Are We Rome Yet?

The question is legit. Every great nation has ceased to be so great. The life cycle is well known and always denied by the brighter lights of every great nation until it was made painfully clear one way or another that it had ceased to be so great. When you're a nation with the global scope of the United States, with military bases everywhere, cultural and economic dominance everywhere (until the Chinese stop lending, anyway), the comparisons aren't just with other great nations (which include the Dutch and Spanish and Venecians, remember) but with the one that still holds the imagination of everyone--Rome.

A lot of people invoke Rome without knowing much about it, just a few incidents or emperors, the stories of Jesus, its fall with your choice of all kinds of proposed causes. In fact, one proof of the ignorance of Rome despite its invocation is the realization that the Roman Empire went on for centuries after the fall of Rome and historians really can't pinpoint any specific moment when, like a light switching off, life changed even for those in the lost western portion of the empire.

These are the sorts of things you can learn when you read the new works comparing Rome to the U.S., works like Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Murphy's task is to explain how Rome went from a powerful republic to its transformation into an empire to its eventual (and IMO inevitable) decay. And then to relate that to our present day. The common elements are conspicuous: the degenerate and self-impressed and insulated capitals, the degraded and trivial public life, the vagarities and porosity of borders, the community-eroding results of over-hyped privatization, the truly monumental ignorance and stupidity regarding the rest of the world and how we're networked in it, the pure corruption of the government. You'll learn a lot from this journalist/historian even if you're familiar with the histories of the two countries; you'll feel like the smartest guy on earth if you knew nothing beforehand.

After this thorough review, comparison, and analysis of the situations of the two empires, here are some of the lessons of Rome he says are relevant to us today:

There is, to begin with, a psycholological tendency that is nearly impossible to shed. The idea that you should preserve everything you already have, exactly the way it is, exerts a powerful grip, even when logic suggests that only adaptation can preserve what is essential and worthwhile. . . .
Then there is a simple fact of life: the status quo never stays that way. Thucydides observed that empires start to decline when they cease to expand. You can't read an account of Rome in the third, fourth, or fifth century, when expansion is over and emperors are trying desperately to hold things together, without marveling at the blizzard of variables in play. Every Roman action to address one urgent problem . . . creates unintended new problems. . . .
And from this comes, finally an unhappy generalization: large systems are inherently unstable. . . .
For a long time Rome was able to organize the world according to its own convenience--until there came a point when doing so became difficult, then impossible. . . .

Deja vu, huh? And from that, here's what Murphy recommends as the best course for US to avoid following down that same path:

First, instill an appreciation of the wider world. Start teaching it round instead of flat. Immigration helps us here. The influx of foreign students does too. . . . To drive home the idea that "we are not alone," there is no substitute for fluency in another language. . . . Americans have their priorities backward. They worry needlessly about . . . whether the immigrants will ever learn English. They should be worrying about . . . : whether the elites will ever speak anything else.
Second, stop treating government as a necessary evil, and instead rely on it proudly for the big things it can do well. Privatization has its uses, and farming out government functions has its place--but the loss of civic engagement and loyalty across the board is a very real threat. . . . Besides, government can be held accountable in ways that the private sector can't. Yes, it takes some imagination to see how corrosive privatized government will prove to be many decades down the road--and that's another thing: start thinking in centuries.
Third, fortify the institutions that promote assimilation. . . .
Fourth, take some weight off the military. . . .

Seriously. You see these things happening within the context of our current politics? Me either. That's not the only thing ultimately demoralizing about Murphy's book. He concludes by pinning his hopes on what he sees as the American tendency to believe in possible improvement as compared to Rome's "it doesn't get any better than this." But the people he quotes as evidence of this trait, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, are all part of an older value-system now overrun by triviality and unseriousness. (How's Paris doing today? Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert are more as authorities than Murphy is. Barbara Walters still lives.) We're a nation that now leads the world in incarcerating its citizens, and the political leaders of CA, when given a chance to reform its crushing prison problems, just voted to spend $7b. more on 53,000 more prison beds. Other states will inevitably follow suit. That's a nation with its eye on continuous possible improvement?

This nation's station as leading power in the world, whether we gratuitously argue over whether we're an empire or not, will vanish one day. Maybe from China calling in its notes, maybe from other sudden economic shocks, maybe from just the arteroschlerosis that Murphy describes for Rome. Maybe we'll have to complete the transformation from republic to the imperial government that Bushnev and Cheneyov are finalizing from the early designs of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the First and then have the world gang up on us to put us back in our place. I know we've been through these belches of authoritarian excess here before and racheted back somewhat each time. But I also look at the tendency of resource scarcity to require authoritarian regimes and we're coming up on the Mother of All Resource Scarcities, and I look at determined ignorance of a critical mass willing to give away freedom and democracy in the name of protection from boogey men, and I wonder if our resilency will hold through my lifetime. Some generation had to be the one to suffer for its nation's decline and fall. It's always hard to believe it could be yours, but Murphy makes clear it will happen to someone. Why not you? But I've only got a couple or three decades left. I may get lucky.

I really am sorry, sonny.