When my grandfather died, I inherited his collection of “The Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant. This 11-volume series, 50 years in the making, stretches from “Our Oriental Heritage” (volume 1) to “The Age of Napoleon.” The prose is magisterial. The Durants were shrewd, probing, superbly balanced in diction and idea. They did more than sum up the past. They sought wisdom. I confess I have not read the whole thing. But I have flipped through the thousands of pages to consider what my grandfather underlined or commented on. And I did read the companion volume: “The Lessons of History.” (It only has 118 pages.) Two big lessons stick with me. One of them is the wry observation that human beings are reliably violent and crazy. To try to rein in our more destructive influences, we create institutions. The family. Religion. Work. Nations. But institutions, founded by human beings, take on human flaws. One in three women and one in four men have been physically abused by an intima...