Rusty Makes My Point For Me
Dean
Rusty's got a great way with words. He recently managed to distill hundreds of words I wrote into this:
Yeah.Why are so many conservatives fascinated with Rome? Personally, I think it's latent homosexuality. In contrast, Dean Esmay has a more serious take on the same question for you conservatives of what he calls "the America sucks Right."
These are the guys at your church that think God has an invisible shield over the U.S., and that as America slouches toward Gomorroh he slowly raises the shield. This line of thought can go to the extreme and become one that basically says were doomed, DOOMED, DOOMED!
He also notes:
By "C.E." he means "A.D." if you're not up on the current poli-sci lingo.In many ways, this argument is very similar to the namby-pambies of the 'hate America first' Left and self-proclaimed paleocons on the Right who share the belief that America is destined for failure, soon, because that is the fate of all empires.
The remedy? End the empire, bring troops home, etc. Only by ending the empire can America be saved.
Which, of course, is stupid, since at any point in Rome's history the same argument could have been made. Bring troops home from Palestine now, one could have argued in 70 C.E. Of course, 300 years later you would have found the city of Caesaria, near modern Haifa, bustling with activity--all of it Roman.
He also has more to say on the idea that all nations and empires are doomed to fail. Which he's quite correct about.
Now, I do know guys that are big military history buffs, and they love Rome along with the Civil War, WWII, etc. But I'd always gotten the impression that the Romans were great engineers, but a little on the brutal and bloody-thirsty side.
Statements like that detract from the serious argument you both are making. I don't think the US is at all like ancient Rome and all this business of stretching either historical or current facts to make it seem like they are similar really chaps my hide.
I've been accused of being a Pollyanna because I'm still pro-American, but I have yet to see anyone make a rational argument that we are on the road to ruin. There are some cultural trends that I detest, but as someone mentioned here in another comment thread, these things are cyclical -- licentiousness alternates with puritanism as people react to one or the other being taken to an extreme.
As a culture, the US is quite young. Eventually we may grow up and stop doing idiotic things like equating sex with violence in movie ratings, or giggling like schoolboys and pretending to be horrified when someone flashes a nipple. Or we may not. But IMO there is absolutely no evidence that we're in anything other than the typical cultural mood swing.
To those who think we're in decline, I assign to you watching some of the recent spate of films set in the '70s, and perfectly evoking the despair that was prevalent in that era. Even as a kid I was acutely aware of it. The world was a grim place. Now, there is positive change in all sorts of ways that were unimaginable only 30 years ago.
As to why conservatives have traditionally admired ancient Rome, the Republic and/or the Empire does, at first glance, seem something of an anomaly, seeing as how it was the Romans, not the Jews, who crucified their Savior (most conservatives are Christians). But I can think of three reasons:
1) It was Rome that defeated Carthage. Rome vs. Carthage stands in for the more ancient and continuing conflict of West vs. East, going back at least to the Persian Wars. Carthage was also an outpost of that civilization known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians and to the Hebrews as the Canaanites. The nature of their Polytheism, centering on the sacrifice of their own first-born infants to Moloch, was well known. G. K. Chesterton devoted a chapter in his The Everlasting Man, "The War of the Gods Against the Demons", to this final struggle between the two Polytheisms, the Roman against the Carthaginian. I, too, root for the Romans in this conflict. As did Dr. Max Rafferty in his Suffer, Little Children (1963) (against progressive education).
We of the West today take a kindlier view of the Roman-Greek Polytheism, as art-inspiring fantasy at least (e.g., see the Renaissance), than the Hebrews took of the Canaanite Polytheism, and it is no wonder. It is no wonder that, in the face of the abominable Moloch, the Prophets of the Old Testament held so strongly to their own more righteous Yahweh.
It is interesting that Chesterton's adversary on the secularist-progressivist Left, H. G. Wells, sided with the Carthaginians, as did Freud.
2) It was mainly through the Romans that we of Northern Europe received the Classical, Greek, heritage which, along with the Jewish, the Christian (now split into Catholic and Protestant), and the indigineous Northern European (Celtic, Gothic, Norse) elements, makes up our Western high culture. The Greeks originated the art, literature, philosophy, and historiography of the Classical culture, which the Romans then conserved and transmitted to us. It is no accident that most of us, from childhood, are more familiar with the Roman Gods and Goddesses than with their Greek counterparts (e.g., Mars and Venus rather than Ares and Aphrodite). Latin is the historic language of the Catholic church, whose seat is still in Rome. It was the language of every educated man throughout much of our history.
3) Rome stands for law and order, authority. The Romans extended, by force, their code of laws to the Mediterranean world, from Judea to Gaul and Britain, and much of our law, and our legal terminology (including, I have found, the names of many legal-oriented blogs) to this day derives from the Romans. References to political authority in the New Testament are necessarily to that of the Romans, and these tend to command obedience, e.g., Christ's command to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's". When the Roman Emperor Constantine himself became a Christian, that made his authority all the more authoritative among Christians.
And, then, when the Christians were themselves in charge of the Roman Empire, they owed her more than the obedience of good slaves. They had to actively side with her against the barbarians. They had to become warriors for Rome. They became loyal to Rome, and they transmitted that loyalty, along with their theology, to the Northern barbarians whom they spent the next several hundred years converting.
I must mention again, as I often have in the past, that many or most of today's conservatives would have been the last to convert, would have been those who held most tenaciously, fiercely, dogmatically to their old Gods and Goddesses. But, when they did finally convert, they became the deepest and fiercest Christians, the Christians of the Crusades. As I have often remarked, the word "Pagan" or "Heathen" is the exact equivalent of what we today call a "redneck" or "Red Stater", i.e., rural, tradition-minded, God-Family-Country folk, who today would never think of calling themselves "Pagans", but are instead the most fundamental Protestants, the most orthodox Catholics.