Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 3

Roman civilization under the Caesars was a centralized absolutism with a large measure of peripheral deviation and autonomy. It was directed by a central oligarchy and patrolled, defended and extended by a military force unified in theory but in practice grouped around the outstanding personalities and subjected to the vagaries and upsets always a.s.sociated with power politics in the hands of military backed political despots.

Roman civilization, like all social organisms, came into being, moved toward maturity, reached a plateau of fulfillment from which it declined, broke up and eventually disappeared into the interregnum known as the Dark Ages. The entire episode occupied a dozen centuries. Its beginnings were unimpressively local. At the height of its wealth, power and cultural influence it bestrode the Eurasian-African triangle. Its decline and disappearance were no less spectacular than its meteoric rise to fame and fortune.

I would like to summarize the Roman experiment and some of its lessons by listing and commenting briefly on the forces that built up Roman civilization and those forces which resulted in its decline and dissolution.

Primary up-building forces in the Roman experiment:

1. Establishing the city of Rome as a stable, defensible center of merchandising and commerce, transport, finance, population, wealth and power with a hinterland of a.s.sociates and dependencies. As it turns out, the city of Rome has outlived both the Roman Empire and Roman Civilization.

2. Steadfast dedication to Roman interests first, by all necessary means and despite costs which at the time seemed to be excessive.

3. A recognition of that which is possible, especially in political relationships. The acceptance with good grace of a half-loaf where no more was available.

4. Consistent, persistent aggression and expansion where such policies were beneficial to Rome, with little or no regard for their effects on Roman a.s.sociates, allies, friends or enemies. Studied ruthlessness.

5. Rewarding Rome's friends, allies and a.s.sociates with economic, political and cultural advantages. Implacably punishing and where necessary exterminating Rome's persistent enemies.

6. Wide tolerance of local cultural variation in matters that did not conflict with the major principles and practices of Rome's central authority.

7. Taking defeats in their stride, paying the price, and recovering lost momentum. Again advancing along avenues which led to Roman success and aggrandizement.

8. Indomitable persistence in the pursuit of major objectives.

9. After the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus, concentrating power in a single person and his chosen brain trust, using that power to further aggrandize the Roman Empire and Roman Civilization.

This category is not complete. It aims to answer the basic question: In a situation where a thousand contestants entered the knock-down and drag-out struggle, first for survival and then for supremacy, what qualities or qualifications enabled Romans to win the laurel crown of victory?

Paralleling the up-building forces that established Roman supremacy were counter-forces which undermined and eventually destroyed the Roman Empire and Roman civilization:

1. The growth of city life at the expense of rural existence.

At the outset of its life cycle, Rome was essentially rural.

At the end of the cycle Roman culture was turning its back upon ruralism and moving into a culture that was to be chiefly urban during an entire millennium. In that millennium Rome, her a.s.sociates and dependencies, experimented with a culture that was essentially urban, but encircled, dependent and eventually replaced by a culture that was essentially rural.

2. During the millennium between 600 B.C. and 500 A.D.

the Romans and their a.s.sociates succeeded in bringing large parts of Europe, Asia and Africa under their control, but the control was so rigid and temporary that tribalism and local nationalisms broke loose from the fetters of central authority and coercive integration, shattering the structure of Roman civilization and its structural core--the Roman Empire. Instead of resulting in closer cooperation, the strategy and tactics of the Roman builders and organizers led to contradictions, bitter feuds, civil strife, independence movements which combined with expansionist diplomacy and periodic wars to discourage, frustrate and eventually to eliminate peace, order and planned progress.

2. The spread of chattel slavery had a profound effect upon the texture of Roman life. At the outset Roman family farms housed the bulk of the population. During the cycle of Roman civilization unnumbered millions of captives were seized in the course of military operations and reduced to slavery. By the end of the Roman cycle the work-load of agriculture, commerce, industry, mining, transport, and the domestic life of the well-to-do was carried by slaves. Basically, therefore, the Roman world was divided first into Romans and non-Romans and second into masters and slaves, with a third category which consisted of an immense bureaucracy (including the military), a professional and technological group and a heavy burden of persistent parasitism.

4. Growth of the abyss that separated wealth and the wealthy from ma.s.s poverty in the cities and the countryside.

The abyss was widened and deepened by the presence of slavery. More extensive and more frequent foreign conquests added to the volume of slave labor in a market already glutted and reduced the price of slaves. Against this super-abundant cheap slave labor, free labor could compete only by reducing its standard of living and thus deepening the abyss of poverty. At the other end of the social arc, the rich were able to surround themselves with mult.i.tudes of slaves who provided the energy needed to carry on the complex life of Roman civilization. As the Roman world expanded, the abyss widened, deepened and became all but impa.s.sable. It was from such lower depths that Spartacus and other leaders of rebellious slaves drew sufficient manpower to challenge and for a time even defeat the full military power of Rome.

5. Built into the structure of Roman civilization was the potential of civil war. The contradictions of ma.s.s slavery and poverty side by side with boundless leisure and abundance was only one side of the picture. Each of the more distant provinces became a possible base from which ambitious governors or generals could wage wars of independent conquest at the expense of Roman authority. Each newly subjugated people, smarting under defeat and the heavy hand which Rome laid on its dissidents and opponents, became a potential center for disaffection, conspiracy and rebellion against Roman authority.

6. Conflicts over power succession, in the provinces, and more significantly in the mother city, added another aspect to the many sided pressures. As there was no legal means of determining the succession, the end of each imperial reign offered the probability of military intervention.

7. Deification of emperors, during the era of the Caesars, led to the denigration and degradation of the common man. The fact that the common men of Rome were more and more likely to be poor slaves furthered the process and deepened the abyss between the haves and have-nots.

8. Among the forces of disintegration operating in Rome none was more potent and more decisive than the numerical growth of the military and the increasing probability that any one of the growing contradictions and conflicts would lead to intervention by the military. Roman emperors were dictators and their retention of authority was increasingly decided by the legions which were willing and able to fight for the perpetuation and extension of their authority.

9. The extensive, complicated, elaborate structure of Roman civilization involved a persistent and implacable rise of overhead costs of food and raw materials, of production, of transportation, of the bureaucracy, including the military.

The area of Roman civilization increased arithmetically.

Overhead costs rose geometrically. They were expressed in an empty treasury, rising taxes, inflation, expropriation, the degradation of the currency.

10. Side by side with the rise in overhead costs went the increase of parasitism among the rich and among the poor.

Something-for-nothing was the order of the day. Speculation was rampant. Gambling was universal. Instead of living by production of goods and services, Romans let the slaves do their work and lived by their wits.

11. From top to bottom of Roman society negative forces replaced positive forces. Self directed labor gave place to slavery; partic.i.p.ation in productive activity yielded to parasitism; productivity was subordinated to destructivity; the spirit of independence was replaced by the acceptance of increasing arbitrary individual authority.

12. Roman society constantly faced and consistently failed to solve the contradiction between centralism and local interests and local rights. This contradiction increased with increasing size, diversity and complexity.

13. Psychological forces played a part in the breakdown and break-up of Roman civilization. People lost faith and hope.

They became disillusioned and cynical. They forgot the common good and devoted themselves to the gratification of body hungers. They turned from proud service of fatherland to the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake.

Romans lost freshness and vigor. Creativeness had never been as highly regarded among the Romans as it was among the Greeks. Life was lived closer to the surface. It was confined more and more to the present. Growth in the volume of Roman life sapped its vitality so that there was less surplus for experiment and innovation as more and more of the social income was devoted to meeting overhead costs.

Moralists have insisted that the decline and dissolution of Roman civilization resulted from the abandonment of moral standards.

Undoubtedly this was true. The upstanding womanhood and manhood of early Rome was replaced by a wealth-seeking, pleasure-loving, parasitically inclined population. But these features of Roman life under the empire and during the period of Roman decline were the outcome of political, economic and social forces that have characterized one civilization after another. Instead of insisting that Rome declined and fell because it was immoral, it would be far more accurate to insist that Rome declined and fell because the objectives which it sought, the means it employed and the civilized inst.i.tutions which it developed contained within themselves oppositions and contradictions which led to decline and dissolution. Rome declined and fell because the ideas, inst.i.tutions and practices upon which it depended--the ideas, inst.i.tutions and practices of civilization--could lead to no other outcome.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS

An experiment with civilization presently spans the planet Earth. It is called "modern," "contemporary" or "western civilization." Its artifacts, inst.i.tutions and practices predominate in Europe, North America and Australasia. They play a prominent role in the lives of Asians, South Americans and Africans.

Two thousand years ago a long established Egyptian civilization was pa.s.sing into the shadows. Civilizations in China and India were developing. Roman civilization was approaching the zenith of its ascendancy.

A thousand years ago Roman civilization, like that of Egypt, was a memory; Chinese and Indian civilizations were holding their own, while the followers of Islam were reaching out into Central Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

In east central Europe and around the Mediterranean the beginnings of western civilization had made their appearance and were expanding their control along the Eurasian trade routes and beginning to penetrate western and northern Europe. The Crusades had introduced Asian culture traits into the European backwoods. Hardy European and Asian mariners were penetrating the Americas. Dark ages of ignorance and superst.i.tion which had held sway in Europe for centuries were coming to an end.

Western civilization was beginning to draw the breath of a new life.

The vast structure of Roman civilization had split West from East. The Eastern Empire retained its form and continued its culture for centuries after its break with the West. Meanwhile the West fragmented into smaller and smaller units, increasingly self-contained and increasingly isolated. Cities raised and manned their own walls. The countryside broke up into smaller and smaller divisions over which the Holy Roman Empire exercised little more than a shadowy authority. Each landed estate had its stronghold or castle. Each locality looked after its own interests. The ma.s.sive Roman Universal State, stretching for centuries across parts of three continents, had broken up into a mult.i.tude of tiny semi-sovereign, semi-independent fragments. Some of the fragments as leagues, alliances and coalitions were reaching nationhood.

New dawn was illuminating the Dark Ages. Western man was sorting and re-a.s.sembling some of the scattered fragments of the defunct and dismembered Roman civilization. The task was colossal. Rome's "one authority, one law, one language" hegemony had been replaced by an all pervading diversity. The closely knit Greco-Roman Empire had been superseded in Europe by a spa.r.s.ely inhabited, roadless wilderness, largely bereft of trade, using waterways as the easiest means of communication and transport. The economy was built around wood cutting, charcoal burning, backward animal husbandry, hand-tool agriculture, hand-craft industry, the rudiments of commerce and finance centered in trading cities. The great houses of the aristocracy and the gentry, scattered villages, towns and walled cities were preoccupied and disrupted by endless feuding and between-seasons warfare.

Adding to the chaos of this dismembered society were the controversies over dynastic succession. Intermittent incursions of migrating hordes from central Asia pushed their way into central and southern Europe.

Covert and open conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular authority added to the general lethargy, confusion and chaos.

Europe struggled for centuries to free itself from Asian invasion and occupation. At the same time Europe was improving its agriculture, restoring its trade and expanding its hand-craft industries and its commerce. Towns grew in population and productivity. Life-standards rose in the cities. Cities based on trade and commerce extended their authority and became city-states. Commercial cities joined their forces to form trading leagues.

Lords spiritual and temporal, who had ruled Europe for centuries, were joined by lords commercial, enriched by the growth of trade, transport and developing industry.

Generations pa.s.sed into centuries--the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth. From small local beginnings the nations of western Europe emerged: Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Italy, Austria and eventually Russia. Each was a consolidation of local princ.i.p.alities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms. Each was pa.s.sing through the rural-urban transformation. Each was outgrowing feudalism and producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals, tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle cla.s.s and a proletariat.

After the fifteenth century each state was spilling over its own frontiers, annexing or losing neighboring territory, spreading beyond the boundaries of Europe into the teeming markets of Asia and the newly discovered treasure-house of the Americas.