Daily Inspiration Quote by Will Durant

Durant’s line has the cool efficiency of a historian who’s tired of hearing ethics treated like a set of eternal commandments dropped from the sky. “Adjust” is the tell: it’s the language of pragmatism, not prophecy. He’s describing morality less as revelation than as a living technology - a social operating system that updates when the world that runs it changes.

The intent is quietly deflationary. Durant isn’t denying that people feel moral conviction; he’s puncturing the idea that those convictions float above material life. Environmental conditions can mean climate and geography, but also scarcity, war, commerce, urban density, disease, new tools. When resources are thin, virtues like thrift, loyalty, and obedience tend to harden into necessity. When surplus arrives, societies can afford broader tolerances and more individualized ideals. Moral “progress,” in this framing, is often just the luxury of stability.

The subtext is a warning to moral absolutists and a check on moral smugness. If our codes are adaptive, then judging the past (or other cultures) as simply wicked becomes a kind of willful illiteracy about their constraints. It also unsettles the comforting story that we’re better because we’re wiser; we may just be differently situated.

Context matters: Durant wrote as a synthesizer of civilizations, watching the 20th century’s rapid shocks - world wars, mass industry, secularization - rearrange what people called decent. His point isn’t that morality is fake. It’s that morality is contingent, and that contingency is the real engine of historical change.