In his latest attempt to re-invent himself (Our Endangered Values : America's Moral Crisis), former President Jimmy Carter warns of the decline of America due to our loss of "American Values" and the emergence of the Christian Theocracy (this coming from a man who routinely embraces brutal dictators such as North Korea's Kim Jong-ll and unleashed radical Islam on the world).
Here is another point of view:
You see a book, open it up, read a sentence in the conclusion, and suddenly - with a bit of extemporizing - can communicate its essence to the masses. I squeaked by on this approach through high school - a sad commentary on my adolescent work habits but also on the amount of gratitude shown by my teachers toward voluntary contributions in classroom discussion. Of course, once I hit college, these shortcuts began to come at a price. (I learned that the hard way trying an “extemporized” translation of a stanza from Virgil’s Aeneid in a Latin seminar.)
However, as far as certain books go, “interpretive” shortcuts are almost all you get.
Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” for example - published in the 1770s and 1780s - presents us with a bit of a paradox: In over a million and a half words, it covers fifteen hundred years of the cultural, political, military and religious history of four major regions, as many religions, and a few hundred nations and tribes speaking as many languages. (Rumor has it that its sheer scope kept other intelligent men - such as the German historian and Nobel laureate Theodor Mommsen - from even attempting to write about periods postdating the rule of Diocletian, dreading that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the self-taught English scholar.)
And yet, out of the 1.5 million words Gibbon penned by the light of a candle, the work’s most contagious idea - the one most laypeople invoke to make a point - is printed right on the book’s cover. The word-count ratio is 1:500,000.
Decline. Fall. Empire.
These three words have become the Alka Seltzer of historicizing writers: “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz - oh, what a relief it is!” Combine this cliché with some historical reading about Romans, Pax Romana and the “Dark Ages,” and you have the perfectly smart-looking (if commonplace) motif of “Empire in Decline” that we encounter in later works, from Oswald Spengler to the back cover of “Empire of Debt” by my colleagues Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, where the disembodied voice of a movie trailer announcer seems to tease us with the bold statement: “Unfortunately, history shows that running an empire is a disastrously expensive business. You pay in cash. You pay in blood. You pay with your soul.” (Gibbon himself would have elegantly bypassed that last statement, considering that the concept of “soul” was largely introduced by the early Christian Church - which he considers the most prominent corrosive influence on the Roman Empire.)
But if you try to look past the cliché, you may be surprised. There is another paradox:
The empire at the heights Gibbon establishes as his departure point - from which everything supposedly began to go downhill - was all about running exactly this kind of “business.” This empire was unadulterated by what Nietzsche called the “decadent” attributes of moral decline, such as compassion, peace-focused diplomacy, human rights. In short: No cash, no blood - no empire. The period those with a smattering of historical knowledge consider the Pax Romana - supposedly an international Golden Age of peace and prosperity - witnessed the most profound expansionist efforts of the emperors, who established domestic peace by inviting their opponents to commit suicide and dealt with external rivals by moving legions of hard-boiled professional soldiers rapidly across Europe via an extensive road network built expressly for that purpose. Those who stood in their way were annihilated whenever possible, their civilian populations annexed to the empire, their gods added to the Pantheon.
Decline set in only when Rome ceased to be willing to pay in cash and pay in blood… when the Roman citizen began to withdraw from public life and military service, leaving maintenance of the conquests to foreign mercenaries and eunuchs and the salvation of one’s recently acquired soul to the chants of monks.
Now, if you could ask the Romans of the Republic - those who put the “vir” (man) into “virtus” (virtue), destroyed Hannibal, sacked Carthage and assassinated Caesar - the would tell you that the Roman Empire was in decline even before it reached the apex of power Gibbon and subsequent generations of writers take as their point of departure. To the patrician of the Roman Republic and his descendants who played a greatly diminished role in the Senate of Imperial Rome, Augustus and the Julio-Claudian gaggle of imperial deviants were grotesque travesties of the old Roman moral essence… sacrilegious dictators whose very existence was a constant affront to the spirit of the elders.
On the other hand, you might say that an empire that manages to last a millennium and a half makes it difficult to “short-sell” its decline. Especially if you consider the ingredients of “empire” to include such things as religious and legal traditions, philosophy, art and language. Then, the fall of Constantinople, which Gibbon uses as a convenient terminus for his narrative, is really just a blip on the screen of history: while Islam conquers the Eastern Empire, the Western part unleashes the Renaissance, the revival of Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and thought.
In turn, at the point of Gibbon’s writing the Renaissance and its offspring, the Enlightenment, are about to launch the American Revolution and, a few years later, the French. Both events are carried by ideas and men deeply immersed in the intellectual and legal traditions of the Roman Republic, which find their way into the Napoleonic Code, the Constitution of the United States of America and everything we consider the foundations of modern secular democracy.
The lesson of history: If you expect to outsit, outwit and outlast the supposedly imminent decline of both the dollar and the global dominance of the American “empire,” my advice is to bring a comfy chair to sit on and maybe a box or two of your canned Y2K food preserves. You may be sitting for a while.
Cordially,
Adam Lass
WaveStrength
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