Are We Going The Way of Rome? - (Caution! - this is a "no spin zone!")

MACKINAC.ORG ^ | SEPTEMBER 1, 1002 | LAWRENCE W. REED

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Bump 4 later

[Rockingham]

The points made in the article deserve consideration, not as omens of inevitable decline, but as challenges to be met in a spirit of hope and practical optimism. History repeats itself, but it is also a succession of singular events and causes.

Rome's decline is instructive for us, but it does not mark our destiny. We have a great capacity for self-renewal. I feared the worst for this country when I was young and experiencing the 60's, the Viet Nam War, the Cold War, and the Carter years of stagflation, economic and military decline, and national failure. But then came Reagan and an American renaissance that continues still.

In eras of great danger, the American and British peoples seem to call forth the leaders that they need, finding them in improbable form: Lincoln -- an Illinois lawyer with negligible education, poor spelling, and the manner of a rube; Reagan -- a retired B grade actor with a common touch and disarming personality that hid a sharp political mind and a passion for reading in history and politics; Churchill -- a widely disliked parliamentary hack with an excessive fondness for brandy and his own voice; Thatcher -- a sharp edged grocer's daughter with training as a chemical patent lawyer and a dislike of the aristocracy.

Disparaged by the elites of their day, they all nevertheless came to power through the good sense of ordinary people and led their nations out of mortal peril. Perhaps, one day, we will rank George W. Bush among them, with others yet to come forth against dangers that we now see but dimly. We are equal to the challenges we face if we will that it be so.

[AntiGuv]

Keep in mind the Byzantine Greeks called themselves Romaioi (Romans) until the very bitter end..

[Terpfen]

Which kind of proves my point--if you can't do a direct comparison, there's probably not much there worth comparing in the first place.

[Billthedrill]

Rome had a number of problems, the welfare state being one, but hardly the most important. I don't think many of them map well to the current situation of the United States unless you either begin well before Gibbon's "Decline" or ignore a far greater number of differences.

Michael Grant has a wonderful book that summarizes what seemed to him the most important of these. Gibbon, of course, treated it at much greater depth. Among many were the following:

1. The metropolitan area had grown beyond the ability of domestic agriculture to support it and hence had to depend on lines of communication with North Africa that were threatened by Carthage and broken by the Vandals.

2. The army was no longer native, but first included allied peoples and eventually simple mercenaries.

3. Roman tax bases had shrunk with extensive movement toward the cities and away from agriculture.

4. The native Roman population had fallen below replacement reporduction and was overwhelmed demographically by waves of migratory peoples.

5. The government, in an attempt to support its welfare state, taxed and regulated small businesses out of existence and hence lost the ability to create new wealth from new population.

6. The structure of government was transformed from republican to monarchical, and as such had the problem every monarchy has, stable succession. Each head of state's death threatened, and many inaugurated, a civil war.

7. Communications technology was not up to central administration of an empire that large, hence regional governors became independent powers and claimants to the throne.

8. The rise of Christianity sucked off a major source of administrative ability from state to Church and established an extragovernmental authority that grew increasingly secular as it was forced to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of its parent government. (Gibbon was particularly insistent on this point, much to the chagrin of his own contemporary churchmen).

More, I'm sure, than this brief amateur summary can touch, and so I shall leave that to those on FR who know more about the topic than I. But I will suggest one parallel, and it isn't the U.S. - the factors of welfare state, tax base, hindrance of economy through regulation, inability to field a military, and demographic submersion, apply much more to contemporary Europe than the U.S. And their barbarians are already inside the door.

[Cronos]

Hi -- this could be a continuation on the discussion we were having regarding the fall of Rome.

Down with the Welfare state!

[AntiGuv]

What, if anything, is a Byzantine?

[Cronos]

The Persians army came to the gates of Rome. When they found out the number of citizen solders prepared to fight, they turned around and went home. About 100 years later the Romans no longer cared for their culture enough to fight for it. Thus the Persians sacked and defeated Rome.

errrr...... WHAT??? That's WRONG, W R O N G

The Persians never went past Greece -- furthermore, the "Persians" were defeated by Alexander's Army and after briefly having a Macedonian general as ruler, got the native PARTHIAN dynasty in power. The PARTHIANS never reached Rome, Parthia's power was directed in Iran, Iraq, Arabia, Central Asia and Western India.

[Cronos]

Rome's fall had more to do with incessent civil war then it did with anything else. We've had one. I'll get worried when we hit an even dozen.

i would call the recent election pretty much akin to a civil war -- wouldn't you say so?

[Cronos]

The record is abundantly clear as to what happened, but nowhere near clear on why. One alternate theory is the Pirenne Thesis, which holds that, despite changes in governmental control, the Mediterranean world was basically okay until the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, because they destroyed the maritime economy.

That is correct -- most people forget that until the Muslimes came along, Europe and the lands bordering the Mediterranean (Libya, Turkey etc.) were all basically one trading bloc with a lot of communication going on between them

[Puckster]

"In a famous statement, philosopher George Santayana warned that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it."

Okay so, the problem here is that history is written by the victors, so, it's not like history isn't biased, or, something like that.

There's text book history............then there's history.

[Cronos]

America restored the Republican form of government to Earth, after 2000 years of darkness.

Well, not quite -- what about Switzerland?

[FreedomCalls]

Ancient history bump.

[Cronos]

I'd say Sulla, the dictator supreme after knocking off Marius. Though his 'reforms' didn't last too long, he let the secret out -- a general could conquer Rome

[Cronos]

The Byzantine Empire was plainly the most enduring empire in history, a proud legacy. I'm not sure how you can call the Byzantine Empire the Roman Empire, however. Doesn't the name "the Roman Empire" imply that it should be in Rome? Or run by Romans?

The thing is that the Byzantines called themselves Romaoi -- Romans, they considered themselves Romans who retained the light of civiisation (and they were mostly correct!). If you were to transport yourself back to 1300 AD, the Byzantine Emperor would insist that he ruled the Eastern Half of the Roman Empire.

[Puckster]

I guess a god would know this.

Very interesting observation.

[Syncro]

I think Sept 1002 was the first ^year this was published on the internet.

:>)

A good and fitting story to see again. Glad to see it posted, thanks.

[Cronos]

I would more liken Byzantium to the re-establishment of the Hellenic Empire, which is an Empire much more proud even than Rome.

No way -- there was barely a gasp of the "Hellenic" Empire under Alexander and it quickly split up -- Egypt went back to it's Pharoahs, though now they were ethnic Hellenes, but they worshipped the same old gods and followed the old ways, Syria had Seleucus (or was it antiochus?) and there was an Empire in Greece proper and in Persia -- they were not one entity (unlike the Mongol Empire, which after Genghis, for 50 years was ONE empire with FOUR ulus'). Even the places where the Macedonians conquered retained their far more ancient civilisations with a veneer of hellenic thought -- Persia for example, or Egypt.

[mhx]

It's not the conquest of territory that made the republic turn into an empire.

The dissolution of the republic started when people realized that they could just blow off the constitution and get whatever they wanted by either paying off the population or just using sheer force. We have seen echoes of this in our recent elections. Once 48% of the population becomes convinced that elections aren't important to have unless they get to win, and they would rather have a tyrant that's on their side than an elected government, well, let's just say I'm not optimistic about the outcome.

[ijcr]

I beg to disagree with the author...it is not the welfare state that dragged down Rome.

It was the volume of "Civil Servants", their needs and pensions. This is the same problem we are having in the US today. The number of Americans at the taxpayers trough is alarming. If we count all municipal,State and Federal employees the annual totalbudget of wages and pensions surpasses the spending on Medicare and Medicaid.