I'm almost through Volume VII of "The Story of Civilization" series by Will and Ariel Durant. Volume VII is titled "The Age of Reason Begins". At 647 pages it is one of the shorter volumes of the set so it's not suitable for reading on a smart phone or by those with more important things to do. It can be time consuming to read but if you are interested in time travel, reading history is a practical means that doesn't require a flux capacitor.
When
I first started reading about this series of books I thought it was a
joke that anyone could claim to write "the story of civilization."
Luckily Will Durant
has a sense of humor and created what seems to be a fair minded,
necessarily partial treatment of history with all the limitations that
any history writing has especially one of this scope that reaches back
over 2500 years. If nothing else reading this type of history will give
you some sense of perspective when considering our present time. It will
also disabuse you of any notions of "exceptionalism" when it comes to
nations, states, races, creeds, genders or colors. Exceptional
individuals - yes; exceptional abstractions - not so much.
Fun fact - Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the Republican President Gerald Ford in 1977. It seems somehow instructive that the Republican President Donald Trump awarded this medal to the radio personality Rush Limbaugh in his 2020 State of the Union address.
So what's the point?
You'll
certainly learn by reading Will and Ariel's books that civilizations
evolve and devolve. The moral arc of the universe may be long and bend
towards justice as Martin Luther King taught but the actual state of
society has varied wildly over the last couple of thousand years
alternating between times of feast and famine, war and peace,
enlightenment and darkness.
I wanted to include a bit of Volume VII to give you a taste of the style of the Durant's writing, which of course changed some over the 37 years they spent on their project but remained always informative, surprising (to me at least) and somewhat wry. This is from the chapter "Imperial Armageddon" in a section titled "Morals and Manners" describing the German empire in the mid 1500's. It may cause you to wonder if there is anything truly new under the sun or if humans are actually acting out some variation of an absurd, sometimes beautiful sometimes cruel and ugly, drama with only the names and dates varying over the millennia. Hopefully it will also make you laugh a little at us apes wearing pants and pantsuits.
From Will and Ariel -
If we believe the moralists of this half century before the war, the moral picture was as dark as the economic. Teachers complained that the youngsters sent to them were not Christians but barbarians. "The people bring up their children so badly," wrote Matthias Brendenbach in 1557, "that it becomes obvious to the poor schoolmasters...that they have got to reckon...with wild animals." "All discipline appears at an end," said another in 1561;"the students are refractory and insolent in the extreme." In most university towns the citizens hesitated to go out at night for fear of the students, who on some occasions attacked them with open knives. "A chief cause of the general depravity of the students," said Nathan Chytransin in 1578, "is undoubtedly the decline in home training...Now that we have slipped the yoke of ancient laws and statutes from off our necks...it is no wonder that we find, among the larger part of our young people, such unbridled licentiousness, such boorish ignorance, such ungovernable insolence, such terrible godlessness." Others thought that "not the least among the causes why the young lapse into immorality and lasciviousness are the comedies, spectacles, and plays."
As for adults, the preachers described them as quarrelsome hypocrites, gluttons, drunkards and adulterers. Pastor Johann Kuno complained in 1579, "Vice of all sorts is now so common that it is committed without shame, nay, people even boast of it in sodomitish fashion; the coarsest, the most indecent sins have become viirtues...Who regards common whoredom any longer as a sin?" Pastor Bartholomaus Ringwalt thought in 1585 that these were "the last and worst times which have come upon the world." Profanity was almost universal among the men, regardless of the creed. Calumny had a festival. "My superintendent," wrote the Count of Oldenburg in 1594, "has complained to me of the manner in which Dr. Pezel, at Bremen, has abused and slandered him in one of his books, making out that he spent his days in gluttony, drunkenness and debauchery, that he...was a sheep-devouring wolf, a serpent, a he-goat, an abortion...and that he must be gotten rid of by hanging, drowning, or imprisonment, by the wheel or by the sword." The court preacher of the Elector of Saxony found that, "almost throughout the length and breadth of Germany it has been falsely reported that I earn large gilded goblets in drinking matches, that...I so fill myself with wine that...I have to be propped up and laid on a wagon and carted off like a drunken calf or sow."
Eating and drinking were major industries. Half the day of a well-to-do German was consumed in passing edibles from one end of the anatomy to the other. Burghers were proud of their appetites, which like the dress of their women, served as heralds of prosperity. A circus performer earned national fame by eating at one meal a pound of cheese, thirty eggs, a large loaf of bread--after which stint he fell dead. Dinners lasting seven hours, with fourteen toasts, were not unusual. Weddings were in many cases riots of gourmandizing and intoxication. A jovial prince signed his letters "Valete et inebriamini" (Be well and get drunk). Elector Christian II of Saxony drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven. A temperance society struggled against the evil, but its first president died of drink. It was asserted that gluttony was shortening the tenure of life. Said Erasmus Winter in 1599: "Owing to immoderate eating and drinking there are now few old people, and we seldom see a man of thirty or forty who is not affected by some sort of disease, either stone, gout, cough, consumption, or what not."
We must not take these contemporary complaints too seriously. Probably the majority of the people were hard-working, long-suffering, and literally God-fearing folk; but in history, as in journalism, virtue makes no news--which proves it usual.
I hope you can find time to read something that makes you realize how complex and in some sense unknowable this world and the people in it are, while also seeing the common virtue of human individuals throughout time. If nothing else it's like a billion piece puzzle you can enjoy spending your life trying to piece together and in the end knowing the effort was the point. In other words - there are plenty of dittoheaads what the world always needs more of are independent, thinking, evolving humans.
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