Americans when they first visit Europe are immediately struck by the fact that our oldest cities, buildings, works of art, traditions and institutions are teen-agers alongside their venerable counterparts abroad. And especially by what Lawrence Durrell called Caesar’s vast ghost.
In the streets of Rome, as Dylan sang, “ancient footprints are everywhere,” but also in Arles, Nimes, Lyon, Vaison-la-Romaine, Orange. In Trier, Tarragona, and Toledo, from Bath and Hadrian’s Wall in Britain to Ephesus in Turkey, there are the roads, bridges, forts, villas, forums, baths, and temples of the empire.
Every would-be successor from the Carolingians through the Spanish, French, Dutch, and British to ourselves has surely paused in their hubris to wonder occasionally at the decline that ended Rome’s reach and to worry that the same fate might befall them.
The cause of alarm is almost always in the eye of the beholder. Gibbon, an Enlightenment rationalist, thought the martial, pagan virtues of Rome were undermined by the adoption of Christianity, a mood expressed a century later by Swinburne’s “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”
Conversely, conservative moralists claim Rome was brought down by corruption, sexual license and decadence, though the empire was actually at its zenith during its most licentious days and declined after the shift to theoretically more straight-laced Christian rule.
Economists claim the empire’s wealth and power were based on conquest and enslavement of populations, and when it could no longer find new worlds to loot and people to subjugate it could not maintain it’s lifestyle. It was done in by debt. An organization studies subset of this argument is that the empire grew too large and cumbersome to manage efficiently, and so fragmented.
Many now feel America has passed its prime and is becoming uncompetitive. Are we weaklings compared to our forebears, too decadent to command, too overstretched and burdened by debt to survive, too delicate to exercise the brute force needed to dominate, or too divided against ourselves to undertake the vast works that were once our daily bread?
People who see race everywhere claim Rome fell by allowing barbarians to become citizens, but the real fault may have been failing to pass on the traditions, language, knowledge and culture that the empire was founded on, and that citizenship entails.
At some point, no one knew how to keep the water running in the aqueducts and baths or was willing or able to pay what it cost in upkeep to maintain a vast system of roads, bridges, ports, waterworks, archives, schools, workshops, ports, and military readiness. So, little by little, sand was thrown into the administrative gears and the empire ceased to work.
This looks suspiciously like our condition today. The barbarians to fear are not without, but within our gates. Ambitious people still want to come here and improve their lives and our society, but our infrastructure is poorly maintained, our schools less rigorous and demanding and uniformly excellent than they need to be. Our citizens are less daring and self-sacrificing than they once were. We are unwilling to be taxed to pay for the maintenance of the civilization we have built. Our politics is polarized and has ground to a halt.
We have chosen to be led by a man whining that we are being outcompeted by rivals. Yet he proposes avoiding the contest rather than upping our game. He plans billions in budget cuts to institutions that have taken generates to build — scientific, medical, and energy R&D, a diplomatic presence around the world, cops on the beat at FDA. SEC, OSHA, EPA, and a thousand other things from public broadcasting, arts and education to infrastructure maintenance, flood protection, crop support. Why? To fund tax cuts for the pampered patrician class in their villas while the plebes in their hovels are barely promised bread and circuses.
We are turning isolationist, protectionist, provincial, xenophobic. Superstition is preferred to hard truths, blaming others is preferred to examining our own flaws, video games and tweets to study, conflict to cooperation. Instead of one nation, we are fragmenting into haves and have nots, capital and labor, black and white, urban and rural, red states and blue. This is the way the empire ends, not with a bang but a whimper.