# Our Oriental Heritage  ## Metadata - Author: [[Will Durant]] - Full Title: Our Oriental Heritage - Category: #books ## Highlights - CIVILIZATION is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. ([Location 779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=779)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If the soil is fertile in food or minerals, if rivers offer an easy avenue of exchange, if the coast-line is indented with natural harbors for a commercial fleet, if, above all, a nation lies on the highroad of the world’s trade, like Athens or Carthage, Florence or Venice—then geography, though it can never create it, smiles upon civilization, and nourishes it. ([Location 790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=790)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility; but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. ([Location 795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=795)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Civilization begins in the peasant’s hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns. ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=808)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Given like material conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan reproduces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth. Civilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation into a relatively homogeneous people. ([Location 813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=813)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Subtle psychological factors must enter into play. There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education—some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe—its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts—must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men. ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=816)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The disappearance of these conditions—sometimes of even one of them—may destroy a civilization. A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change; an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age; the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies; the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials; a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world’s commerce; mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them; the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietist philosophy; the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness… ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=825)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which… ([Location 833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=833)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.”4 There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence, as in many “savage” ways. The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears. ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=859)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the façade; in the rear are the shambles. ([Location 897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=897)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The discovery of fire limited this indiscriminate voracity, and coöperated with agriculture to free man from the chase. Cooking broke down the cellulose and starch of a thousand plants indigestible in their raw state, and man turned more and more to cereals and vegetables as his chief reliance. At the same time cooking, by softening tough foods, reduced the need of chewing, and began that decay of the teeth which is one of the insignia of civilization. ([Location 947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=947)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry began with fire. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=975)) - Tags: [[blue]] - So beneficent and strange was it that fire always remained a miracle to primitive man, fit to be worshiped as a god; he offered it countless ceremonies of devotion, and made it the center or focus (which is Latin for hearth) of his life and home; he carried it carefully with him as he moved from place to place in his wanderings, and would not willingly let it die. Even the Romans punished with death the careless vestal virgin who allowed the sacred fire to be extinguished. ([Location 980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=980)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At first man was content, apparently, to accept what nature offered him—the fruits of the earth as his food, the skins and furs of the animals as his clothing, the caves in the hillsides as his home. Then, perhaps (for most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice), he imitated the tools and industry of the animal: he saw the monkey flinging rocks and fruit upon his enemies, or breaking open nuts and oysters with a stone; he saw the beaver building a dam, the birds making nests and bowers, the chimpanzees raising something very like a hut. He envied the power of their claws, teeth, tusks and horns, and the toughness of their hides; and he set to work to fashion tools and weapons that would resemble and rival these. Man, said Franklin, is a tool-using animal;24 but this, too, like the other distinctions ([Location 984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=984)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: The major benefit of human intelligence - we can absorb the best parts of other animals by fashioning technologies to replicate them (and eventually improve on them) - Above all, he made himself a stick. It was a modest invention, but its uses were so varied that man always looked upon it as a symbol of power and authority, from the wand of the fairies and the staff of the shepherd to the rod of Moses or Aaron, the ivory cane of the Roman consul, the lituus of the augurs, and the mace of the magistrate or the king. In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=992)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since human skills and natural resources are diversely and unequally distributed, a people may be enabled, by the development of specific talents, or by its proximity to needed materials, to produce certain articles more cheaply than its neighbors. Of such articles it makes more than it consumes, and offers its surplus to other peoples in exchange for their own; this is the origin of trade. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1041)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Romans used kindred words—pecus and pecunia—for cattle and money, and placed the image of an ox upon their early coins. Our own words capital, chattel and cattle go back through the French to the Latin capitale, meaning property: and this in turn derives from caput, meaning head—i.e., of cattle. ([Location 1061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1061)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.41 Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as “so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.”42 Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized;43 or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality. Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none. ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1098)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery grew.44 It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1129)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace. ([Location 1144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1144)) - Tags: [[blue]] - MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. ([Location 1177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZS93Q&location=1177)) - Tags: [[blue]]