(credit: from Nicole Oresme's Traite de la Sphere, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It is also worth pointing out here that some societies in the past even worked out sets of beliefs and customs that enabled them to live and multiply so well that for generations, their wealthiest citizens came to believe they had found the answers to life. These citizens created niches that were insulated from contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material world; they did the customs of their culture without caring about the values behind those customs: they came to think wisdom, love, and freedom, were old-fashioned notions for peasants.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It keeps being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, love, and freedom of all citizens if their society is going to stay strong. What can confuses an analysis of History is that when citizens do begin to get lazy about living their values, the crash of their society may take a while to arrive – and may be obscured by a lot of irrelevant trivia. But it will arrive.

                                 

                            

                  Gaspar de Jovellanos (credit: Francisco de Goya, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It is also worth noting here that the numbers of cultures possible that qualify as brave, smart, free, and kind is close to infinite. If we brought together all the records from all the cultures that have ever existed, this would still give us only a tiny fraction of the total number of human cultures possible. We will never observe in the records of History every theoretically possible way of adapting to catastrophe or opportunity.

Therefore, we must search through the records of all human societies for the larger general principles and try to accumulate what knowledge we can about how our species moves forward through the centuries. Wisdom. The accumulation of what really works has been long, hard, and slow. But however hard all that reading, thinking, and writing has been, as much in our own times as in any past era, it has to be continued. From those mounds of historical records, our minds must extract the general principles that we need to save ourselves from ourselves.  

   

                        

        University of Virginia: Modern scholars (credit: Mmw3v, via Wikimedia Commons)