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The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad
- Causality1 7y agoHow bad it was depends on what you value. Did splitting up societies across Europe lead to more differentiation? Yes, absolutely. Here's some other things it led to: -Population totals and density dropped. -Life expectancy dropped. -Trade fell in volume, trade routes shortened, and the variety of available goods dropped. -The trend of urbanization reversed and Europeans became more rural. -The likelihood of dying to disease/plague increased. -The number and length of usable roads shrank -The plow fell out of common manufacture and farmers began relying on picks, hoes, and shovels instead It's up to you whether those things count as "not that bad".
- nickik 7y agoMany of these things weren't really effected by the Fall of the Roman empirical structure per se. Most of the things you mention didn't actually happen for a long while after the empire fell. The first big plague happened in 541–542 AD and it effected people in the Eastern Empire more then in the former Western empire. Italian urbanization was not actually significantly changed until the Justinian roman wars where Italy was invaded by different armies over and over again. But important to know is that Italy was already less urban by the time the empire fell, Rome had already far, far fewer people then at its peak and had gone down over the last 100 years before the actual Fall. The point here is that many of the variables you describe had lots of variation within the imperial period and often didn't significantly change when the empire fell per see. So we need to be really careful as these things are pretty complex and our data is incredibly bad. Often informed not by good data.
- Spooky23 7y agoAll of those things are true, but it’s easy to overcredit late Rome for their advantages. Remember a lot of the history, perceptions and analysis we get really grows out of 19th century work, where glorification of empire was something of a vested interest of gentlemen of the day. The western Roman Empire had stagnated for years and lost a lot of ground.
- joe_the_user 7y agoThis just and similar rebuttals just make the point that the lost ground happened in a gradual fashion. When the parts of the structure fell, much had already rotted away, sure. That doesn't change the basic outline that the situation involved a decline in "civilization" and general quality of life. IE, it was a rather bad time, in contrast to the OP.
- remotecool 7y agoThe us is still one of the most free countries in the world and people literally risk death to come here. Our government is not even close to the imperialist Roman empire. A closer comparison would be the EU and the fall of it (Brexit).
- herval 7y agoDo you have any source showing the US is “one of the most free countries”? It figures as just moderate/mostly free in all lists I could find. Also, immigrants don’t come to the US for “freedom”. _Maybe_ in the past, but definitely not today. We move here because it’s where the opportunities are, or (in the case of many refugees) to escape violence.
- oh_sigh 7y agoSo you're saying that people go to the US for economic freedom, and freedom from violence?
- herval 7y agoNo, not at all. There’s plenty of places with more economic freedom - less regulation, lower taxes, simpler rules. The US simply has more _opportunities_ and (particularly in tech/sciences) and pays _much_ more money for the same job. It’s just leverage, not “freedom”. :)
- sandworm101 7y agoThere are plenty of freedom indexes published by all sorts of agencies and NGOs. The US does not top ANY of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices -------- US: #16 Canada:#9 UK:#11 HK:#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World_... US:#25/26 Canada:#6/7 UK:#14 Norway:#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index US:#33 Canada:#20 UK:#39 Norway:#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_Press_(report) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_Press_(report) US:#10 Canada:#3 UK:#36 The Netherlands:#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Index_of_Moral_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Index_of_Moral_Freedom
- JumpCrisscross 7y agoWhy is classical education so much more fascinated with the sacking of Rome over the collapse of the Republic? The latter is, to me, far more fascinating and far less explored in our common curricula.
- fictionfuture 7y agoAgreed, most people who study this subject for it's intellectual purposes agree as well
- ummonk 7y agoBecause Rome was only at the beginning of its glory years when the Republic became an Empire.
- jhanschoo 7y agoI think you're mistaken. Classical education traditionally focuses primarily on letters at the point of the fall of the Republic. It is pop culture and history that focus more on the collapse of the Empire, since this is the event that immediately led to the formation of modern European national identities.
- goto11 7y agoI think even pop culture have been more interested in the fall of the republic and the rise and assassination of Caesar.
- goto11 7y agoIt is not, and the article hints at that: > If a civilization could descend from Cicero and Cato to Caligula and Nero in scarcely a century, how long could the brave experiment launched by Madison, Jefferson, and company hope to endure? This describes the fall of the republic, not the fall of Rome half a millennium later. Nero and Caligula are among the first emperors, not the last.
- Keysh 7y ago> the article hints at that Unintentionally, perhaps. Really, this is an indication of the article's incoherence and sloppiness. It purports to be mostly about the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th Century, and how this supposedly cleared the way for assorted awesome developments (five or six hundred years later). So the transition from Republic to Empire is irrelevant to the argument.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scythe 7y agoRome endured repeated leadership crises from the death of Commodus in 192 to the conquest by Odoacer in 476. Put another way, Rome spent more time “falling” than the US has even existed.
- zt 7y agoThis article fails to live up to its premise of thinking through what the dissolution of the American empire would look like but does end up making an interesting case for local vitality and governance.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoOne thing that this analysis ignores is how the Roman Catholic Church stepped in and filled a lot of the void left by the collapse of the Roman administrative state. Although, the various Germanic kingdoms fought each other, by the time the Roman Empire fell, they had all converted to Latin Catholic Christianity. Because, of this the Roman Catholic Church could serve a unifying purpose and hold in check the worst impulses of an individual kingdom. Now, there is no such authority. Maybe 10 years ago, we could have thought that multilateral institutions like the UN, EU, IMF, World Bank, NATO, etc could step up, now, if anything, those institutions might have more of a credibility gap than the US. The collapse of the American "Empire" would be very painful for everyone, not least Western Europe.
- simonh 7y ago>the Roman Catholic Church could serve a unifying purpose and hold in check the worst impulses of an individual kingdom. When they weren’t actively inciting and promoting those worst impulses in the service of their own ends, that is.
- nordsieck 7y ago> Maybe 10 years ago, we could have thought that multilateral institutions like the UN, EU, IMF, World Bank, NATO, etc could step up, now, if anything, those institutions might have more of a credibility gap than the US. I'm skeptical. Fundamentally, the all of civilization is built on the rule of law, and the rule of law is built on enforcement. The UN is nothing without the mailed gauntlet the US brings to the table. IMF/World Bank depends on international law, they can't enforce it. The EU/NATO has the same problem as the UN. I suppose many of the EU countries have a functional military, but they just can't project power.
- DuskStar 7y ago> The EU/NATO has the same problem as the UN. I suppose many of the EU countries have a functional military, but they just can't project power. Only the UK and France have relevant militaries within the EU Nations as far as I'm concerned. Or at least they're the only ones with nukes - Germany's conventional forces might qualify otherwise. And you need some sort of retaliatory strike capability to really take a seat at the big boys table. (Which they both do, with their SSBNs)
- siavosh 7y agoPeter Zeihan, a geopolitical author, has had a long running thesis that after the end of the cold war, the US no longer has a motivation to maintain the post WWII order of multilateralism and ensuring the safety of global free trade with its navy. The current administration has only accelerated that timeline. The end result, he claims, will be nations acting more like nations have always acted which unfortunately means more conflict. The US will simply watch from afar and swoop in when its interests are directly threatened. So in his opinion, it very much is NOT the US falling, but simply withdrawing because the economic order it used to bribe most of the world to be allied against the USSR no longer makes sense.
- SllX 7y agoAn alliance without a definite enemy is a sad state of affairs. Russia was an existential threat to the United States in a way that the PRC simply isn’t. They’re more of a threat to their immediate neighbors than anything, and near as I can tell they just want US to back off and let them be, let them have Taiwan, do what they want with Hong Kong and Macau, and let them assert a local hegemony. I don’t want to see Korea, Japan, Vietnam, or others to fall under a PRC hegemony, and Americans don’t necessarily want that either, but it’s a tough ask of my countrymen to continue to allocate resources to maintaining the world order in a sort of stasis when that proposition is increasingly expensive, bad for business and we we have strong isolationist tendencies. The post-WWII order was the exception, not the norm for American sentiments. Charles Krauthammer wrote in the wake of the collapse of the Cold War when we weren’t sure what the hell we were going to do as a country that it was actually pretty obvious: we would move from a bipolar world to a global order of American dominance, and if we were lucky, it would last about 30 years or so. Krauthammer[1] hasn’t lived to see how that turned out, but we’re creeping up on the end of that third decade. [1] Krauthammer 1) has about the coolest name for a Jewish man to have and 2) was a guest on Bill Kristol’s podcast “Conversations with Bill Kristol” where he gave an excellent interview in 2015. I highly recommend giving it a listen.
- pm90 7y agoYou conveniently forget the immense benefits the American Empire has obtained from maintaining allies in Asia. Japan, Korea and then the other Asian tigers have been incredibly beneficial to American businesses and American consumers. Cheap manufacturing allowed Americans to keep a somewhat decent standard of life in the face of stagnating wages, and has allowed the US to focus on high end manufacturing, services and the like, all of which provide much better jobs than can be provided by the manufacturing sector. I want to point out the fundamental flaw in your analysis: Asian allies have been an incredible investment for American taxpayers, and not supporting them would not only mean the loss of those benefits, but also goodwill, prestige and respect.
- blub 7y agoAcording to this historian it was pretty awful: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285 https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807... "The book recaptures the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world, and reminds us of the very real terrors of barbarian occupation. Equally important, Ward-Perkins contends that a key problem with the new way of looking at the end of the ancient world is that all difficulty and awkwardness is smoothed out into a steady and positive transformation of society. Nothing ever goes badly wrong in this vision of the past. The evidence shows otherwise." We've seen how this looks like in modern times with the fall and decline of the Soviet Union. The US could end up similarly in the future: invading countries under flimsy pretexts, assassinating opponents, politics utterly corrupted by money, trying to bully other countries into submission, etc.
- dilyevsky 7y agoWait you mean to tell me US doesn’t already do all of those things?
- goto11 7y agoWell the glory days of the Roman Empire was pretty awful for all the people who was conquered and killed or enslaved by the Romans.
- HNLurker2 7y agoWell it is true just like the USA the Roman Empire attacked tribes (especially Caesar in Gaul) with pretext like abducting a diplomat (just like the United States did in Afghanistan, Vietnam etc) But for the most part the Roman Empire where the peak of humanity civilization and we still awe at their ahead of time way of life (they had roads,politics, gyms, and many other public institutions we hold dear today)
- fictionfuture 7y agoThe fall of Rome led to a power vaccum that was filled by organized religion. Religion then outlawed science and philosophy (competing ideology)... Which led to the dark ages. Yes, it was that bad.
- dantondwa 7y agoThis article is bad. Instead of focusing on the actual topic of the book, it immediately jumps into an absurd comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and today's America. The two situations have NOTHING in common. None of the factors that led to the Western Roman Empire's fall plays any role in the US. Also, the argument that the Roman Empire allowed things like individual human rights is absurd. Modern notions of individual and individual rights appeared in the 16th century. How is it possible to link the downfall of the empire with something that happened more than 1000 years later? How could we know the same development wouldn't have happened inside the empire?
- TMWNN 7y ago>This article is bad. Instead of focusing on the actual topic of the book, it immediately jumps into an absurd comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and today's America. It's a coatrack to justify a claim that "Trump is destroying America, and maybe that won't be as bad as that sounds". Which, in turn, leads to Fallows's related article (linked at the bottom), "Trump is so bad that he is destroying America, which is justification to actually destroy America (in terms of dissolving the Union)".
- cjf4 7y agoKind of funny to refer to Palo Alto and New Haven as "ancient" adjacent to Rome.
- jjuhl 7y agoThis made me think that "The End of the United States of America Won't be That Bad". Might actually be a good thing.
- Elrac 7y agoI realize I don't have the chops to argue against a professional historian, but here's what I'm seeing: The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is often called "The Dark Ages," though a lot of revisionists try to make us think this wasn't nearly as ominous as it sounds. OK, we know that time wasn't called "dark" because the Sun failed to shine; it's called "dark" because we have a dearth of historical information about it. What does this tell us? The Greco-Roman civilization produced truckloads of books on all topics of interest; there were libraries both public and private, and schools to support general literacy, often bilingual, among the upper class, at least. A good part of the literature from that age survived the multiple sackings and burnings of Rome, etc. In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any scientific progress. In another top-level comment, user "causality1" mentions a large handful of side effects of this intellectual decline, including decreases in population, life expectancy, trade, infrastructure and technology. Unlike the author, I believe a decline in a whole slew of markers of societal functionality is bad indeed.
- drewcoo 7y agoAll history is revisionist. Those dark ages were so called because of people who called their time the enlightenment, throwing a little shade at their past to make themselves seem all the brighter.
- mark_l_watson 7y agoNice read, and I think it likely that the article describes how things will be in the future. re: > by large margins, Americans feel dissatisfied with the course of national events—and by even larger margins, they feel satisfied with and connected to local institutions and city governments This. Ever since the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, I have been unhappy with resource allocation by the US federal government. I am happy and proud to pay local and even state taxes. I think that the very large amount of federal taxes that I pay goes to some expenses that I don’t approve of. Since retiring this year, I am putting much more effort into my community, mostly volunteering at our local food bank. It is difficult to overestimate the value of local networking.
- coldtea 7y agoThe title perhaps means that we are we getting at the acceptance stage of the end of the American dominance? (Hmm, the subtitle is: "Maybe the end of the American one won’t be either", so I guess I called that)! As for the end of the Roman Empire, in the Eastern part it had a succession regime. In the Western parts, where this was slow to emerge, it was the end of tons of things the citizens of the Roman republic (and westwards) took for granted, for several centuries...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thedudeabides5 7y ago"The ancient university towns of Palo Alto and New Haven may lie in different countries." This world is definitely possible, but I'd say as likely as one where the two Cambridges are part of the same union again.
- kragen 7y agoSlatestarcodex did a well-sourced and highly entertaining job rebutting this goofy “the Dark Ages weren't” meme: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ Also, life expectancy collapsed, Diocletian instituted what became near-universal serfdom, population density feel by a third (maybe nice if you were born afterwards, but can't have been super fun for the people watching their progeny diminish decade by decade), and the loss of learning inside the Empire was so complete that medieval Europeans called their standard text on astronomy the “Almagest”, its Arabic name, even though its author Ptolemy lived in the Roman Empire and presumably wrote in Greek; only Arabic translations survived. (Some other books only survived in Ireland, outside the former Empire.) The Romans were no scholars—think of the detestable Sulla or monstrous Marcellus—but what came after was far worse. From the point of view of human rights, of economic prosperity, and of scholarship, the collapse of the Western Empire began a disaster that lasted nine centuries.
- onetimeusename 7y agoI can't answer to all of those points but, at least in Post-Roman Britain, life expectancy increased after the fall of the Roman Empire.[1] [1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11415022/The-best-thing-the-Romans-did-for-Britain-was-leave-historian-claims.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/114150...
- kragen 7y agoInteresting! I didn't know about this new research. Perhaps it will hold up! Thank you!
- Keysh 7y agoI would be skeptical about attributing too much to a newspaper report about an unpublished conference presentation, particularly as the reported increase is only 2 years (with no quoted uncertainties). From this review article about post-Roman Britain: (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00085.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542...) "There is just no alternative to the conclusion that urban life ceased in most places by the mid‐fifth century, doomed by the virtual cessation of market activity, a climatic downturn which arguably destroyed the capacity of agriculture to deliver a reliable surplus, the collapse of state funding of officialdom and the soldiery, and the impact on trade of an era of barbarian raiding and internecine warfare." Of course, since historically urban life expectancy has tended to be less than small-town and rural life expectancy, it's even possible that the de-urbanization of Britain did lead to a slight increase in life expectancy.