Walter Issacson: Is America the New Rome?
[Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, is the author of “Einstein: His Life and Universe” and “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.”]
The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it. As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies. Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those who have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and then they both invoke the bread-and-circus days of the overstretched Roman empire in an attempt to sound even more subtle and profound.
In his provocative and lively “Are We Rome?” Cullen Murphy provides these requisite caveats as he engages in a serious effort to draw lessons from a comparison of America’s situation today with that of imperial Rome. Founded, according to tradition, as a farming village in 753 B.C., Rome enjoyed 12 centuries of rise and fall before the barbarians began overwhelming the gates in the fifth century. During that time it became a prosperous and sometimes virtuous republic and then a dissolute and corrupt empire that was destined to be mined for contemporary lessons by historians beginning with Edward Gibbon, whose first volume of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was fittingly published in the British empire in 1776.
There are almost as many causes cited for Rome’s collapse as there are historians. But the general sense is that the empire became too fat, flabby and unwieldy. As Gibbon put it, “prosperity ripened the principle of decay.” Rome’s decline came to be viewed with an air of tragic inevitability fraught with resonance. As Byron wrote in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”: “There is the moral of all human tales; / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, / First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.”...
Read entire article at NYT Book Review
The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it. As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies. Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those who have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and then they both invoke the bread-and-circus days of the overstretched Roman empire in an attempt to sound even more subtle and profound.
In his provocative and lively “Are We Rome?” Cullen Murphy provides these requisite caveats as he engages in a serious effort to draw lessons from a comparison of America’s situation today with that of imperial Rome. Founded, according to tradition, as a farming village in 753 B.C., Rome enjoyed 12 centuries of rise and fall before the barbarians began overwhelming the gates in the fifth century. During that time it became a prosperous and sometimes virtuous republic and then a dissolute and corrupt empire that was destined to be mined for contemporary lessons by historians beginning with Edward Gibbon, whose first volume of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was fittingly published in the British empire in 1776.
There are almost as many causes cited for Rome’s collapse as there are historians. But the general sense is that the empire became too fat, flabby and unwieldy. As Gibbon put it, “prosperity ripened the principle of decay.” Rome’s decline came to be viewed with an air of tragic inevitability fraught with resonance. As Byron wrote in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”: “There is the moral of all human tales; / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, / First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.”...