Years ago I needed to do some research for something on Napoleon. I asked my dad if he had anything and he lent me the last in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization 11 volume series: The Age of Napoleon.

This is a big book, but I love history and I really enjoyed it. I asked about the Story of Civilization series and he said I should get my own set. We drove over to the now defunct Acres of Books in Long Beach CA and I found a used set for a good price.

I then set out to read them, essentially through insomnia. I’d read every time I couldn’t get to sleep. It took me nearly 20 years to read through the entire set- nearly 10,000 pages total, but read through them I did. I really love his thought process and came to respect how he understood that historical figures need to be judged by how they fit in their time, not ours. They weren’t products of our culture, they were products of their own.

Anyway, I’ve been aware of Will Durant’s philosophical works so I recently picked up his Story of Philosophy, and Lessons of History. I’m reading Lessons of History first, trading it off with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in modern Italian.

But I wanted to share some of the third chapter on Biology and History because in it, he brings out some lessons that I think would be important for others to know.

We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive.

I’m a born-again Christian, and I’m well aware there are huge, contentious debates within Christianity over evolution. But I can say that even the most strident six-day literal creationists would accept adaptation as a given in life. So I have no problem sharing these as legitimate lessons, even for those that might not accept evolution completely as an explanation for life on earth.

The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Cooperation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we cooperated in our group- our family, community, club, church, party, race, or nation- in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups.

This is an important concept. Life is competition. I’ve heard this as well from some evolutionary biologists that I regularly listen to. You can have life without cooperation, but you can’t really have life without competition. For those that want to believe we can edit competition out of life through rearranging our political system, it’s a pipe dream. People compete because life is competition.

How does that square with Christian eschatology? I don’t have the slightest idea. All I can say is, I’m assuming life then, after Jesus comes back and settles things and remakes the world, is going to be different enough. Perhaps there will be some similarities, but enough different that I couldn’t even imagine what it will look like.

As for now, I want to get along with everyone, but no systemic arrangement is going to erase competition.  

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. Since nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution. Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.  

If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.  

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. Freedom and equality are sworn enemies, and when one prevails, the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically. To check inequality, liberty must be sacrificed. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed and the best the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups.

I laughed out loud at the opening line: Nature hasn’t read the declaration of independence, so we’re born unfree and unequal. Man can declare all he wants, nature does what it wants. In fact, nature needs inequality in order to select what is better. That may sound harsh, but again, nature doesn’t care, it just is. Inequality simple is because that’s how we are born.

Any attempts to equalize will necessarily come at the expense of freedoms, which means purposeful injustice enforced by man, as opposed to the blind injustice that occurs in nature.

Would you prefer purposeful, targeted injustice? Or blind injustice? What I know of men, I don’t want them in charge of deciding where the injustice will be applied, since it will, in my opinion, be 100 times worse than the blind injustice of nature.  

The blind injustice of nature can also be managed- let people play to their strengths. The enforced injustice of man will feel much worse because someone will have decided to handicap the most productive, so that the least productive will feel less so. This is simply worse for everyone.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variation, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality. She is more interested in the species than the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism.

There is a short bit in this section on more educated populations tending to not have as many kids. Durant mentions simply that this is a sign of that population committing suicide. Nature has no use for that which can’t reproduce abundantly. Nature needs quantity so it can select for quality.

Does this square with Christianity? I don’t know that it doesn’t…. I recognize that the Bible speaks of this world as fallen due to sin. Whatever it is right now, isn’t what it was supposed to be. What parts point to God and what parts are fallen are perhaps too much for me to sort out, but this deduction seems true to me.  

There are political philosophies that I believe are doomed to failure because they don’t adequately account for these lessons. They sound good in theory, but they are misguided ultimately because they misunderstood the basic natures of men and life. Those proposing such things are tilting against windmills.

They do of course have the power to bring us down with their stupidity, so it’s not like they should be ignored, but even if utopian schemes sound convincing, there are certain ideas that just run counter to the lessons of history.