History Is For The Birds
[ad#toppostwrap]I just finished reading Will Durant’s The Reformation. At over 1,000 pages it was quite a read. Why did I bother? Who cares what a bunch of people did almost 600 years ago? What’s it got to do with the price of a new cell-phone? Nothing at all.
Will Durant is my favorite historian. You can find more about him on Wikipedia if you want. I studied history at school and it was mainly names and dates and not much understanding about what the human race has been up to for its existence. Since then I’ve read other historical works, many of them published in the past 20 years, and unfortunately I found them frequently biased towards some viewpoint, or written to serve another purpose than to enlighten.
Will Durant is different. As you read him you gain the sense that he really wants you to understand why certain events took place and what effect these had not only on our present day, but on the people who lived them.
His language is a pleasure to read. His portrayal of the events and the personalities is very even-handed, so much so that you rise above the black-and-white perception of human nature and learn that even the most vicious personalities had some redeeming qualities, and that the ‘heroes’ of history had their moral or spiritual Achilles heels.
Take Martin Luther for example. His purpose was apparently to remove the corruption and suppression of the Roman Catholic Church. He did that – and replaced it with his own brand of suppression.
It must have been very confusing in those days for anyone with an opinion about the single most important subject on the planet – religion. If you disagreed with the perversions of Christianity as practiced by the Catholic Church you were a heretic and could be burned at the stake. The Reformation moved in. Now if you agreed with the Catholic Church you could be burned at the stake.
In Europe, a traveler could be fatally wrong for holding any opinion about his religion simply by moving from one geographical area to the neighboring one. There was no way to be right. Except to not hold your own opinion – wait to see which way the wind was blowing and go with the flow. But even that was dangerous because the wind could change almost overnight…
What did I get from reading this book? Perspective. That’s a valuable thing, especially when being bombarded from every side with the urgency of ‘now!’, as if the events of today are unique and not simply a repetition of the same patterns that have characterized mankind’s efforts to survive for at least the past 3000 years.
That’s why this article is entitled ‘History Is For The Birds’ – birds have an excellent perspective. You can get Will Durant’s books on Amazon.
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