Causes of moral decay

The parallels between Rome and America reveal a trajectory that is shockingly similar. In your typical republic, the legislature is the primary governing body with the executive being at best a secondary check on its power in addition to being charged with doing what it's assigned to by them. In the case of both Rome and America, the shift from republic to empire occurred because the executive gradually assumed all the power.

In both cases it was preceded by massive economic growth, a subsequent expansion in military power, a then subsequent degradation of the economic system into warfare-welfare state (i.e., our military-industrial complex), which then leads to militaristic hubris, imperial overextension and eventually collapse.

I predict that this trajectory is pretty irreversible for us at this point. The only choice is whether we recede slowly, like the British who preceded us as the pre-eminent global hegemon, or we collapse rapidly and endure all the resultant political chaos, like Rome. Either way in the next half century or so we are going to be marginalized on the world stage.

If the Republicans retain control over the Congress, I predict a civil war within a decade. This, too, is Roman.

Are the Foley stories and in particular the detainee bill stories being shown by mainstream media in the US?

Here in Australia there is very little coverage except in alternative media. Even when Ruddock makes a fool of himself it seems to be hidden off the main pages.

I am looking forward to seeing how the 5/10/6 protests end up.

I find it just as hard as everybody else to avoid parallels between Rome and the U.S., but in lucid moments I remind myself that reasoning from this sort of analogy is pretty hard to defend. It's not just that every conceivable reason has been educed to explain the fall--I'm looking at a table from Der Fall Rome by one A. Demandt that lists 210 factors somebody or other thought were responsible for the disaster, everything from Aberglaube to Zweifrontenkrieg. The main thing is, Rome and America differ in too many ways to allow a meaningful comparison. I haven't had the time to compile that 210 item list, but it would include an utterly different technology, the fact that the ancient economy was overwhelmingly rural, differences in literacy levels, the absence of slavery, and the small fact that the last Western Emperor couldn't say the hell with it and nuke the barbarians.

My real reason to reject the Roman comparison, though, is national pride. America really is sui generis, and our downfall will make its own precedent while setting a host of world and Olympic records for sheer scale. I have the same reaction to the tendency to refer to Bush's ideology as fascist because, although the political movement that runs this administration is definitely in the same family as classic fascism, which is to say it is a kind of reactionary populism, it is definitely a new genus and species with its own homegrown characteristics. How dare a foreigner imply that my country can't cook up its own brand of mischief? I predict that a hundred years from now, Australian grad students will be denouncing their profs as nothing better than Republicans...

Jim,

It is true that Rome and America differ in many ways, but the primary trajectory is strikingly similar.

That is not to say I'm claiming that our collapse (which I believe is inevitable at this point) will be an exact parellel to that of Rome, I'm simply saying that the overall conjecture of events, from beginning as a limited constitutional republic, to expanding economically, to expanding miltarily, to degrading into a warfare-welfare state, to expansionism, adventurism, and eventually collapse is what we and Rome have in common.

I personally am still holding hope for a slow, gradual recession from global hegemony in the likes of Britain, but that's just a hope. I have a hard time actually believing the best case scenario at this point.

The best analysis of the prospects of American decline that I've encountered is Emmanuel Todd's book After the Empire. Todd looks at economic and demographic trends rather than historical parallels, and he has the added virtue of cool-headedness--he's a Frenchman who doesn't think the decline of America will necessarily be a disaster, even for us. I've got some doubts about that--it seems to me that states whose economic and cultural power declines faster than their military capabilities are inevitably tempted to preserve their hegemony by violence.

By the way, DiPetro writes about Rome expanding economically before it expanded militarily. Was that really the order in which things occurred? I'm under the impression that Roman prosperity was based on conquest. The Roman version of capitalism depended upon slavery for its manpower and plunder for its capital. Certainly the history of the expansion of the Empire features a series of Roman victories over economically advanced states like Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms. What am I not seeing?

I think that economic and military expansion have a more symbiotic and interactionist relationship than a sequential one. If you look at America's history, our increase in economic hegemony coincided with westward expansion, and afterwards continued with the Span-Am War, WWI & II, and the various military interventions during the cold war.

Your list of potential or alleged influences on moral decay should give each of us pause to reflect. The victimhood of social misbehavers is boundless. the bottom line is that we are responsible for our behavior, unless there is something amiss--and some of what you cite may qualify.

For me, the fundamental challenge is to promote an inclusive social order. Whenever people identify themselves as part of an exclusive--hence superior or inferior--group, there is the risk of misbehavior.

Thanks for the blog. It prompts important thinking.

I think "social decay", much like "diversity", is massively multifactorial. The point isn't that some magical taboos are being broken ("if everyone would just follow the Rules"), it's that we're seeing the breakdown of many different interactions and relations that make up a cohesive society. There are always fallback positions, but those tend to be successively simpler and "more primitive" than what came before. What ShrubCo want is a "Big Man" system writ large. What they're more likely to get is a basic class system, with the "aristocrats" squabbling over power, but united against "the plebes", while both unite against the "servant" class.