Will Durant (b. 1885) was an active left-winger his entire life—joining the Socialists in 1905, writing a declaration of racial equality in 1945, and so on. I had this in mind recently when I picked up the first book in his eleven volume History of Civilization and began reading Durant’s account of civilization’s origins.
Given the little I knew about Durant’s political activities, I was expecting something like a Rousseau-sounding complaint against property and civilized life. But Durant surprised me—he’s balanced, even Burkean:
We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that—as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter—“morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community”; and that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved. Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which the members of a society practise its moral code is quite as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to understand that there may be more wisdom in the moral code of the group—the formulated experience of generations of the race—than can be explained in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us that even that which we cannot understand may be true. The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds, and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are relative, and indispensable.
Of course, there are plenty of escape hatches here for the Durant who wants to pen rights declarations. Still, this passage represents a lucid and historically-informed product, and so far Durant is a very worthwhile read. A reliable source tells me that he ends up arguing, contra figures like Carl Schmitt, that Western society is chiefly Greek in derivation. That’s something I’ll have to take up later.
In the meantime why not repeat a routine observation? Socialists from fifty years in the past had noticeably firmer ties to an inherited civilization than do “conservatives” living today.
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Burke via Durant?
Will Durant (b. 1885) was an active left-winger his entire life—joining the Socialists in 1905, writing a declaration of racial equality in 1945, and so on. I had this in mind … [Read More]
Posted by Evan McLaren on August 12, 2008
The Usual Suspects