TB: Our Oriental Heritage (Durant)
Core Thesis
Civilization is an accumulation — a treasure-house of arts, wisdom, manners, and morals transmitted by education across generations. The Near East (Sumeria, Egypt, Babylon) laid the first foundations: writing, law codes, astronomy, mathematics, architecture. But "the Orient" is far larger than the Fertile Crescent: the Jews gave the West its Law and its God, Persia its Zoroastrian dualism, India its metaphysics and numerals, China its humanistic philosophy and its inventions, Japan its disciplined absorption of foreign culture. Europe and America are "the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia" — heirs to a pre-classical inheritance we have largely forgotten. We do well to recover and equal it.
Key Takeaways
On civilization and its transmission
- Man differs from beast by education — the technique of transmitting civilization. Civilization owes its life to education.
- Civilization is an accumulation from which the individual draws nourishment for his mental life.
- Custom gives the group the stability that heredity gives the species; the routine of custom is what keeps men sane.
- Most of history is guessing; the rest is prejudice. History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck — more of the past is lost than saved.
- All human history hinges on two revolutions: the neolithic passage from hunting to agriculture, and the modern passage from agriculture to industry.
- Writing marks the ever-receding point at which history begins. Property was the mother, war the father, of the state.
The ancient Near East — Sumeria, Egypt, Babylon
- Cuneiform script was Sumeria's outstanding gift to the civilizing of mankind.
- Egypt: one of the richest, greatest, and most graceful cultures in history — not even Greece or Rome surpassed it. Egyptian engineering exceeded anything known before the Industrial Revolution; the Egyptians were the greatest builders in history.
- The first person in known history is not a conqueror or king but an artist and scientist — Imhotep, physician and architect (c. 3150 BC).
- Babylon almost created astronomy, advanced medicine, founded the science of language, wrote the first great law codes, taught the Greeks mathematics, and gave the Jews the mythology they gave the world. Its gifts to history were in commerce and law; its literary heritage was middling. The Code knew nothing of the individual's rights against the state — that was to be a European innovation.
- Astronomy was the special science of Babylonia. From Babylonia (more than Egypt) the Greeks — and through them Rome and ourselves — drew mathematics, astronomy, medicine, grammar, and philosophy.
The Jews and Judea
- After the Book of the Law, the building of the Temple was the most important event in the epic of the Jews: it gave Judea a spiritual center and a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries of wandering.
- That Law became the central fact of Jewish life; loyalty to it through all tribulations is one of the most impressive phenomena of history.
- Nowhere is there so much killing as in the Old Testament; among nineteen kings of Israel, eight were assassinated.
- Job receives everything but an answer to his question — where is justice? No answer is possible without belief in another life beyond the grave where all wrongs are righted.
Persia and Zoroastrianism
- Persia brought a more extensive area under one government than history had ever recorded; but it is the nature of empire to disintegrate soon, as the energy that created it drains from the heirs.
- The great Persian roads merely paved the way for the physical conquest of western Asia by Greece and Rome — and the theological conquest of Greece and Rome by western Asia.
- Zoroastrianism was a splendid religion — less warlike, idolatrous, and superstitious than its contemporaries. It did not deserve to die so soon. But humanity loves poetry more than logic, and without a myth the people perish.
India — Vedas, Upanishads, Buddha, Hindu philosophy
- Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. India is the land par excellence of metaphysics and religion.
- The Vedas let us watch religion in the making — from animism to the philosophic pantheism of the Upanishads, "as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant" — the oldest extant philosophy and psychology of our race. Its core: the essence of the self is not body, mind, or ego but the silent formless depth within, Atman.
- Buddha — more patient and humorous than any other great teacher. His favorite sutra, the Four Noble Truths: life is Dukka (suffering); Dukka is due to Craving; wisdom lies in ceasing the Craving. Happiness is impossible here or hereafter — only peace, the cool quietude of craving ended: Nirvana. In the end men do not ask for happiness, but only for peace.
- Buddha refused metaphysical questions (the world's beginning or end, soul versus body, reward in heaven) as leading only to feverish dispute, never to wisdom. His weakest point: he never reconciled his rationalist psychology (no enduring soul) with his uncritical acceptance of reincarnation.
- Karma is not Fate: Fate implies helplessness, Karma makes man the creator of his own destiny — and there is biological truth in it, since we reincarnate our ancestors and the defects of the fathers visit the children.
- Hindu philosophy begins where European philosophy ends — with an inquiry into the nature of knowledge and the limits of reason. As Greek thought declined and died, the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics "drank deep the Indian wells."
- India gave us grammar and logic, fables and chess, and above all our numerals and the decimal system — but these are trifles beside her spirit. The bloody Mohammedan conquest is the bitter lesson that civilization is precarious: eternal vigilance is its price — a nation must love peace but keep its powder dry.
China — Lao-tze, Confucius, the inventions
- As India is the home of religion and metaphysics, China is the home of humanistic, non-theological philosophy.
- Lao-tze: if resistance is met, do not quarrel or make war but retire silently and win through yielding and patience — passivity has its victories more often than action.
- Confucius: the foundation of character is sincerity; he acts before he speaks, is modest in speech but exceeds in action. The one word to serve as a rule of practice for all of life: reciprocity.
- Movable metal type was a thoroughly Chinese invention — "the greatest, after writing, in the history of our race."
- "Rome fell because China built a wall": the Huns, barred from China, moved west into Europe and Italy. The same Tatar inroads disordered China — but China recovered far faster than Rome, a measure of the strength of Chinese stock and culture.
Japan
- Japan studied Western civilization carefully, to absorb its values and surpass it; Durant (1935) urged the West to study Japan as patiently, so that the coming crisis might issue in understanding rather than war.
- The Battle of the Sea of Japan was a turning point in modern history: it ended Russian expansion, ended the rule of Europe in the East, and began the resurrection of Asia.
Patterns and maxims
- Power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect.
- A nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. Religion stands at its cradle; philosophy accompanies it to the grave. (And: a nation, like an individual, begins with poetry and ends with prose.)
- The alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history.
- Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits defeat, but waits patiently for centuries to recover lost territory.
- Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and mark of civilization.
- Men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. Sometimes thought overcomes belief — but such periods never endure; religion is born again.
- The first lesson of philosophy is that we may all be mistaken. In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever.
Mental Models
- Compounding Returns — civilization is an accumulation across generations; each layer (Sumer → Babylon → Greece → us; India → the Neo-Platonists) draws from and builds on previous layers
- Complex Systems: Features from Path, Not Design — civilizations follow path-dependent trajectories; barbarian invasion or the Mohammedan conquest of India shows how a delicate "complex of order and liberty" can be overthrown from without or within