Here's my column from Sunday's Dallas Morning News, about Cullen Murphy's book "Are We Rome?" Excerpt:
Are we Rome?That is, are we Americans, citizens of the mightiest empire the world has known since the days of the Caesars, living in the last days of our civilization? Is the United States, like the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, doomed to collapse from its own decadence? Or can we avoid Rome's fate?
As historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously observed, "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." While any number of Rome's particular poisons could have been most responsible for its demise, the generally accepted view is that wealth and power corrupted its character, eroding the virtues that made Rome great and leading to its ultimate dissolution.
In his fascinating new book Are We Rome? journalist Cullen Murphy argues that yes, contemporary America is unnervingly like the Late Roman Empire. But it also has saving graces and resources that the doomed Romans lacked.
Unsurprisingly to regular readers, I conclude that if we are Rome, we can either take the Cincinnatus Option, and work to rebuild our flagging institutions and restore our republican (small-r, nota bene) vigor ... or, if that seems hopeless, there's always the Benedict Option -- the path pioneered in the fifth century by St. Benedict and his followers:
Those men and women decided that the survival of the moral community would not be possible under the old order – so they pioneered the nucleus of a new one. They became the Benedictine monks and nuns and their followers, who spread throughout the Europe of the Dark Ages, preserving the remnants of Christian and classical virtues and laying the groundwork for the rebirth of a new civilization.The question facing men and women of good will today: Do we believe that America can and should be renewed, and therefore seek restoration through the exercise of heroic republican virtue, like the venerated early Roman Cincinnatus? Or do we believe that America is bound to succumb to the process the great 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon identified as "the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" – and so await what Mr. MacIntyre identified as "a new, and doubtless very different, St. Benedict"?
The Cincinnatus Option or the Benedict Option – sooner or later, the choice is going to be upon us. As Gibbon saw, it is a law of history and human nature that prosperity ripens the principle of decay. To live as if our present peace and prosperity will last forever would be a most foolish mistake.
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Both the Romans and British were patient, and were willing to think in terms of years, if not decades, not in terms of months or days or the next 24-hour news cycle.
Not really true. Was it the British Empire that was said to be acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness? Rome, in the meantime, didn't show much in the way of strategic or long-term thinking in its late Republican stage. It wasn't until the Empire that its foreign policy started looking coherent.
Victor D. Hanson reviewed this book in the National Review and if you read the review carefully, its pretty clear that he's saying that comparisons of modern American to the late Republic are pretty sensible but comparisons to the late Empire are ridiculous.
Maybe our American world has to be destroyed, maybe it deserves to be destroyed, but this forever undertone of enjoying, relishing, downright welcoming its demise, is hardly Christian. Christ wept over the forseen destruction of Jerusalem.
That's a very good point, and please don't think I look forward to any sort of destruction or dissolution of America. I am someone who doesn't know how to fix his toilet.
Osvaldo: The light of civilization was going out, for him. For us its the light of a certain fuller and wholer morality and aesthetics, something like that. Maybe what you're really looking for is something like the Jewish option.
What do you mean? Curious...
PS -- Cincinnatus, of course, was a legendary figure who probably never existed. I hope that isn't somehow symbolic. I recommend Garry Wills' book *Cincinnatus*.
Sigh. The last refuge of an advocate like Wills of an untenable idea like his "Cincinnatus never existed" is to posture as though he knows so much more than his critics. Sorry, after he got hoaxed by a con man like Bellesiles, Wills fails to impress or intimidate me anymore on historical subjects.
Which Romans of the time who challenged the validity of Livy's account of the origin of the Republic? I know that Cicero never gave an alternative account of the establishment of the republic. If you imagine that no one before the 2nd century BC ever recorded anything
about contemporary issues and the men engaged in them -- that is too
extreme a position even for a zealot to take, and even Wills never dares make such an argument. Hmmm, even if there was no one engaged in the formal study of the past until the late Republic, could it be that generations of a literate society might leave behind records by which future generations could learn the names of people important in the past and what they had done?
Wills and other similarly puffed-up mountebanks like Niebuhr pretend that they know what records were existent in the day of Augustus. They guess that there were none relating to the start of the republic. They imagine that Livy was unreliable in the extreme, because he gives details about stuff he could know nothing about. And why could he know nothing about the fall of the last Roman kings? Because those geniuses fancy they know the inadequacy of his records. Their arguments are circular, spun from unproven assumptions.
Should reincarnation be a fact, they'll have lots of fun in a couple
millennia. They can argue that the whole Clinton Administration is a
fabrication. "The tale of Monica Lewinski closely parallels the stories of the ancient's soap operas...It is naive to assume that a president would have foolishly concealed such a liaison and unthinkable that any Congress would have gone any distance to remove the president...Clinton is, in fact, a mythical figure named for a portion of the female anatomy, no more deserving of credence than "Prime Minister Churchill", whose very name reflects the antique custom of putting houses of God on high ground..."
Their tortured arguments boil down to the odd assertion that: "The
history that really happens isn't interesting." The tale of Brutus standing up for Lucretia's memory and of a royal dynasty toppling over the scandal and of a people resisting the re-imposition of that control by outside forces --- gosh, do Wills and Niebuhr worry that students might actually stay awake in class?
Face it, history shows that implausible, emotionally riveting stories
are the stuff of fact over centuries. When you have one version of what happened, one shouldn't poo-poo it because he or she personally would rather have a different story.
A Jewish alternative to Cincinnatus and Benedict: Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who, in the middle of the last Jewish uprising against Rome, had himself smuggled out from Jerusalem (in a coffin) to the Roman general's tent. There he told the general (Vespasian) that he would one day become emperor (he did.) When the general gratefully offered him three favors, he used one to re-establish the Sanhedrin and found a new center of Jewish law in Jamnia (Yavneh/Jabneh) after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
After the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and its sacrificial altars he led the Council of Yavne (70-90 CE), from which Rabbinic Judaism emerged.
Give it a thought.
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