The Fall of the American Empire

1/08/10 | ReaganCaesar

[The_Reader_David]

Oh, goody! another analysis based on the non-event, the “Fall of Rome”.

The Romans stopped believing in their gods not because of their decadence, but because they started believing in God, the All-Holy Trinity, as revealed in Christ Jesus.

St. Constantine (I’m Orthodox, so I venerate him as a saint, for some reason, Western Christians, both Latin and protestant don’t) moved the capital from Rome to New Rome (which everyone called “Constantinople” since he built the city) in 324. The big event attributed to the pagans’ decadence was the retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples at the behest of the Christian Eastern Augustus, Zeno, who decided (probably wrongly) that Imperial interests in Italy could adequately be looked after by promoting the King of the Ostrogoths to the position of Patrician of the Romans.

No one noticed that “Rome fell” in 476 because it didn’t, the Empire continued for nearly another millenium, though in its last years it dwindled to the size of a city state, not through decadent disregard for morals—in the last days of the Empire, the Greek speaking Romaioi were not merely moral but devoted to ascetic discipline of fasting and prayer—but through the perfidy of purported Western Christian allies, neglect of the fleet, and a failure to adopt the fire-and-movement tactics of its Muslim adversaries.

St. Justinian’s reassertion of direct Imperial control over the west in the sixth century was understood as just that, not as conquests of lands outside the Empire.

Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 was intended to restore the office of Western Augustus, and it was only after the Emperor at Constantinople gave him a cold-shoulder as an upstart, that the Frankish court began its vain accusations of ‘heresy’ against the Christian East for continuing to say the Nicene Creed in its original form (without the filioque), started styling his own domains the “Holy Roman Empire” and calling the Roman Empire, the “Empire of the Hellenes” (which was slur since by that time Hellene meant not “Greek” but “Greek pagan”).

The Roman Empire fell on May 29, 1453, and not due to moral decadence.

If you think America will follow in Rome’s footsteps, expect the capital to be moved to oh, somewhere like Wichita, Omaha, or Tulsa, the decadent coasts to fall into barbarism and have to have military expeditions sent to reassert Federal control, and for America to go on for another thousand years or so.

[ReaganCaesar]

I like your attempt, David, but I’m sorry that you’re so misguided. The parallels are a little too hard to ignore. You’re paying attention to the wrong cultural axis. The precise “Fall” that I am referring to is the destruction of the Zeitgeist and national character of Rome. The original consciousness of the people that allowed for the innovation and expansion that could easily be measured by the Romans themselves and the neighboring cultures that felt their influence. Are you going to deny the expansion of America? Are you going to deny the cultural, political, and economic ascendence of America in regards to the fact that America has had the largest economy in the world since 1870? Will you deny that this ascendance was accompanied by a strong national pride in America, and can you deny that it has been deteriorating since the counterculture revolution of the 1960s? You haven’t noticed that America has had a hard time winning wars since the 1960s? If the Zeitgeist of the 1940s was applied to today’s military technology, we would be winning wars left and right in a tiny amount of time. I think it’s kind of sad that you’ve applied so much effort to figuring out the fall of Rome in other contexts. The answer lies in a simple concept of countercultural revolution, both in America and Rome.

[The_Reader_David]

I fault anyone for attempting to draw parallels between actual historical events—the state of America at present, for instance—and the non-event of the “Fall of Rome”.

The fact is that the Roman Empire remained the dominant power in Europe long after the retirement of the last Western Augustus, and the fact there was still an Emperor at Constantinople was an anchor in the consciousness of Christendom well into the Middle Ages. Alfred the Great’s court modeled itself on the Imperial court, and the Saxons who fled the Norman conquest, for the most part decamped to Constantinople.

One can’t get useful historical insight about the present by invoking a past that never was. Gibbon’s historiographic fantasies about the “Fall of Rome” are about as useful for understanding the progression of great powers or decadence as Mann’s “hockey stick” is for understanding climate.