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Is America Historically
Doomed to Decline and Fall Like Rome Did?
What Cultural Factors
Caused Other Empires to Decline and Fall?
Can We Learn from History?
By Eric V. Snow
The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) once
cynically commented, “What experience and history teach us is this—that people
and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on
principles deduced from it.” Ever since
the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, America seemingly
stands over the world as a great colossus economically, culturally, and militarily. Despite the present tests of increasing
Iraqi restiveness against the Coalition’s occupying forces and the launching of
the war against Islamic terrorism since the events of 9-11 and the looming
challenges stemming from the European Union’s growing political and economic
unity and China’s rapid modernization and industrialization, America’s lone
superpower status still presently remains fundamentally uncontested. But could this change? Despite its preeminence, could America still
decline and fall like the great empires of the past, such as those of Britain,
Spain, Islam, Rome, Persia, and Babylon?
Surveying the history of past fallen empires, the British military
officer and historian Sir John Glubb Pasha (1897-1987) discerned in his book,
“The Fate of Empires,” a general life cycle of stages through which empires
developed as they started, expanded, matured, declined, and collapsed. If America today has entered the ending
stages of this life cycle, Americans should critically self-examine the current
state of their culture to see what could be done to prevent the same grim fate.
Of course,
some may object to calling America an “empire” because this nation usually
didn’t make a point of systematically conquering and directly ruling large
numbers of alien peoples with different cultures and varied languages for
extended time periods. The case of the
Philippines (1898-1946), acquired from Spain after the Spanish-American War,
stands forth as the clearest exception, since a major native independence
movement initially had to be militarily crushed at significant cost in order to
hold onto these islands. But through
the mechanisms of sporadic military interventions, economic aid, business
investment, and the latent mechanisms of “informal empire,” American influence
in the Caribbean, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world extends far beyond
just those areas abroad America directly administers politically today or
controlled in decades gone by. In this
light, historical comparisons of the United States with past empires are still
sound.
Glubb Pasha
discovered that empires experienced similar cultural developments while
experiencing a life cycle in a series of stages which may overlap. As he generalized, the stages are: (1) the age of outburst (or pioneers), (2)
the age of conquests, (3) the age of commerce, (4) the age of affluence, (5)
the age of intellect, (6) the age of decadence, and (7) the age of decline and
collapse. Each stage helps to lead to
the next as the values of the people change over time as influenced by
military, political, economic, and religious developments. To generalize, the adventuresome manly
values of the warrior propel an empire to power as it expands its territory by
conquest in the first two ages. Later,
the (inevitably) materialistic and increasingly prudent, risk-averse values of
businessmen take over at the highest levels of society during the ages of
commerce and affluence. Their societies
downplay the values of the solider normally not “from motives of conscience,
but rather because of the weakening of a sense of duty in citizens, and the
increase in selfishness, manifested in the desire for wealth and ease,” as
Glubb Pasha maintains. Instead of
taking more land (i.e., staying on the offensive), empires at this stage build
walls (i.e., defensive barriers) instead, such as the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s
wall near the Scottish border, the Great Wall of China, even the Maginot line
of twentieth-century France. Then the
wealth acquired by conquest and (later) business investment promoted by the
political unity provided by the empire (such as how the brutal Mongol Empire
later promoted the caravan trade across Eurasia) is later spent to establish
educational institutions such as universities and secondary schools. During the age of intellect, these may produce
intellectuals (such as the medieval Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averoes,
who drank deeply from the waters of Greek philosophy) who are skeptical of at
least some of the values and religious beliefs of the founders and developers
of their empire. Alternatively, these
intellectuals may administer educational institutions that educate the elite or
part of the masses in subjects either impractical (i.e., rhetoric in the Rome
of the Caesars, when persuading assemblies emotionally was no longer of political
value) or mostly oriented towards financial success (e.g., today, the M.B.A),
not character development and virtue, as in the early Roman Republic. As both the elites and masses discard the
self-confident, self-disciplined values that created the empire because of
affluence’s corrosive effects, moral decay and decadence set in. Eventually, the empire collapses from (say)
an outside power (e.g., the barbarians in Rome’s case) or an energetic internal
force (e.g., the communists in Czarist Russia’s case). Likewise, God warned Israel against
departing from worshipping him when they became materially satisfied after
entering the Promised Land (Deut. 8:11-15, 17-18; 31:20). In short, as the growth of wealth and
comfort undermine the values of character that led to the given empire’s
creation through self-sacrifice and discipline in its initial stages, an empire
increasingly grows weak and subject to destruction to forces arising inside or
outside of it.
Has the
United States entered the latter phases of the empire life cycle despite only
having been independent from Britain a little over 225 years, despite still
being a “young nation”? Does America
today have the same values or cultural developments that past empires such as
Rome had before they fell? For example,
who are the nation’s heroes, and what does their selection indicate about the
values of its people? Today, in America
people admire and pursue avidly news (i.e., gossip) on celebrities such as
sports stars, singers, actors, and musicians.
Now Glubb Pasha notes that the heroes of an empire’s leaders and people
change over time as their values do.
Soldiers, builders, pioneers, and explorers are admired in the initial
stages of the empire life cycle.
Successful businessmen and entrepreneurs are held up for admiration
during the ages of commerce and affluence (cf. the values of prudence, saving,
and foresight found in the Horatio Alger stories promoted by late
nineteenth-century middle class Americans).
The intellectuals and academics are also increasingly admired during the
age of intellect. During the last
stages of decadence and decline, an empire’s people often admire and emulate
the athletes, musicians, and actors generally regardless of how corrupt their
private lives are. Remarkably, Glubb
Pasha found in tenth-century Baghdad, during the Arab Abbasid Empire’s decline,
writers complained about the corrupting influence of singers of erotic songs on
the young people! How different is the
America of recent decades, whether the target of conservatives was Elvis, the
Beatles, Ozzy Osbourne, or Marilyn Manson?
The immense attachment people have to the (rock) music they love,
regardless of its often spiritually rotten lyrical content (including sometimes
even positive Satanic allusions), encourages them to esteem people whose
lifestyle is truly degenerate because of frequent drug use and casual sex.
More
generally, what are some common features of an empire’s culture in its
declining period? Glubb Pasha and
Bernard Goetz in “When the Empire Strikes Out” (which usefully summarizes the
former’s work) describe developments such as the following: 1.
The decline of sexual morality, an aversion to marriage in favor of
cohabitation, and an increased divorce rate, such as in the upper class of the
late Roman Republic and early Empire.
The first-century A.D. Roman writer Seneca cynically commented about
Roman upper class women, “They divorce in order to re-marry. They marry in order to divorce.” The birth rate declines and abortion and
infanticide both increase as family size is deliberately limited. The historian W.H. McNeill has referred to
the “biological suicide of the Roman upper classes” as one reason for Rome’s
decline. Gay sex becomes publicly
acceptable and spreads, such as it was among the ancient Greeks before their
conquest by Rome. 2. The increased economic and political power
of women, such as by their entry into the professions and the general workforce. Arab historians complained about the
increased influence of women in public life during their empire’s decline. The Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 55 to c. 127 A.D.) was horrified by
female gladiators, poets, athletes, and actresses. 3. An influx of foreign
immigrants into the empire’s capital and major cities. (This could also be elsewhere within its
borders, such as the late Roman Empire trying to co-opt barbarians by settling
them within the frontier regions of its territory and hiring them to fight
other barbarians). The diversity stemming
from this cosmopolitan element introduces an (inevitably) culturally divisive
element into the empire greatly in excess of its percentage of the
population. 4. Both frivolity and pessimism increase among
the people and their leaders. The
spirit described in I Cor. 15:32 spreads in society, “Let us eat and drink, for
tomorrow we die.” As people cynically
give up on finding solutions to the problems of life and society, they drop out
of the system and turn to mindless entertainment, luxuries and sexual activity,
and drugs or alcohol. The astonishingly
corrupt and lavish parties of the Roman Empire’s elite, such as the practice of
the Emperor Nero spending the modern equivalent of $500,000 for just the
flowers at some banquets, are a case in point. 5. The government
provides welfare for the poor extensively.
For example, the masses of the city of Rome (population, perhaps 1.2
million in the second century A.D.) were kept content by government-provided
bread and spectacles. Around one-half
of its non-slave population was on the dole at least part of the year. Although this provision may seem to manifest
Christian compassion (Mark 14:7), it also can encourage laziness and dependency
as well (II Thess. 3:10-12), especially when the poor perceive relief as a
right of permanent duration, not a privilege to tide them over temporary bad
times.
Now a sharp-eyed skeptical critic
may ask about why it’s legitimate to cite evidence of family disintegration or
of other societal decline in Rome centuries before it fell. Did the Christianization of the Empire after
Constantine proclaimed the Edict of Milan granting Christianity toleration (313
A.D.) help improve Rome’s family life or reform the values of its governing
officials? True, the small minority that
was Catholic Christian (perhaps 10% of the Roman population when the Peace of
the Church came) had to be a largely dedicated lot because of the waves of
persecution that periodically struck the Church. But in the mass conversions that came in the fourth and fifth
centuries, many of these people were far less committed; they changed their
personal behavior little if any at all.
One Christian priest in the mid-fifth century, Salvian, complained about
people who were Christian in name only, such as the carousing members of the
elite whose behavior hardly differed from that found at the court of Nero some
four centuries earlier: “Something
still remained to them of their property, but nothing of their character. They reclined at feasts, forgetful of their
honor, forgetting justice, forgetting their faith and the name they bore. There were the leaders of the state, gorged
with food, dissolute from winebibbing, wild with shouting, giddy with revelry,
completely out of their senses, or rather, since this was their usual
condition, precisely in their senses.”
In short, the superficial Christianization (which, incidentally,
included the Church compromising by adopting various pagan beliefs and
practices) of the Roman Empire before its collapse didn’t seriously improve the
moral condition of Rome’s leaders and masses, thus leaving the pre-existing
ominous cultural trends in place.
When we
examine this list of indicators of an empire’s cultural and moral decline, does
anybody really think the United States hasn’t entered the stages of decadence
and decline? True, in the past decade
or so, the tidal wave of social and cultural decline unleashed by the 1960’s in
America has ebbed some, as the rates of abortion, divorce, illegitimate births,
drug abuse, welfare dependency, and violent crime either have declined or have
gone up much more slowly. Furthermore,
some of indicators of decline aren’t all bad.
Some immigration is good, for often it amounts to a “brain drain” from
Third World countries that benefits the United States economically. And,
indeed, the United States historically is a melting pot nation of
immigrants. Nevertheless, the present
influx of immigrants, legal or illegal, equal in impact to the wave that
arrived at America’s shores at the turn of the previous century, are far more
apt to be a divisive force because the intelligentsia has adopted
multiculturalism as an ideal, not assimilation as it was a hundred years
ago. Today, multiculturalism is the
ideology underlying a potentially ultimate political Balkanization (cf., the
liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s “The Disuniting of America”),
such as if and when a Spanish-speaking majority inhabits the American
southwest. Then, of course, many women
with young children, or older ones without any children at home, have to work
full-time because ex-husbands (or ex-boyfriends) dump them in order to escape
the burdens of fatherhood or to trade in their old wife for a younger
model. And it’s clearly better for
young single women or even older widows who haven’t reached retirement age to
work outside the home rather than be dependent on handouts from their families
or the government. But although the
traditional sexual division of labor, of men working outside the home and women
working inside it, may appear to be rather arbitrary, discarding it or
reversing it simply won’t work for most of society in the long run because of
the innately different personalities of men and women. In a process that he has dubbed “sexual
suicide,” the sociologist George Gilder in “Men and Marriage” describes how the
feminist values presently enshrined in our culture lead to demographic
decline. For as women increasingly feel
the need to both bring home the bacon and to fry it up in a pan, the men
correspondingly feel useless and feel free to neglect more their family and
work responsibilities.
Given the historical knowledge of Sir John Glubb Pasha’s
“The Fate of Empires” and how its insights can be applied to America (and other
English-speaking nations, including Britain), how should true Christians react? We have to redouble our efforts to warn the
world’s nations (Matt. 24:14), especially those largely inhabited by the
descendants of the tribe of Joseph (cf. Ezekiel 33:1-9), about their fate if
they don’t repent. We ourselves have to
avoid letting our own sense of loyalty to our nations blind us to how much
displeasure God has in our nations’ sins and how they will be punished in years
to come. By knowing history better, we
can project our likely national futures better, which fits the observation of the
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “The farther backward you can look,
the farther forward you are likely to see.”
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Is the theory of
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0908.htm
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Christian teaching from ancient paganism? /Bookhtml/Paganism influence issue article
Journal 013003.htm
Which is right?: Judaism or Christianity? /Apologeticshtml/Is Christianity a Fraud vs
Conder Round 1.htm
/Apologeticshtml/Is Christianity a Fraud vs
Conder Round 2.htm
Should God’s existence be
proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be
Proven Fideism vs WCG.htm
Does
the Bible teach blind faith? Click
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Knowledge.htm
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