"From time to time, it is true, the public mind is arrested by some new 'interpretation,' preferably a diagnosis: the Roman Empire fell owing to gout, or perhaps it was lead poisoning, or both. Now that is interesting. The eye brightens at 'the Bacchanalian appetites of ancient Rome' and the menace of their lead pots. More generally, philosophies of history receive attention for a brief while. Toynbee supplied some good repeatable phrases suggestive of natural laws. But reading history is a lost avocation." – Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve
In his book, The Fall of Rome, Bryan Ward-Perkins sets the record straight. Whatever else contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, it was the barbarians who destroyed it after all. Recent historians prefer to downplay the barbarian invasions as a "slow and quiet" process, but Ward-Perkins says the barbarians were hardly the peaceful and agreeable re-arrangers of "late antiquity" we'd like to believe in. When the German hordes crossed the Rhine in the winter of 406-7, they ushered in a century of violence against persons, property, order, law and the Church. In the chronicle of bishop Hydatius we read of raids, invasions and cannibalism. Women were forced to kill, cook and eat their children. The economic reduction of entire regions was sudden and severe. Hostages were taken, women were raped, cities pillaged. Victor of Vita described the Vandal progress through Africa in the 420s: "in their barbaric frenzy they even snatched children from their mothers' breasts and dashed the guiltless infants to the ground. They held others by their feet, upside down, and cut them in two...." The Western Roman Empire during the fifth century suffered mass murder, rape, pillage, arson, infanticide and more. "Some lay as food for dogs," wrote one poet about the Germanic invasion of Gaul, "for many, a burning roof."
"Through villages and villas, through countryside and marketplace,
"Through all regions, on all roads, in this place and that,
"There was Death, Misery, Destruction, Burning, and Mourning.
"The whole of Gaul smoked on a single funeral Pyre."
Who says you need atomic weapons? But imagine what is possible today, when man's tribal affiliations have the added emphasis of envy - the envy of the ideological malcontents. It is widely believed today that the poor countries are poor because the rich countries robbed them. With the academic centers of the West stewed in self-hating envy, the rich countries do not seem inclined to defend themselves from the poor countries. This is because they are now ideologically defenseless. Stupidly believing in the doctrine of universal equality, even to the extent of "stopping the economic motor of the world," the Western countries have opened their borders to the poorest tribes of the earth, who flood in. Here is a "peaceful and agreeable" re-arrangement. But how long will it remain peaceful?
For those who have no sense of history, who do not know what ethnicity boils down to, what violence men are capable of, the future doesn't look so dark. But for those who know history, something terrible and wicked may be anticipated. In a recent column the political writer Morton Kondracke relates the story of "one of America's most distinguished historians" who played a game with a presidential candidate, "asking him which five years were the most perilous in American history." The presidential candidate was confused by the question. Surely the most critical years were at the founding of the Republic, the War for Independence, or the Civil War, or perhaps World War II. "No," said the historian, "the next five years."
Why would the next five years prove so critical?
"We are experiencing historical change on a scale previously unknown," wrote the German historian Christian Meier in a book titled From Athens to Auschwitz. "All Around us the conditions of our lives and our world are changing, be it in the world of work, transportation, communications, the ways we spend our time, gender relationships, life expectancy, climate, and medicine.... I could add beliefs and values, personality structures, family, society, and government...."
We believe in innovation, and therefore we innovate on all sides. In politics and morality, however, innovations can be dangerous. President Bush involves us in innovations with his foreign and military policy. The new Democratic majority in Congress have a frightening set of innovations all their own (like legislation to offset global warming that may well devastate the U.S. economy). There are innovations we don't want to see, like the Iranian mullahs with atomic bombs. There are innovations that we'd like to see, like the elimination of old age through genetic science. The consequences of all such innovations, however, are difficult to anticipate. One innovation forces another, and innovations often have a barbarizing effect. The Nazis were born out of innovation, and so were the Communists of Soviet Russia and China. The West doesn't want the Iranians to wield nuclear weaponry, but the innovation of preemptively bombing a country's nuclear infrastructure exposes the preempting power to unpredictable consequences. President Truman would not hear of preemptively striking Stalin's nuclear program. President Nixon allegedly defended Mao's nuclear program against a proposed Soviet preemptive strike.
The next five years are critical because the spread of nuclear weapons cannot be stopped. And the real problem we have with weapons of mass destruction today has to do with our failed sense of history. Like Christian Meier we think that innovation and "change" and one revolution after another have changed the way the world works. We no longer look back to historical models because "the bomb" and "the pill" (i.e., birth control) have made previous models obsolete. The truth may be that the models are still valid, but innovation and the rapid pace of change have confused our thinking. The atomic bomb is a terrible weapon, but a sword is also a weapon of mass destruction because a single sword can slit ten thousand throats. The barbarians who attacked the West Roman empire in the fifth century created the same overall result that a nuclear war would create: namely, they reduced cities and economies in such a way as to collapse economic complexity. With that collapse went knowledge, skill, city life and civilization itself. And today this same type of collapse could happen again, only on a larger scale - set on by new barbarians armed with nuclear weapons.
History teaches what has happened before. But today we don't want to know, because the knowledge is too disturbing. Consider the case of Adolf Hitler. The barbarism of the Germans in the twentieth century left us unsure that anything in history could compare with recent atrocities - that anything in history could help us understand our own age. This is the problem that Christian Meier has, being a German in the wake of the Holocaust. But surely, the historian of ancient Athens has heard of the Melian Dialogue. In the ancient Greek world, whole cities were destroyed and ancient peoples exterminated for the most perverted reasons (and by the famed city of ancient "democracy"). And yet, somehow, modernity wants to credit itself with an altogether unique bloodthirstiness. The German historian, Meier, laments, "the Second World War, including Auschwitz ... still casts its baneful spell over us and blocks our path to history. It does so for many reasons, but especially because we have a sense of ourselves and our fellow Germans as unmistakably involved, as perpetrators, but at the same time as blind and helpless, and - as grotesque as it may seem - also as victims."
According to Meier, there is something unique about modern wickedness. One may ask, in response: Are we so delicate, and have we so deluded ourselves with misunderstandings, that we no longer recognize our own bloody, irrational tendencies played over and over? Despite the seeming goodness of this or that individual, each human being harbors all the treachery and murder of the ages, bottled and repressed by the mannered goodness of civilized affectation. The idea that our personalities are stable, that our character isn't subject to horrific change, is a conceit that history wipes away. The liberal mind, however, clings to this conceit -and so the Holocaust troubles us and bars us from historical sense.
If history teaches us anything, it teaches a deeper awareness of negative human tendencies. Through this awareness we may (or may not) be able to regulate these tendencies to advantage. The policies of the Bush administration have failed because the administration shares the liberal perspective of its Democratic opposition. President Bush, despite the "conservative label," is actually a liberal in his worldview. His mission in Iraq, begun as a preemptive hunt for weapons of mass destruction, shifted to democratization. That is to say, the grand strategy of the United States turned the utopian corner and promises to arrive nowhere. The cause of preemption has been discredited, and now the cause of democracy faces the same fate. "Both the ability and the need to recognize the context in which an event occurred, and to assemble such contexts, are rapidly on the decline," noted Meier.
The barbarians are upon us once again. And if, like the Romans, we cannot bribe them, we will attempt to remake them in our own image. For some reason, a decadent Rome and a decadent America cannot simply fight the enemy. Such an effort is either too rigorous or too costly to a confused historical sensibility.
