I actually read this book in 2024, it just took this long to come around to posting my notes.

There’s nothing like this book in the world. The Durant’s spent decades creating a history of civilisation. This summary is a 100 page distillation of the patterns they discovered.

Get the book yourself here (affiliate link)

Notes

We need privacy, because we’re all struggling to be better than our nature:

“Joseph de Maistre answered: “I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.""

Economic inequality of free markets is a natural sideeffect

“And all this has come about not (as we thought in our hot youth) through the perversity of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development, and through the nature of man. Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power.”

Life is a Us vs the Environment game. The amount of control we have of our situation is a good measure of progress.

We shall here define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life. It is a test that may hold for the lowliest organism as well as for man.

A wonderful explanation of human flourishing:

We must not demand of progress that it should be continuous or universal. Obviously there are retrogressions, just as there are periods of failure, fatigue, and rest in a developing individual; if the present stage is an advance in control of the environment, progress is real.

We may presume that at almost any time in history some nations were progressing and some were declining, as Russia progresses and England loses ground today. The same nation may be progressing in one field of human activity and retrogressing in another, as America is now progressing in technology and receding in the graphic arts.

If we find that the type of genius prevalent in young countries like de America and Australia tends to the practical, inventive, scientific, executive kinds rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the carver of statues or words, we must understand that each age and place needs and elicits some types of ability rather than others in its pursuit of environmental control.

We should not compare the work of one land and time with the winnowed best of all the collected past. Our problem is whether the average man has increased his ability to control the conditions of his life.