by Niall Ferguson Vanity Fair October 2006
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest. —Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West.”
This has not been a decline in the sense that Spengler envisaged: a kind of corrosive metropolitan ennui. Rather, it has been an unexpected but inexorable military decline. It has been a scarcely perceptible economic decline. It has been a subtle but unmistakable cultural decline. Above all, it has been a creeping demographic decline. In short, it has been a decline in precisely the sense that Gibbon understood the decline of Rome’s empire.
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction 1836
According to Gibbon, Rome fell through a combination of external overreach, internal corruption, religious transformation, and barbarian invasion. That the United States—and, perhaps even more, the European Union—might have something to learn from his account is too seldom acknowledged, perhaps because Americans and Europeans like to pretend that their polities today are something more exalted than empires. But suppose for a moment (as the Georgetown University historian Charles Kupchan has suggested in The End of the American Era) that Washington really is the Rome of our time, while Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, is Byzantium, the city transformed in the fourth century into the second imperial capital, Constantinople. Like the later Roman Empire, the West today has its Western and Eastern halves, though they are separated by the Atlantic rather than the Adriatic. And that is not the only thing we have in common with our Roman predecessors of a millennium and a half ago. …
Gladiators
What had gone wrong? The answer sheds revealing light on some of the problems the United States currently faces in the same troubled region. A recurrent theme of Gibbon’s work is that the Romans gradually lost “the animating health and vigour” which had made them militarily invincible in the glory days of Julian’s predecessor Trajan. They had lost their discipline. They started complaining about the weight of their armor. In a word, they had gone soft. At the same time, like most armies, their fighting effectiveness diminished the farther they were from home. … To put it bluntly, the United States has a chronic manpower deficit, which means it cannot put enough boots on the ground to maintain law and order in conquered territory.
[Economic malaise: debt]
Cultural malaise: While “the corrupt and opulent nobles of Rome gratified every vice that could be collected from the mighty conflux of nations and manners,” Gibbon wrote, “the most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles.” Orgies and circuses are not precisely the favorite pastimes of Western society today. But if you substitute pornography and NASCAR, the parallel is not so far-fetched.
Couture, Romans of the Decadence 1847
Gibbon’s argument against Roman “luxury” was in part that it sapped the empire’s martial strength. Here, too, there is a striking analogy. For our culture’s sedentary character—our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action—seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape. Gibbon’s Romans became metaphorical pygmies. We, by contrast, are being transformed into actual giants. We are certainly taller on average than past generations, a consequence of improvements in nutrition. But we are also wider …
Gibbon called the decline and fall of the Roman Empire “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.” Could a still more awful scene be unfolding in the form of the West’s decline and fall? For Gibbon, Rome’s decline was the result of military overstretch, inner decadence, religious conversion, and barbarian invasion. To my mind, all of these are operating today to undermine what remains of Western dominance in the world. If the United States suffers mainly from the first and second, the European Union seems even more afflicted by the third and fourth.
A hundred years ago, as we have seen, the West could justly claim to rule the world. After a century during which one Western empire after another has declined and fallen, that can no longer credibly be claimed. Empires, of course, take time to decline and fall. Gibbon begins his narrative in A.D. 96; he ends it in 1430, more than a millennium later. Yet there can be no question that the pace of imperial descent has quickened in modern times. …
Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation 1836
The empires created in the 20th century, on the other hand, were all of comparatively short duration. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922–91) lasted less than 70 years, a meager record indeed, though one not yet equaled by the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949. Japan’s colonial empire, which can be dated from the conquest of Taiwan in 1895, lasted barely 50. Most ephemeral of all modern empires was the so-called Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by the end of 1944. The remaining empires of the West are young by Roman standards. But by the standards of modern times, the United States—at 230 years—is quite long in the tooth. The day when the Capitol in Washington, D.C., will be reduced to a picturesque ruin may seem to us infinitely remote. History—including the greatest historian of them all, Edward Gibbon—suggests that it may come sooner than we think.
Read the entire article here.
The Slate Book Club on American Power, Past and Present.
See also Low Concept on the G.W. Bush Severance Package – How much would it take to make him go away?Â
And an interesting article from 2003 in the Guardian Unlimited on American Un-Americanism.
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