A review by villyidol
The Lessons of History by Ariel Durant, Will Durant

Did not finish book. Stopped at 24%.

Always difficult to say whether it makes sense to read such an old book about human history. I enjoyed it in the beginning, but soon some doubts crept in. At some point it became a back and forth between enjoying and disliking the text; nicely illustrated by the following paragraph:

Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

What a rollercoaster. I think the main problem here is just that this is a book written by old people with a dated perspective.

I could look past this— to some extent. But a book of merely 120 pages of course is not going to provide a comprehensive overview of human history. And this is also not what this book is about. It’s about what we have learned from all of it (hence the title). And I’m not sure it makes sense for me to read such a book when it was written by someone that, in my humble opinion, doesn’t understand human nature. This table here of positive and negative human instincts was the nail in the coffin:


DNF at 24%

I did read the last chapter, though, because a GR-friend of mine said it would be good; and it was. But I think I’d prefer to read a book written by someone with a more modern view on humanity and human history.