Are We the New Rome?

No, I’m not an historian. From early adolescence well into senescence, I’ve mostly occupied myself with fields based on reason and current reality—first science and engineering, then law and social organization. Learning the names and succession of kings and other tyrants, their endless conflicts and alliances, and their futile attempts at building durable empires, has always seemed to me a fruitless endeavor, one without evident benefit or end.

But ancient Rome was different. I spent four pre-college years learning Latin, the language of Rome. Well into professing law, I stopped to devour Anthony Everitt’s celebrated biography of Cicero, one of Rome’s greatest orators and politicians.

Why? Because Rome, until the twentieth century, was unique. It was not just one of the greatest and most powerful nations in human history; it was also, at least for most of its regional supremacy, democratic. The standards that Roman legions bore as they relentlessly conquered the known (Western) world proclaimed “SPQR,” or “Senatus Populusque Romanus.” That meant “the Senate and the People of Rome”—not the name of the current emperor, dictator or commanding general. Unlike every other ancient great empire we know of, Rome conquered not in the name of a despot, but its people.

Conscription, in ancient Rome, was for twenty years, not four. But young men from the hinterlands willingly signed up in the hope that, if they survived the brutalities of war that long, they would become elevated from nobodies, or from captured slaves, to “Citizens of Rome,” the greatest ancient empire ever outside of China.

And as far as we can tell today, Rome treated people of all colors and creeds more or less equally. There was no concept of racial superiority. That demented notion thrived in eighteenth-century America, apparently to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of people shanghaied from Africa. The Nazis later “perfected” it, only to have their “Thousand-Year Reich” flame out in a dozen years.

But Rome itself, albeit after several centuries, also was gone. Its democracy, its democratic Senate, its laws, its world-beating military and social organization—all vanished. The tides of history erased them as if they had been nothing more than sandcastles on a beach. Even the noble Roman language—Latin—disappeared, eventually morphing into modern French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. It survives today only in history books, in the “classics,” and in bits and pieces in law, medicine and proverbs.

Ancient Rome had no science. Galileo and his contemporaries didn’t invent science until early in the seventeenth century, far more than a millennium after Rome fell to Alaric the “Barbarian.” But ancient Rome had superb civil engineering, which you can still see in modern Rome today. The Coliseum, the Forum, the aqueducts and viaducts (some still in use!), emperors’ villas and some Roman cities throughout Eurasia all still stand as mute testaments to the inventivity and power of ancient Rome.

Yet the culture and the nation behind those structures vanished over a millennium and half ago. Why?

Isn’t that a key question of human history? Answer it, and we perhaps can prevent something similar from happening to the United States of America. For in human history there has never been another real democracy with the global reach, power and influence of our own nation, except for ancient Rome. (Britain, perhaps, was once a contender, but its global influence, which really lasted less than three centuries, has already dissipated, with Brexit a following indicator.) Except for Rome and the US, all the great empires of human history have been monarchies or tyrannies of one sort or another, many of them vying to be more brutal, capricious and despotic than the last.

If we can figure out what did away with Rome and its rational and egalitarian social organization, maybe our own faltering democracy has a chance to survive and prevail. Then maybe future human history can become something more than a dispiriting parade of sequential despotisms.

No doubt a democracy, at its best, keeps its people better off, happier, and more dedicated to its survival than tyranny. So why did Rome die?

I’ve been thinking about this question for over sixty years, ever since I graduated high school. So far, I’ve come up with only three big themes to explain Rome’s slow but sure demise: corruption, vulgar degeneration, and environmental poisoning. Let’s look at each in turn.

Corruption in Rome was classic. Many Roman senators achieved their positions through business or business connections. As time when on, their businesses incurred debt. So they used their political power to get the state to pay if off. The state fisc declined. Promises of land and pensions to soldiers were broken, and society slowly came apart. This process, perhaps the first case of “corporate welfare,” Everitt describes in his biography of Cicero.

Corruption is a universal human evil. Our world’s most successful current despot, Xi Jinping, once recognized this point. His struggle against corruption in China was a big part of his rise to power. Yet to get there, he subordinated the Plenum to his personal despotism, descreasing its membership from nine to seven. Then he made himself the sole successor to Mao—something akin to a secular deity in modern Chinese governance. All this he has done now, and so he has become a king or emperor in all but name.

But Xi neglected (or never understood) a controlling principle. The more concentrated political power becomes, the more quickly and easily corruption prevails.

As power concentrates at the top, the fewer people there are to pay off or influence to achieve one’s personal goals. Rich people’s influence increases as their money rises to the top. So perhaps the best way to resist their influence is to distribute political power.

It propbably doesn’t matter much whether the mechanism of distribution is federalism, a regulatory bureaucracy, an “administrative state,” or something else. The ancient Chinese were pretty successful with their expert Mandarin bureacracy, selected through rigorous testing. Its motto of power distribution was, “Heaven is very high, but the Emperor is far away.” The more people who have influence in decisions, the more they consider local needs and conditions, and the more they base their decisions on neutral, non-pecuniary principles, such as science, the harder it is for corruption to take hold.

This, of course, is precisely why our own Demagogue rails against the so-called “Deep State.” A Deep State involves a lot of people, including some who respect non-pecuniary principles like science and the “greatest good for the greatest number.” The more people like that there are in a society, and the more power they collectively wield, the more resistant their society is to corruption.

Of course we Americans are now going in the wrong direction. Our own Supreme Court—the closest thing to a despotic power our Constitution provides—is a perfect example. It concentrates absolute power over the structure and principles of our democracy in a cabal of nine fallible minds. With lifetime appointments and Congress now so divided that impeachment is practically impossible, none of the nine is accountable to anyone. (The recent controversy over Harlan Crow’s generous gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas is just the latest proof of this enduring reality.)

Already, the rich in our nation have managed to capture this citadel of power with a thing called the Federalist Society. This is a small, relatively new and elitist arm of the rich and their interests. Almost without anyone noticing, over the last several decades it has managed to steal the gatekeeping role of vetting Supreme-Court nominees (at least during Republican presidencies) from the American Bar Association, a much bigger and more democratic body that formerly played that role.

So if you want to see our democracy succumb to corruption, just as did ancient Rome’s, watch the processes of: (1) concentrating power at the top; (2) taking policy-making authority from recognized experts with Ph.D.s and putting it in the hands of partisan political hacks like Karl Rove (what the old Soviet Union used to call “Commissars”); and (3) reducing the number of people and steps involving in policy making, so that money can find easier purchase.

The second big theme in the degeneration of Rome’s democracy was what I call vulgar degeneration: the seduction and corruption of ordinary people. At the end of the day, we are all vulnerable flesh. Shakespeare said it best, in his play The Merchant of Venice, from the mouth of a Jew: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” The more a society operates at a primal level of crushing vulnerable flesh in violence and revenge, the more the rich prevail, with their wealth, well-paid lawyers and hired muscle.

Today we forget how vulnerable the common person was in ancient times—even the much admired “Citizen of Rome.” In those days, there were no universities and no police forces. The rich enjoyed personal protection by virtue of their paid guardians and armed slaves; the poor had to survive by their own wits, subordination to the powerful, and personal fighting skills, if any. Most of the poor couldn’t even afford proper weapons, then well-tempered swords and daggers, let alone training to fight well.

So the “bread and circuses” that Caesar and other demagogues introduced served two seemingly contradictory purposes. First, watching a losing gladiator being dismembered, or an early Christian being eaten by lions, allowed the common Roman to experience a brief reprieve from constant danger. He could think, “At least I’m not that poor bastard down there in the arena.” He could, for a moment, share the twisted triumph of a gruesomely violent state. He could even, by cheering or gesticulating, share in the Emperor’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down sealing of the victim’s fate.

But the minute that same citizen left the Coliseum, he or she was even more conscious of personal vulnerability, as a lone man or woman without armed guardians. The Roman Coliseum had a floor of sand, several feet deep, just to absorb all the blood and gore from the human combat and human sacrifices intended to drive these bitter lessons home.

Today we see what took place in the Roman Coliseum as crude, cruel and primitive. But two things in our own society perform similar functions in making ordinary people more vulgar, insensitive and crude, and more conscious of their own personal vulnerability. One is the increasing prevalence of weapons of war in ordinary life, and the regular cadence of massacres of ordinary people going about their daily business. The other is the tendency of pols like the Demagogue to mock and ridicule as “weak” the infirm, those with hereditary or other weaknesses, or just the aged.

Mockery is the human emotion that leads to heedless neglect of people’s dignity and personal security. And too many guns—including weapons of war designed for the battlefield—make them exceedingly vulnerable.

All this is hardly a perfect match for ancient Rome’s gladiatorial combat, “mock” real battles—with real blood, gore and death—and the staged sacrifices of Christians in ancient Rome’s Coliseum. But it all produces much the same political and psychological results.

Too many massacres with too many weapons of war make common people feel helpless and vulnerable, increase their disdain and decrease their empathy for their fellow citizens. This is turn makes them more dependent on, and subservient to, the rich and powerful, who enjoy greater safety in their gated communities, bullet-proof limousines, and private jets with personal bodyguards. The fantasy of ordinary people, unwilling to train themselves constantly as disciplined soldiers, being capable of defeating hardened criminals or suicidal maniacs with weapons of war, only increases the risk of mayhem and tragedy, and hence their sense of vulnerability.

It bears emphasis that none of this—neither the staged spectacles of real human slaughter in the Roman Coliseum nor the now-regular series of actual massacres of innocent civilians—has, to our current knowledge, ever occurred at the same level in other so-called “advanced” civilizations. What happened in the Roman Coliseum is unique. So is the level of regular gun massacres in the modern United States. Both, when you think about it, have much the same result: making common people feel vulnerable and in need of protection by stronger men, namely, the rich, the powerful and the all-powerful despot. And mocking the infirm, sick and weak is the antithesis of an orderly, decent and fair society, in which the strong protect the weak so that all feel secure.

The third and final major theme I’ve found in the decline of Rome is environmental poisoning. It may ultimately be the most important.

Modern science has established beyond question that ancient Rome’s elite suffered slow poisoning by lead. Rome’s slightly acidic water leached lead from the lead pipes that fed the homes of the emperors, high officials and rich merchants. (Our modern English word for plumbing comes from the Latin word for lead, “plumbum.” That’s why lead’s atomic symbol is “Pb.”)

Rome’s common people avoided this poisoning by getting their water not through plumbing, but from communal concrete fountains fed by concrete aqueducts. So ancient Rome, as a society, poisoned itself from the top down, as shown by lead in exhumed skeletons. This, along with inbreeding among powerful families, is undoubtedly the cause of the series of “crazy” emperors who presided over Rome’s most precipitous spates of decline: Nero, Caligula, and Commodus.

Is something like this slow lead poisoning of a society’s entire elite happening in the US today? It’s hard to tell. It’s also hard to exclude the possibility with any degree of certainty. Science tells us that certain hard-to-degrade chemicals, including BPA and the many thousands of variants of PFAS, appear in all our bloodstreams, where they can have extreme effects on human endocrine systems, far out of proportion to normal dose-response relationships. We also know that the rich people who profit from producing and selling these chemicals have poured a lot of money into delaying and preventing their detailed study and regulation, let alone their phasing out.

In other words, the rich who profit from selling things that may inadvertently be poisoning us are consciously reducing sensible study of, and cutbacks in the use and ubiquity of, those poisonous things. So they thwart us in saving ourselves from something like the environmental poisoning that helped destroy ancient Rome. Thus does the very first cause of Rome’s fall, corruption, likely propel the last, environmental poisoning, in our American case.

But we also have two differences from ancient Rome, one bad, one good. In Rome the lead poisoned only the elite; so the people watched helplessly as their leaders went crazy. Today, the poisons likely affect everyone. They could even be responsible for the increasing craziness of the MAGA crowd and some members of Congress, especially pols who can’t control their diet and eat a lot from plastic boxes while on the campaign trail. Disruption of his endocrine systems could be why Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) seems genuinely and perpetually enraged.

The good news is that we today, unlike ancient Romans, have science. If we can only use it, we can study the gradual poisoning effect in real time—not centuries later—and maybe stop it before it destroys our society, our leaders’ perspectives, our social cohesion and our democracy.

Except for the US, and maybe Britain during its relatively brief maritime transcendence, there has never been anything like the democracy of ancient Rome. According to legend (history is unclear) it took most of a millennium for Rome to perfect its great democracy and decay into empire, then nearly another half a millennium to complete the fall that led to the great city’s sacking. The Pompeiian Civil Wars that the Demagogue Caesar started (but that long outlived him!) were a key element of the political descent from democracy into empire. Corruption, degradation of the common people (the “vulgate”), and environmental lead poisoning were key precipitating factors. Those very same elements appear to be infecting our American society, with violence, discord and the rise of visible social and political “craziness” as evident results.

After Rome fell, the Western World fell into the Dark Ages. I would say they lasted at least 1,200 years—well over a millennium—from Alaric’s sacking of Rome in 410 AD, to Galileo’s excommunication for discovering how Earth orbits the Sun in 1616.

Today we refer to this dismal period eupehmistically as the “Middle Ages.” But they were dark indeed. During that time, China, not the West, reached the pinnacle of human civilization, then fell from grace and into disorder again, while the “Western” world stagnated in innumerable, primitive, now mostly-forgotten imperial struggles—all until the Enlightenment. Only then did the principle of greatest good for the greatest number prevail. Only then did science and modern democracy begin to fluorish.

Today, a general setback for us, similar to Rome’s, might involve the use of nuclear weapons, if only due to a military miscalculation or a transient imbalance of power. If so, our human recovery period could be as long as eight times the half-life of plutonium-239, or 8 x 24,110 years = 192,880 years. (Eight half-lives, which reduce radioactivity by 1/256, are generally considered essential to reach a level safe for normal biology.)

To avoid a new Dark Age lasting some forty times as long as our written record of human civilization so far, shouldn’t we now make a supreme effort? Shouldn’t we try to root out from our society everything that we now know destroyed ancient Rome: growing corruption, a rising, carefully cultivated taste for violence and unreason among our people, and things that we make and use that could be poisoning us slowly but surely?

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