The Roman Empire is often described as the world's greatest civilization.
It's long sad path of decline and fall is a story for the ages.
What can Rome's collapse teach 21st century Americans?
There has been through American history this consciousness of
vulnerability. This consciousness of
decline, this consciousness of a past greatness that somehow we may be falling short of.
Politicians have capitalized on this vulnerability, but they're missing the point.
The narrative of decline and fall of Rome that has prevailed in America's
minds has assumed that the fall was both the end of the story and the bad part.
What if after the fall is the time we should be concentrating on as modern Americans?
There are many theories of what went wrong.
There's corruption, there's slavery, there's overextension.
The simplest theory involves a string of military losses that chipped away at its borders.
Finally a barbarian defeated the last emperor to rule from Italy.
Historians consider this the end of the Western Roman Empire.
The part that tends to get all the attention.
After the fall you have the bubonic plague, you have the dark ages, and then eventually you come to the Renaissance.
Scholars call the era in between "late antiquity." This time of
transformation gave rise to new systems of government, a new state religion, and
artistic experimentation.
And it can be a case study for America.
when Rome went away some things were lost, but other things were created and became possible.
The idea of modern corporations and business organizations, some concept of
individual rights, the first glimmer of what became universities. There was a
kind of experimentation which was the necessary precondition to the flowering
of the Renaissance and onwards.
How does the U.S. of today compare to the Rome of the past?
Over the last generation there's almost
nothing the national government system seems capable of. You have more and more
national politics becoming a matter that you call tribal or like sports rivalries
in a really nasty way.
The Empire might be fading, but cities and towns tell a
different story at the local level.
80% of Americans across the country and of
all different ethnicities and income levels consider the community where they
lived to be an excellent or quite good place to live.
70 percent of Americans
said that they trusted the people in their own neighborhoods.
Just as the fall of central power in Rome
made way for new possibilities, a weaker national government could lead to
stronger local initiative.
In almost any area of
public policy you can think of there are cases of where communities, states, and
regions are taking the lead where national policy is not.
We're seeing things like that in western Kansas, little farming town of Spearville just
outside Dodge City. Wind turbines becoming a major source of income for farmers.
In every city of the United States you can see city-based activity
to plant more trees.
It may be the single most effective short-term step to deal
with carbon that's already in the atmosphere.
The end of America as we know it doesn't
necessarily mean the end of America.
When a tree falls in the forest there's
suddenly sunlight for the saplings that have been struggling to rise
Modern Americans should be thinking about how to avoid the decline and fall
of the American Empire, and also, what might come next.
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