Why Did Rome Fall—And Why Does It Matter Now? [Victor Davis Hanson]

A German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise—corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of the elite, etc.

Any such discussion is also predicated on two other twists: the Eastern Empire at Constantinople went on for nearly another 1,000 years until the 1453 sack by the Ottomans. And for the last twenty years, revisionists have disputed Gibbon’s notion of a dramatic “fall” in the West, and argued instead that it was a “transition” as the “barbarian” “other” was insidiously assimilated into what would emerge in the latter Dark Ages as “Europeans”.

The East certainly had more defensible borders with the Danube and the Hellespont. Constantinople was far better fortified naturally and artificially than was Rome; the defense of Byzantium could rely to a greater degree on naval forces. And greater wealth was to be had in Asia and Egypt than in the northwestern provinces.

How could Christianity have caused the Western ‘fall’ when a very Christian East survived? (So I postpone here discussion of that crux of why the East enjoyed another 1000 years (e.g., larger population, greater wealth, less civil strife, more defensible borders, fewer Germanic enemies, etc.), given it shared many of the same pathologies of culture as the West.)

My concern, however, is instead with the indisputable decline in material culture in Britain, Iberia, Gaul, Italy and North Africa from the 4th-5th century AD onward, with the end of strong government that had resulted in everything from secure borders to internal calm (the sort of world that St. Augustine in Tunisia saw ending at his death).

Rather than rehash Gibbon, or review the spate of recent books on Rome’s decline and our own supposed end, I throw out a few general notions.

The Romans themselves by the first century AD (cf. Horace to Livy to Petronius to Juvenal) felt that the enormous influx of unearned wealth from conquered provinces had undermined the old republican virtues of small farmers and merchants (e.g. the old yeoman with four kids and a wife on five acres of grain now either devolved into the urban unemployed spectator in the Coliseum at Rome on the dole or evolved into the sterile estate owner with 50 slaves and 200 acres of wine grapes and an expensive pasture with a herd of beef cows.)

So the rise of latifundia, and the influx of unheard of wealth and slaves, gradually, in the ancients’ own view, created a dependent class on the dole and corruption among the elite. “Decline” as seen in the ancient mind was not inevitable, and was almost seen as a moral question—material progress resulting in ethical regress.

Yet Rome did not fall for four centuries after its moralists wrote of its decadence and decline. Why the resilience?

Entitlements and official corruption were for centuries subsidized by the profits accruing from global standardization and Romanization—brought about by the implementation and imposition of Roman law, order, and commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As long as the empire was cohesive, it brought in thousands yearly into its sphere of influence.

Those from the Black Sea to the Nile and from Portugal to Iraq were now subject to habeas corpus, a standard official language, regularization in weights and measures, and security on roads and the seas. The centuries-long result of such Romanization is easily discerned in the later historians from Ammianus to Zosimus, who remarked on both widening prosperity and a persistent moral crisis, rather than the dangers of material impoverishment.

So such global uniformity created real wealth in newfound places faster than such bounty could corrupt the citizens in the old Italian core to the degree to bring down what was now a world system. In other words, the creation of entirely new cities like Leptis or the growth of Asian centers such as Ephesus, brought previously unproductive tribal folk into the Roman system at precisely the time old Romans were no longer doing the things that had once created their own vibrant culture that swept the Mediterranean—the ancient version of the Chinese youth working 10 hours in an Adidas factory while an American counterpart is still “finding himself.”

One can see the resultant transition in the center of power— emperors mostly were born in the provinces, wealth centers were increasingly found in Asia and Africa, and good soldiers were no longer native Latin-speakers. The West taught the East, and the East soon became not only the more productive hemisphere of the empire, but also the more enthusiastic upholder of being Roman itself.

Petronius’s Satyricon (ca. AD 60) is a glimpse into the world of tough-minded Asian immigrants who had created fortunes in business—and who were desperately (and crudely) trying to buy into the snotty aristocratic and bankrupt world of fossilized Old Rome.

The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism.

But the cloning and spreading of this system after WWII (“globalization”) did two things: literally billions of non-Westerners adopted the Western mode of production and began, in economic terms, becoming far more productive in creating valuable manufacturing goods, food, and exporting previously unknown or untapped natural resources; in addition, the vast rise in population added billions to the world’s productive work force.

Two, this influx of imported goods and inclusion of hundreds of millions into the American orbit enriched the United States in unimaginable ways. In my own life, the very notion that I would have a tooth implant rather than one of my grandfather’s poorly constructed false teeth is mind-boggling. We once huddled around a 19-inch fuzzy black and white TV to watch 4 days of the JFK funeral in 1963 in a small 800 square foot house; now today I have 2 plasma 500-chanel cable TVs. Poverty, as I saw it as a boy in Selma in 1960, might be defined by occasional homes with outhouses in the back yard, gravel rural roads, no TVs and rampant illiteracy among those over 30.

Today, the “poor” as I see them daily at Wal-Mart and Food-4-Less in Selma (a poor town in a poor county in poor central California) buy blue-ray DVD players, have to buy food-stamp subsidized sirloin rather than rib-eye (as I can attest watching 5 carts ahead of me in line tonight), and drive used 2000 Tahoes and 2001 Yukons rather 2010 Honda Accords. Government subsidies for housing, food, transportation, etc., coupled with cheap Chinese and Indian imported consumer goods, have for a time been substituted for the old manufacturing jobs or resource-based work (e.g., we don’t make steel, we increasingly curtail farming, we don’t drill, etc.). In other words, we are enjoying a lifestyle undreamed of by our grandparents who had values quite different from our own—a result of globalization, advances in technology, and massive borrowing and debt.

But as in the case of Rome, there is a price for all these sudden riches. Just as the Iberians, and Libyans and Thracians were hungrier and more enterprising than Italians back in the bay of Naples, so too we, the beneficiaries of this wealth, lost the values that were at its heart, in a way that the Indians, Chinese, and others have not–yet. Our youth in schools are not so excited by the notion of creating 100 new nuclear power plants, creating new mountain reservoirs, building new railroads and highways, or eager to rebuild the steel industry, or dreaming of increasing food production or eager to mine more ores—instead the emphasis in our schools is more on race/class/gender engineering, regulation, redistribution, etc, all of which in classical terms is not necessarily wealth creation.

We are now borrowing nearly $2 trillion a year to do things like ensure the 84-year old has a hip replacement—nearly half of it from the Chinese where 400 million have never been to a Westernized doctor. We spend $45,000 to incarcerate the felon in California, to meet utopian court-ordered mandates. As imperial Romans, we are felt to be owed a standard of living, even as our own daily habits would no longer necessarily translate into such largess, even as those on the periphery have learned what made America so wealthy from 1950 to 1990.

Where does it all end? I have no idea, but offer only competing scenarios: 1) as our debt becomes unsustainable, we react and increase the retirement age, cut spending and entitlements radically, and renew our work ethic (impossible by choice, made possible by necessity), and enjoy a renaissance; 2) we become a UK-like museum, with witty cynical observers, as the new giants in Asia produce the next Microsoft, Exxon, and Ford, and we fade; 3) India and China discover that they too have a rendezvous with suburban blues, environmentalism, consumer regulation, and a pampered citizenry, and there is some sort of shared global postmodernism.

We inherited a wonderful infrastructure from our parents. A superb system of politics and economics was likewise given to us at birth. Many of us try to copy our grandparents and parents whose values and work ethic we increasingly eulogize. But against all that is that Roman notion of luxus, untold wealth and leisure that we see juxtaposed with shrill cries and accusations that we are too poor, exploited, and in need of someone else’s income. The wealthier we become, the louder and angrier we become that we are not even more wealthy.

In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things. But clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth—and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable western empire far less margin of error when barbarians arrived, or rival generals marched on Rome. For a while the Romanization of the wider Mediterranean subsidized this ennui, but eventually the old western and southern provinces neither could protect what they had created nor could continue to be as productive as in the past nor believed that being Roman was any better than the alternative.

The strange thing is that these wild swings in civilization are at their bases psychological: decline is one of choice rather than necessity. Plague or lead poisoning or famine did not destroy Rome. We could balance our budget tomorrow without a great deal of sacrifice; we could eliminate 10% worth of government spending that is not essential; we could create our own energy with massive nuclear power investment, and more extraction of gas, oil, and coal. We could instill a tragic rather than therapeutic world view that would mean more responsibilities rather than endlessly more rights. We could do this all right—but too many feel such medicine is worse than the malady, and so we probably won’t and can’t. An enjoyable slow decline is apparently preferable to a short, but painful rethinking and rebirth.

Rule #1: feed the army.
Rule #2: pay the army.

That's 0bama's plan w ACORN and other community organizations. Keep your foot soldiers fed

Matter of fact that's the Democrat plan in a nutshell
Redistribute wealth to the non-producers so they vote for you
An army of non-producers ready to swing into action on election day and leading up to election day

Matter of fact we had 10 days of pre-voting here
The library was made into the voting center for these 10 days
There were lines of non-producers wrapped around the library for all 10 days
It was like a social occasion to run into new and old friends and family
You had to wait an hour or two to vote

On the real election day I breezed in and out in five minutes

“We are now borrowing nearly $2 trillion a year to do things like ensure the 84-year old has a hip replacement—nearly half of it from the Chinese where 400 million have never been to a Westernized doctor. We spend $45,000 to incarcerate the felon in California, to meet utopian court-ordered mandates. As imperial Romans, we are felt to be owed a standard of living, even as our own daily habits would no longer necessarily translate into such largess, even as those on the periphery have learned what made America so wealthy from 1950 to 1990.”

Welcome to the ENTITLED society, where there is more ENTITLEMENT than there are JOBS.

If you want entitlements then they have to be paid for honestly and accounted for honestly. We have delayed an honest accounting for decades and succeeded because we had all these bubble bucks

The bubble buck scheme deflates when you have cascading defaults, non payments, repudiated promises to pay X at a future date. You might see a cascade start when a few counties and cities default on bonds. It won’t be a killer cascade but will be a glimpse of the future

Bubbles depend on confidence in a con game. Bubbles deflate when too many parties discover they will never be paid back the bubble bucks they lent out.

You obfuscate the Mexican analogy with your bias. The example was given to provide an example of folks getting off their asses, taking the initiative and making a positive action. You seem to equate a job with some undefined degree of compensation or wealth.

A similar example are the Interstate exit American panhandlers. They have no job but have taken the initiative to find a suitable off ramp and sit there with a sign saying they are homeless or a vet or such. Can they make $10 per hour at such a job? Don’t know, but they are making more than sitting at home. A guy came around painting mailboxes. A real job? of course. He found a niche of deteriorating mail boxes that need sprucing up. The customers are easy to find, in plain sight.

Will they get rich. From the businesses noted probably not but they may and are actually likely to fall into more lucrative endeavors. Unlike you, I find no fault with making money in small amounts. The effort is the key. They made an effort

There is a threshold you ignore as petty or inconsequential. Entreprenurism trumps laziness. Life is not a continuous trip to work and back

The US consumer has just as much disposable income today as he did before the smash in 2008. And he is buying at the same clip.

Americans fully earn their lavish lifestyle and they freely choose to spend what they earn on big houses, big cars, big TVs, more clothes than they can wear, and plenty of bling.

Any philosopher can tell you that 90% of everything men have ever spent a dime on, they didn't truly need in any pure utility or survival sense. But comfort, entertainment, and pretty are what most men want, and they can afford it.

It is just other men's freedom...

"I know a time 30 years ago and more when the jobs were there for them in light industry. Heavy industry. In many useful endeavors"

First of all, in the free market there is no such thing as a "useless" or "make-work" job. Every job, without exception is worth exactly the amount of money the worker is paid -- no more and no less. That's because if the job were truly worth a lot more, the worker would not accept it, he or she would go somewhere else for higher wages. If the job were actually worth less, then the boss wouldn't pay more than he or she needed to keep a steady worker.

But more to YOUR point: how quickly we forget! Our parents and grandparents and great-grand parents HATED those old factory jobs!

They hated the company and their bosses, they hated the work because it was back-breaking, dangerous, dirty, unhealthy, mind-numbingly boring and besides the pay was lousy. It was exactly the kind of work which these days people claim "Americans won't do." As for gaining some kind of "satisfaction" from doing "meaningful work," they dogged it on the job, were only too happy to go out on strike to improve their conditions.

And not one of those old fools ever figured out why, just when their working conditions were finally improved to half-way tolerable, their companies went bankrupt.

So that is not what ANYONE wants to return to -- no way, no how. The real idea behind "meaningful work" is pretty simple: you get paid what the job is worth, and once in a while a nice "attaboy," or "attagirl" as the case may be.

To expect much more is ridiculous, pal.

"First of all, by the end those who were ethnically Romans no longer really cared. The ones who were holding the Western empire together were former barbarians. The native Romans had all dropped out of the equation by that time."

The native Romans did not just drop "out of the equation," they were literally gone.
By the 5th century AD, there were virtually no more of the old Romans in Rome, or any where else.

Where did they go?
Some moved to provinces like Spain, Gaul or Romania, many intermarried with ambitious & wealthy immigrants, many more simply died off from diseases & other circumstances afflicting the wealthy of that time -- lead poisoning especially comes to mind.

Why didn't those people of non-Roman ancestry who became powerful within the Empire do more to help preserve it?
Because what exact benefit did they really gain from the Empire?
The Empire not only put a heavy yoke of taxes on them, but the Empire's legions fought constant civil wars, destroying everything like locusts.

Under those circumstances, how could the barbarians be any worse than Rome's legions?
Indeed, very often the barbarians WERE Rome's legions.

One more item: the Western Empire, by itself, was not economically viable.
When Emperor Constantine broke away the Eastern Empire, the West could no longer afford the size and quality of armies necessary to hold off invading barbarians.
From then on, it was just a matter of time.

So the Western Empire fell at least in part because in the end Rome was not considered worth fighting for.
The Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople was a very different story. Something about it caught and held the imaginations of its citizenry for another 1,000 years after the West had descended into Dark Ages.

While I agree that basing an economy on pure “service” is madness, if you have a job that is paying you, it isn’t worthless.

Is it vital for the survial of the country that I am an engineer? No. But it keeps food on the table.

The real issue is that not everyone can be an engineer or a salesman. What do we do with the majority of people without the skills?

What he is saying is true.

But I think, initially at least, Rome transformed itself rather than fell. Initially, the “barbarian” successor states, particularly the Ostrogothic, Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms, tried to continue with Roman tradition, titles, architecture, etc. Many of these people had a long history of trade and connection with the Empire and no real desire to destroy it. They wanted to share in its affluence.

What prevented an orderly transformation of the west and instead created a true collapse and resultant “Dark Age” was the spread of the Mohammedans out of Arabia, across North Africa and into the Mediterranean, cutting off trade and communications by sea of the states bordering the northern part of the Mediterranean with Byzantium and with each other.

The Mohammedans were and always will be a source of political and social degeneration wherever they spread.

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