In his republic, Plato made his mouth. peace, Socrates, condemn the triumphant democracy of Athens as a chaos of class violence, cultural decadence, and moral degradation. Democrats temptuously rejected temperance as unmanliness, insolence they term breeding and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence and impudence, courage. Impudence, I guess. The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them. And the son, to be on a level with his father, having no shame or fear of his parents,

the teacher fears and flatters his scholars. And the scholars despise their masters and tutors. The old do not like to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they imitate the young. Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. The citizens, impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten. And this is the fair and glorious beginning, out of which springs dictatorship. The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction. Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction. Dictatorship naturally arises aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty. I'm of Plato's death in 347 BC. His hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth. Industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for money. Kleenexia, as the Greeks called it, an appetite for more and more.

O riches, Neo-Plutto, gaudy mansions bedecked their women with costly robes and jewelry, spoiled them with dozens of servants, rivaled one another in the feasts with which they regalled their guests. The gap between the rich and the poor widened. Athens was divided, as Plato put it into two cities. One the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other. The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation, taxation and revolution. The rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. All this sounds very summation of recent times. I don't know. I don't know whether it would be an accurate description

times in history or if we just happen to be living in one that very I think pretty closely resembles this. And anyways, but the members of some oligarchic organizations, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath. I will be an adversary of the people, and in the council, I will do it all the evil that I can. The rich have become so unsocial, wrote Isocrates. About 366 BC, that those who own poverty, property rather than, those who owned property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who were in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure

than seize the possessions of the rich. Poor citizens captured control of the assembly and began to vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state. redistribution among the people through the governmental enterprises and subsidies. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. In some cities, the Dehies centralization of wealth was more direct. The debtors in Metilin massacred their creditors en masse. The Democrats of Argos fell upon the rich, killed hundreds of and compensated their property.

The moneyed families of otherwise hostile Greek states leaked themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts. The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, or distrusted it as a sham equality of votes nullified bay gaping by a gaping inequality of wealth. So we have distrust coming from the poor fear, which might lead into preemptive strikes, preemptive offensive stances by the rich, due to their fear of the poor getting upset. And then the poor in a terrible feedback loop, apparently becoming more and more upset by the apparent inhumanity of the wealthy. The rising bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip of Macedon pounced down upon it in 338 BC. Many rich Greeks welcomed his coming as preferable to revolution.

Athenian democracy disappeared under Macedonian dictatorship. I think that might be my aversion to ralpherson radical, at least rapid, radical dismantling of current laws. I believe that laws should definitely be changed and, or at least subject to change, and then changed once it's been, once the, the submitted change, uh, has been, you know, properly thought through, at a disgust, agreed upon by enough people. It happened so rapidly. a lot of people get uncertain they get a little anxious and they get they get wary of of disruptions to the the structure that helps keep society together and

they secretly unconsciously maybe start to desire a confident powerful figure to lead them and tell them everything's okay, you know, to subside their anxiety. So that's when you can have extreme liberalism, extreme potential chaos due to instability and rapid change and evolution of a society's infrastructure, the laws that keep it cohesive and running operation, operationally normal. once it reaches a tipping point and it gets disrupted and enough people get fearful of potential anarchy and chaos and there is evil emerging out of the chaos are much more willing to see any rights that they might have had before

to be given the the certainty of a single easy to understand a real-minded ideal of government and leadership yeah it's interesting that um it didn't just start with communism or even the french revolution 300 years ago it started or 250 at least 200 it started 2 000 years ago not started but uh it occurred at least 2,000 years ago probably society's been oscillating like that back and forth for a lot longer I would I would only guess based on this evidence so yeah it's it's interesting I thought I thought that's something really worth learning at least and being aware of and I honestly forgot I read this a while ago it's been years so I forgotten all about it. Anyways, Plato's reduction of political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship found another illustration in the history of Rome. During the third and second centuries before Christ, a Roman oligarchy organized a foreign policy

in a disciplined army and conquered and exploited the menaceous. Mediterranean world. The wealth so won was absorbed by the part patricians and the commerce so developed, raised to luxurious opulence under the middle, upper middle class. Greek, Orientals, and Africans were brought to Italy to serve as slaves of the Latifundia. The native farmers displaced from the soil joined the restless breeding proletariat in the cities to enjoy them monthly dole of grain debt, Caius Crockus had secured for the poor in 123 BC. Generals and pro-consuls returned from the provinces loaded with the spoils for themselves in the ruling class. Millionaires multiplied. Mobile money replaced land as the source or instrument of political power.

rival factions competed in the wholesale purchase of candidates and votes. In 53 BC, one group of voters received 10 million cesteris for its support. Cistercies for its support. When money failed, murder was available. Citizens who had voted the wrong way were in some instances beaten close to death, and their houses set upon fire. Antiquity had never known so rich, so powerful, so corrupt a government. The aristocrats engaged Pompeii to destroy or sorry to maintain their ascendancy.

The commoners cast in their lot with Caesar. Ordeal of battle replaced the auctioning of victory. Caesar won and established a popular dictatorship. Aristocrats killed him, but ended by accepting the dictatorship of his grand-nephew and stepson, Augustus, 27 BC. Democracy ended. The Markey was restored. The platonic wheel had come full turn. Miller's cycle took examples. That ancient democracy corroded with slavery, finality, and war, did not deserve the name, and offers no fair test of popular government.

of popular government. In America, democracy has a wider base. It began with the advantage of a British heritage. Anglo-Saxon law, which from Magna Carta onward had defended the citizens against the state, and Protestantism, which had opened the way to religious and mental liberty. The American Revolution was not only a revolt of colonists against a distant government, It was also an uprising of a native middle class against an imported democracy. The rebellion was eased and quickened by an abundance of free land in a minimum of legislation. Men who owned the soil they tilled and within the limits of nature controlled the conditions under which they lived, had an economic footing for political freedom.

personality and character were rooted in the earth. It was such men who made Jefferson president. Thomas Jefferson who was as skeptical as Voltaire and as revolutionary as Rousseau. A government that governed least was admirably suited to liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a wilderness to a material utopia and from the child and ward to the rival and guardian of Western Europe. And while rural isolation enhanced the freedom of the individual, national isolation provided liberty and security within protective seas. These and a hundred other conditions gave to America a democracy more basic and universal than history had ever seen.

Many of these formative conditions have disappeared. Many of them, personal isolation is gone through, is gone through the growth of cities. Personal independence is gone through the dependence of the worker upon tools and capital that he does not own, that he does not own, and upon conditions that he cannot control. becomes more consuming, the individual is helpless to understand its causes or to escape its effects. Free land is gone, though home ownership spreads with a minimum of land. The once self-employed shopkeeper is in the toils of the big distributor, and may echo Marx's complaint that everything is in chains. Economic freedom, even in the middle classes, becomes

more and more exceptional. Making political freedom a consolatory pretense. So the more you're economically enslaved, enslaved, the more the pretense, pretending that we have political freedom is necessary to maintain people from getting significantly, I guess, displeased with their governments. And all this has come not through the perversity of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development and through the nature of man. Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon the superior ability and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power. Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, requires the widest spread of intelligence,

and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education is spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the symbol. A cynic remarked that you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there's so much of it. However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to the manipulation, by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large company. That was a slip of the tongue, to rule a large country.

Is democracy responsible for the current debasement of art? The debasement, of course, is not unquestioned. It's a matter of subjective judgment, and those of us who should. shudder at its excess, its meaningless blotches of color, its collages of debris, its babbles of cacophony are doubtless imprisoned in our past and dull to the courage of experiment. The producers of such nonsense are appealing not to the general public, which scorns them as lunatics, degenerates, charlatans, but to gullible middle-class purchasers. who were hypnotized by auctioneers and are thrilled by the new, however deformed.

Democracy is responsible for this collapse, only in the sense that it has not been able to develop standards and tastes to replace those with which aristocracies once kept the imagination and individualism of artists within the bounds of intelligible communication, the illumination of life in a logical sequence and coherent whole. If art now seems to lose itself in the bizarries, this is not only because it's vulgarized by mass suggestion or domination, but also because it has exhausted the possibilities of old schools and reforms, and flounders for a time in the search for new patterns and styles,

new rules and disciplines, All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm and more good than any other form of government. It gave to human existence, a zest, a camaraderie that outweighed its bitfalls and defects. It gave thought and science to enterprise. It gave thought and science and enterprise, the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege in class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place. Under its stimulus, Athens and Rome became the most creative cities in history, and America in two centuries has provided abundance for an unprecedentedly large proportion of its population. Democracy has now dedicated itself resolutely to the country.

spreading and lengthening of education and to the maintenance of public health. If equality of education, educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath the catch words cannot be equal. Their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not the rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue that may nourish and test a man's fitness for office and power. A right is not a gift of God or of nature, but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have. In England and the United States, in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, in Switzerland, and Kempers, and Kempark, Canada. Democracy today is sounder than ever before. It has defended itself with courage and energy

against the assaults of foreign dictatorship. It has not yielded to the dictatorship at home, but if war continues to absorb and dominate it, or if the itch to rule the world, requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedom of the freedom, of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife if race or class wars divides us into hostile camps. Changing political argument to blind hate one side or the other may overturn the hostings of the world with the rule of the sword. For our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it. The race road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all in a

martial government under whatever charming phrases will engulf the democratic world. That's the end of that section titled government in history. I think it's really compelling how unoriginal the overall narrative of our time seems to be in light of history and our knowledge of it. Thank God we've been keeping records. So it's not the first time that democracy gives way to dictatorship, which gives way to democracy in an endless cycle. But yeah, America, as far as a institution and our actual unique type of democracy

and now Canada and other Western European nations with all our issues and you know potential invaders from without and within that seems to me

to be a pretty well-founded social structure and government so all we can do is at least fight for our ability to speak freely about anything and that way we can discourse and have a dialogue on what's really wrong and what needs to be changed for the better

and hopefully we can all unite under the cause of the right to be able to speak our minds and not have our voices, our words, our creative endeavors that don't cause any physical violence to anybody else suppressed. So let all people do say what I believe, I guess. So it's interesting just hearing that, you know, how subject to dictators in such a gradual manner

that we don't realize it. Seeing the bigger picture hopefully helps give us, interestingly enough. Maybe it helps through the dialectic of seeing something and then understanding its opposite. I just read something not too long ago actually. That said that peace is just an illusion created to justify the existence of war. So, that's something to think about. Alright, sweet dreams. Thank you.