Though I have not posted for a while, I am still reading Will Durant. The last four days have brought some other obligations—writing for money rather than for the blog—but I have continued to pick up Durant nearly every day for half an hour or so. I have traveled through Durant’s history of the Jews during the Middle Ages and the Age of the Byzantium Empire, and am now in the heart of European feudalism.
What always amazes—and more and more, amuses—me about the comparison of our age to the Age of Faith is our assumed sense of superiority. We are materialists, post-modernists, believers in science and “facts” rather than believers in the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. We tend to regard ourselves as intellectual giants and those who went before us as our underlings. Yet the sophistication of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought in regard to reality is as sophisticated and complex as our own. According to Durant, for example, Moses Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of this period, believed that “we cannot know anything of God except that he exists.” (Near the end of his writings on the Jews, Durant writes of them that “it is the unfortunate who must believe that God has chosen them for His own.”)
In these pages, too, is the litany of crimes and murders that seem to mark the human race. Once again, many of us believe our age to be superior to that long ago time of barbarian invasions, the sacking of cities, the annihilation of peoples, the cruel, deviant tortures, the rapine and ruin that seemed the mark of conquerors. I well remember how many of my students reacted to accounts of torture and slaughter in that period. Some of them, and some of us, especially those who know little of history, like to believe that our society and others of the modern world would never commit such crimes.
Yet we have and we do. The last century has brought untold millions of deaths through warfare, concentration camps, various genocides, revolutions, repressions, and wholesale murders. Even today the world remains a violent place, ranging from such horrific acts as jihadist terrorism to the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels, from the constant battles of the Middle East to the murder of farmers in South Africa. There is nothing more ironic, and sadder, than someone who is alive today who, while shocked and horrified by the savagery, slavery, and violence of our ancestors, thinks that we the living are somehow pure as the driven snow. Here is the truth: Our hands are as bloody as those of the Arabs who spread their Faith by the sword or the Crusaders who recaptured Jerusalem.
History is the pair of spectacles, I am beginning to realize, that can counter our myopic vision.
For another’s reflection on the Durants, I give you the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Gu2SxYJaI
In these pages, too, is the litany of crimes and murders that seem to mark the human race. Once again, many of us believe our age to be superior to that long ago time of barbarian invasions, the sacking of cities, the annihilation of peoples, the cruel, deviant tortures, the rapine and ruin that seemed the mark of conquerors. I well remember how many of my students reacted to accounts of torture and slaughter in that period. Some of them, and some of us, especially those who know little of history, like to believe that our society and others of the modern world would never commit such crimes.
Yet we have and we do. The last century has brought untold millions of deaths through warfare, concentration camps, various genocides, revolutions, repressions, and wholesale murders. Even today the world remains a violent place, ranging from such horrific acts as jihadist terrorism to the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels, from the constant battles of the Middle East to the murder of farmers in South Africa. There is nothing more ironic, and sadder, than someone who is alive today who, while shocked and horrified by the savagery, slavery, and violence of our ancestors, thinks that we the living are somehow pure as the driven snow. Here is the truth: Our hands are as bloody as those of the Arabs who spread their Faith by the sword or the Crusaders who recaptured Jerusalem.
History is the pair of spectacles, I am beginning to realize, that can counter our myopic vision.
For another’s reflection on the Durants, I give you the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Gu2SxYJaI
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