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September 19, 2005

Yet More Rome

Dan sent me some links to some interesting posts on a supposed obsession with the Roman Empire on the part of some conservatives, especially conservatives who think that America is in a decline similar to the one that Rome went through. Many conservatives (especially paleoconservatives) argue that Rome fell because of a decline in morals and that America will go through the same sort of decline because of its decline in morals. This reminded me of when I went to a speech by George Will almost a decade ago where he said something to the effect that Rome probably did not recognize that it was declining while the decline was happening and that the same could be true for America today.

Dean Esmay writes,


I also wonder at the fascination some conservatives have for the ancient Romans. They were a vicious, savage people, given to mass murder on a scale that would make Saddam Hussein seem like a piker--and that was while their Empire was growing. Julius Caesar, before he seized power and turned Rome into an Empire, boasted of slaughtering over 100,000 people in just one of his jaunts into Gaul. Not 100,000 on the battlefield either--no, this included razing villages, hacking off the heads of children, women, old men, the crippled and lame. This was celebrated as a part of Ceasar's greatness, with triumphal celebrations and murals and statues showing in gory detail as Ceasar and his troops raped barbarian women and sliced barbarian children's heads off.

All that, and Rome's greatest days were yet ahead of her.

Furthermore, if you look at the history of the Romans, you'll find that well before they were an Empire, when they were merely a Republic, their values included a casual attitude about homosexuality--it was frowned on for a patrician to take the "submissive" role in sexual relationships (to catch rather than pitch, to put it crassly) but nothing whatever was thought of a male Roman taking the dominant sexual position in a homosexual encounter, whether married or not. And nobody cared at all what slaves did--slaves making up the majority of the inhabitants of Rome by most estimates, at least throughout most of the Republic and early Empire periods.

Over at the Jawa Report there is this related post,

These are the guys at your church that think God has an invisible shield over the U.S., and that as America slouches toward Gomorroh he slowly raises the shield. This line of thought can go to the extreme and become one that basically says were doomed, DOOMED, DOOMED!

In many ways, this argument is very similar to the namby-pambies of the 'hate America first' Left and self-proclaimed paleocons on the Right who share the belief that America is destined for failure, soon, because that is the fate of all empires.

The remedy? End the empire, bring troops home, etc. Only by ending the empire can America be saved.

Which, of course, is stupid, since at any point in Rome's history the same argument could have been made. Bring troops home from Palestine now, one could have argued in 70 C.E. Of course, 300 years later you would have found the city of Caesaria, near modern Haifa, bustling with activity--all of it Roman.

This brings up several epistemological and ethical problems along with the question of whether the US is even an empire (I would argue that it is not). The first is how do you know what a country or society's overall ethical state is at? How do you weigh ethical progress or regress over the centuries and which ethical or moral problems are weightier than others? Many people take Rome's ethical fall as a given, but I do not think it is that obvious. First there are those that think Rome fell because it embraced Christianity, which encouraged Romans to put their first allegiance to God and not to the state. While I do not necessarily think that was a primary cause, it is a defensible position and I think it is easy to argue that Rome as Christian State was more moral than it was as a pagan state. Christian Roman emperors for instance greatly enhanced the treatment of slaves by making it harder for their masters to punish or kill them and eliminated things like gladiatorial combat.

Similarly there are those that argue that America is far less moral now than it was at X point in history. But what point are you talking about and which actions are less moral? For instance abortion and out of wedlock births a higher now than they were at earlier points in America's history, but slavery has been eliminated almost completely and poverty and the suffering caused by poverty have been reduced by a great amount as well. And while poverty has been reduced, there are those that have responded to this reduction with greed or sloth. There is no ethical thermometer or balance to easily weigh the overall morals of any society. While it may be possible to compare the overall morality of the individuals of a society it seems to be much harder to do this with an overall society over time and if you are going to do it you better be pretty specific about which dates and which moral or immoral actions you cite to prove this.

There are those that argue that God is able to do this and with God being omniscient this would be possible. If you take the related position that God punishes societies for their ethical failures, then it may be possible for the decline of societies to be a response of God's judgment, but the difference here is that God is omniscient, while those of us trying to figure out whether Rome was or America is declining morally are not.

But as Brian at Junkyardblog notes, there are many instances where empires rose by being immoral and cruel, but Brian still thinks that God is sometimes responsible for these rise and falls (he also does not think the U.S. is an empire):

We're not an empire. We aren't dealing with the same circumstances that the Romans dealt with. And God doesn't often move in obvious ways, or even in ways that make sense at all to use mere humans on the ground. As Dean Esmay notes, Rome rose when it was cruel and fell after it became Christian. To take another example, Russia rose when Christianity was legal, and came apart after a few decades of barbarous athiestic Communism. The Aztecs ruled one of the most evil empires in history; contact with Christians proved to be their undoing, even though the Christians ended up enslaving and killing millions of them while building their own empire from the ruins of the Aztec's. And Japan became a unified police state largely by exterminating about half a million Christians in unspeakably cruel ways over the course of a few decades. Japan prospered mightily while Christianity was an illegal religion for 300 years, its followers crucified or beheaded, and went on to become a harsh Buddhist/Shinto empire, but one that was dismantled by a better armed majority Christian republic--the United States. Was that divine justice? It's hard to say.

And here is the LaShawn Barber post about how America's declining morality and culture is compared to Rome's decline as a power that started this whole discussion:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, author Edward Gibbon discusses several reasons for the great civilization’s demise, including the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home and the decay of religion.

America has been compared to the Roman Empire in secular and religious ways. Regardless of its ultimate legacy, America is a civilization on the decline. A couple of centuries from now (or sooner), someone will write a book called The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

Historians will lament the loss of a once-great civilization that brought prosperity to the world and tried to make it safer for democracy. The glory that was the United States will lay in ruins, brought down not by terrorists but its own debauchery and complacency.

Posted by Pete at September 19, 2005 10:00 AM

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