by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Count the Ways<\/strong><\/p>\n A German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western Empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise \u2014 corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of the elite, etc.<\/p>\n Any such discussion is also predicated on two other twists: the Eastern Empire at Constantinople went on for nearly another 1,000 years until the 1453 sack by the Ottomans. And for the last twenty years, revisionists have disputed Gibbon\u2019s notion of a dramatic \u201cfall\u201d in the West, and argued instead that it was a \u201ctransition\u201d as the \u201cbarbarian\u201d \u201cother\u201d was insidiously assimilated into what would emerge in the latter Dark Ages as \u201cEuropeans.\u201d<\/p>\n The East certainly had more defensible borders with the Danube and the Hellespont. Constantinople was far better fortified naturally and artificially than was Rome; the defense of Byzantium could rely to a greater degree on naval forces. And greater wealth was to be had in Asia and Egypt than in the northwestern provinces.<\/p>\n How could Christianity have caused the Western \u2018fall\u2019 when a very Christian East survived? (So I postpone here discussion of that crux of why the East enjoyed another 1000 years (e.g., larger population, greater wealth, less civil strife, more defensible borders, fewer Germanic enemies, etc.), given it shared many of the same pathologies of culture as the West.)<\/p>\n Them and Us<\/strong><\/p>\n My concern, however, is instead with the indisputable decline in material culture in Britain, Iberia, Gaul, Italy and North Africa from the 4th-5th century AD onward, with the end of strong government that had resulted in everything from secure borders to internal calm (the sort of world that St. Augustine in Tunisia saw ending at his death).<\/p>\n Rather than rehash Gibbon, or review the spate of recent books on Rome\u2019s decline and our own supposed end, I throw out a few general notions.<\/p>\n Luxus<\/strong><\/p>\n The Romans themselves by the first century AD (cf. Horace to Livy to Petronius to Juvenal) felt that the enormous influx of unearned wealth from conquered provinces had undermined the old republican virtues of small farmers and merchants (e.g., the old yeoman with four kids and a wife on five acres of grain now either devolved into the urban unemployed spectator in the Coliseum at Rome on the dole or evolved into the sterile estate owner with 50 slaves and 200 acres of wine grapes and an expensive pasture with a herd of beef cows.)<\/p>\n So the rise of\u00a0latifundia<\/em>, and the influx of unheard of wealth and slaves, gradually, in the ancients\u2019 own view, created a dependent class on the dole and corruption among the elite. \u201cDecline\u201d as seen in the ancient mind was not inevitable, and was almost seen as a moral question \u2014 material progress resulting in ethical regress.<\/p>\n A Pretty Slow Fall<\/strong><\/p>\n Yet Rome did not fall for four centuries after its moralists wrote of its decadence and decline. Why the resilience?<\/p>\n Entitlements and official corruption were for centuries subsidized by the profits accruing from global standardization and Romanization \u2014 brought about by the implementation and imposition of Roman law, order, and commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As long as the empire was cohesive, it brought in thousands yearly into its sphere of influence.<\/p>\n Those from the Black Sea to the Nile and from Portugal to Iraq were now subject to habeas corpus, a standard official language, regularization in weights and measures, and security on roads and the seas. The centuries-long result of such Romanization is easily discerned in the later historians from Ammianus to Zosimus, who remarked on both widening prosperity and a persistent moral crisis, rather than the dangers of material impoverishment.<\/p>\n We Are All Romans Now<\/strong><\/p>\n So such global uniformity created real wealth in newfound places faster than such bounty could corrupt the citizens in the old Italian core to the degree to bring down what was now a world system. In other words, the creation of entirely new cities like Leptis or the growth of Asian centers such as Ephesus, brought previously unproductive tribal folk into the Roman system at precisely the time old Romans were no longer doing the things that had once created their own vibrant culture that swept the Mediterranean \u2014 the ancient version of the Chinese youth working 10 hours in an Adidas factory while an American counterpart is still \u201cfinding himself.\u201d<\/p>\n One can see the resultant transition in the center of power \u2014 emperors mostly were born in the provinces, wealth centers were increasingly found in Asia and Africa, and good soldiers were no longer native Latin-speakers. The West taught the East, and the East soon became not only the more productive hemisphere of the empire, but also the more enthusiastic upholder of being Roman itself.<\/p>\n Petronius\u2019s\u00a0Satyricon<\/em>\u00a0(ca. AD 60) is a glimpse into the world of tough-minded Asian immigrants who had created fortunes in business \u2014 and who were desperately (and crudely) trying to buy into the snotty aristocratic and bankrupt world of fossilized Old Rome.<\/p>\n Americanization<\/strong><\/p>\n The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n But the cloning and spreading of this system after WWII (\u201cglobalization\u201d) did two things: literally billions of non-Westerners adopted the Western mode of production and began, in economic terms, becoming far more productive in creating valuable manufacturing goods, food, and exporting previously unknown or untapped natural resources; in addition, the vast rise in population added billions to the world\u2019s productive work force.<\/p>\n Two, this influx of imported goods and inclusion of hundreds of millions into the American orbit enriched the United States in unimaginable ways. In my own life, the very notion that I would have a tooth implant rather than one of my grandfather\u2019s poorly constructed false teeth is mind-boggling. We once huddled around a 19-inch fuzzy black and white TV to watch 4 days of the JFK funeral in 1963 in a small 800 square foot house; now today I have 2 plasma 500-channel cable TVs. Poverty, as I saw it as a boy in Selma in 1960, might be defined by occasional homes with outhouses in the back yard, gravel rural roads, no TVs and rampant illiteracy among those over 30.<\/p>\n Today, the \u201cpoor\u201d as I see them daily at Wal-Mart and Food-4-Less in Selma (a poor town in a poor county in poor central California) buy blue-ray DVD players, have to buy food-stamp subsidized sirloin rather than rib-eye (as I can attest watching 5 carts ahead of me in line tonight), and drive used 2000 Tahoes and 2001 Yukons rather 2010 Honda Accords. Government subsidies for housing, food, transportation, etc., coupled with cheap Chinese and Indian imported consumer goods, have for a time been substituted for the old manufacturing jobs or resource-based work (e.g., we don\u2019t make steel, we increasingly curtail farming, we don\u2019t drill, etc.). In other words, we are enjoying a lifestyle undreamed of by our grandparents who had values quite different from our own \u2014 a result of globalization, advances in technology, and massive borrowing and debt.<\/p>\n The Tab<\/strong><\/p>\n But as in the case of Rome, there is a price for all these sudden riches. Just as the Iberians, and Libyans, and Thracians were hungrier and more enterprising than Italians back in the bay of Naples, so too we, the beneficiaries of this wealth, lost the values that were at its heart, in a way that the Indians, Chinese, and others have not \u2014 yet. Our youth in schools are not so excited by the notion of creating 100 new nuclear power plants, creating new mountain reservoirs, building new railroads and highways, or eager to rebuild the steel industry, or dreaming of increasing food production or eager to mine more ores. Instead, the emphasis in our schools is more on race\/class\/gender engineering, regulation, redistribution, etc, all of which in classical terms is not necessarily wealth creation.<\/p>\n We are now borrowing nearly $2 trillion a year to do things like ensure the 84-year old has a hip replacement \u2014 nearly half of it from the Chinese where 400 million have never been to a Westernized doctor. We spend $45,000 to incarcerate the felon in California, to meet utopian court-ordered mandates. As imperial Romans, we are felt to be owed a standard of living, even as our own daily habits would no longer necessarily translate into such largess, even as those on the periphery have learned what made America so wealthy from 1950 to 1990.<\/p>\n Where does it all end? I have no idea, but offer only competing scenarios: 1) as our debt becomes unsustainable, we react and increase the retirement age, cut spending and entitlements radically, and renew our work ethic (impossible by choice, made possible by necessity), and enjoy a renaissance; 2) we become a UK-like museum, with witty cynical observers, as the new giants in Asia produce the next Microsoft, Exxon, and Ford, and we fade; 3) India and China discover that they too have a rendezvous with suburban blues, environmentalism, consumer regulation, and a pampered citizenry, and there is some sort of shared global postmodernism.<\/p>\n We inherited a wonderful infrastructure from our parents. A superb system of politics and economics was likewise given to us at birth. Many of us try to copy our grandparents and parents whose values and work ethic we increasingly eulogize. But against all that is that Roman notion of luxus, untold wealth and leisure that we see juxtaposed with shrill cries and accusations that we are too poor, exploited, and in need of someone else\u2019s income. The wealthier we become, the louder and angrier we become that we are not even more wealthy.<\/p>\n In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things. But clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth \u2014 and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable Western Empire far less margin of error when barbarians arrived, or rival generals marched on Rome. For a while the Romanization of the wider Mediterranean subsidized this ennui, but eventually the old western and southern provinces neither could protect what they had created nor could continue to be as productive as in the past nor believed that being Roman was any better than the alternative.<\/p>\n A State of Mind<\/strong><\/p>\n The strange thing is that these wild swings in civilization are at their bases psychological: decline is one of choice rather than necessity. Plague or lead poisoning or famine did not destroy Rome. We could balance our budget tomorrow without a great deal of sacrifice; we could eliminate 10% worth of government spending that is not essential; we could create our own energy with massive nuclear power investment, and more extraction of gas, oil, and coal. We could instill a tragic rather than therapeutic world view that would mean more responsibilities rather than endlessly more rights. We could do this all right \u2014 but too many feel such medicine is worse than the malady, and so we probably won\u2019t and can\u2019t. An enjoyable slow decline is apparently preferable to a short, but painful rethinking and rebirth.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Count the Ways A German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western Empire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[609],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ty","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3656,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-twenty-five-hundred-years-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":0},"title":"The Twenty-Five Hundred Years’ War","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson The American A shorter version of this essays appeared in the column \u201cGeopolitics\u201d in the March-April issue of\u00a0The American. If a no-nonsense Greek infantryman holding the pass at Thermopylae were to be told that, 2,500 years in the future, Western constitutional states would still be facing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2007"","block_context":{"text":"April 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/april-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4028,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/collapse-of-a-hyperpower\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":1},"title":"Collapse of a “Hyperpower”","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A review of\u00a0The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians\u00a0by Peter Heather and\u00a0The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization\u00a0by Bryan Ward-Perkins. by Victor Davis Hanson The New Criterion After September 11 and the acrimonious war in Iraq, America was castigated as the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10525,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/equal-by-catastrophe\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":2},"title":"Equal by Catastrophe","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 29, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/Inference Review The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel Princeton University Press, 528 pp., USD$35. In his new book, Walter Scheidel offers a simple, though jarring, story of how past societies struggled with inequality.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11403,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-buries-the-old-world-order\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":3},"title":"Trump Buries The Old-World Order","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Hoover Institution The present continuance of institutions such as the EU, NATO, UN, and others suggests that the world goes on exactly as before. In fact, these alphabet organizations are becoming shadows of their former selves, more trouble to end than to allow to grow irrelevant.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10188,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/an-optimistic-u-s-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":4},"title":"An Optimistic U.S. Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 \u00a0History teaches us that during war and international crises, just when things were looking most grim, they were oftentimes already getting better. Consider the dark days of World War II. Seventy-five years ago, 1942 started out as an awful year. The United States\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "McMaster"","block_context":{"text":"McMaster","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/mcmaster\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8166,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/barack-obama-empire-builder\/","url_meta":{"origin":1832,"position":5},"title":"Barack Obama, Empire Builder","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 27, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Not since the 1930s and early 1940s have we seen so many malevolent empires on the rise. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Empires can rise and fall quickly. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires abruptly collapsed amid military defeat, rising nationalism, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Win McNamee\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/pic_giant_012715_SM_Barack-Obama-G-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1834,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}