Conquerors Today, Vanquished Tomorrow
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 5, 2002
TODI is a town in Umbria, Italy, perched high on a hill overlooking the beautiful Umbrian countryside and the Tiber Valley. Its origins are uncertain but it was probably founded about 1955BC and it retains an unspoilt medieval air. The heart of Todi is the rectangular Piazza del Popolo, right on the top of the hill with three public palaces and a duomo built on the site of a Roman temple to Apollo. The citizens promenade around the piazza on clement evenings.
Herald colleague David Dale has a plausible theory that, although Italy has had a miserable military record since the fall of the Roman Empire, it has colonised the world culturally. The pity is that Australians haven't picked up the notion of the evening promenade the passegiata where the very young play in the piazza, the young and beautiful preen themselves as they parade, the not-so-young simply chat and drink, and the total effect is of a wonderful community spirit.
They say travel broadens the mind and it probably does, although Malcolm Muggeridge said that it was, like war and fornication, exciting but not interesting. I found Todi both exciting and interesting, not least because it set me thinking about empire, from ancient Roman to modern American.
Todi was first inhabited by Umbrian tribes, then colonised by the Etruscans. The Romans conquered Umbria in the 3rd century BC. The Etruscans built a wall around Todi, a little of which remains. The Romans built a wall and left much more evidence of their presence. We know that the Roman Empire declined and fell, although historians still debate the reasons. Much less is known about the Etruscans, their decline and fall.
Yet they were formidable folk, with their own empire spreading north and south from Tuscany and Umbria and their native tongue being the third great language of culture in Italy, after Greek and Latin. From the 8th to the 6th centuries BC, they were navigators, traders and producers. Their city states prospered and their society was relatively egalitarian, although an aristocratic class emerged as decline set in. A few centuries later, the Etruscans had lost all autonomy. Their language was not spoken in Imperial Rome.
Few Etruscans could have foreseen the end of their days in the historical sun. Few Romans would have believed their once-great empire would fall apart as it did. Winston Churchill said in 1942: ``I have not become the King's First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."
History is famously difficult to predict. Pete Seeger, the American folk singer, wrote a song, Well May the World Go, in which he cautions pessimists who say that things are going from worse to worse and that the human race is probably in its last century. Did you think America would leave Vietnam the way it did? he asks. Did you think the Berlin Wall would come down so peacefully? Did you think Nelson Mandela would go from jail to become president of South Africa?
Yet one predictable thing about history is that empires do not last. The Etruscan, the Roman and the British all went for one reason or another. Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered western Asia Minor and the Mediterranean coast, subdued Egypt, occupied Babylon and fought his way across Europe and Asia to Afghanistan and India, overturning the Persian Empire. He created an economic and cultural empire from Gibraltar to the Punjab but his provinces became independent kingdoms soon after his death.
The French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turks, Austro-Hungarians and Dutch all had empires once. The Russians had an empire they called the Soviet Union, which fell apart as recently as the Berlin Wall, in 1989.
Some empires end bloodily. Some the British, for the most part end decently. Old empires were based on territory. Empires of more recent times stand on different foundations. By 1943, Churchill had seen that old empires could not survive beyond his age. ``The empires of the future are the empires of the mind," he said.
The American empire of today may be, at least in part, an empire of the mind. It is also an empire of corporate, Coca-Cola hegemony, of CNN, Sex and the City TV culture. It may be a virtual empire, but it's nonetheless an empire. And many argue that Australia is part of it.
It is hard to imagine the American empire falling but fall it will, unless it defies all of history's precedents. Morris Berman says in a new book, The Twilight of American Culture: ``There is simply no exception to the rule that all civilisations eventually fall apart, and we are not going to beat the odds, or outflank the historical record."
Berman, an American cultural historian and social critic, says his country's ``comparisons with Rome are quite startling: the late empire saw extremes of rich and poor, and the disappearance of the middle class, the costs of bureaucracy and defence pushed it towards bankruptcy; literacy and Greek learning melted away into a kind of New Age thinking ...".
Berman's book, published in the United States before September 11, has not been released in Australia. The book argues that factors within American society will bring about its disintegration. Berman has returned recently to the subject, writing in The Guardian that the events of September 11 provided another parallel with the Roman Empire the factor of external barbarism.
The Goths began pressing against the border of the Roman Empire from the late third century and scored a decisive victory at Adrianople in AD378. Siege and potential invasion became facts of Roman life after 378. Alaric, the Visigoth leader, invaded Italy in 401 and captured Rome in 410. The Vandals sacked the city in 455 and barbarian mercenaries made the Germanic chieftain Odoacer king of the western empire in 476.
``America, too, now has barbarians at the gates," Berman says. He sees other similarities even in one photograph of the shell of the World Trade Centre resembling pictures of the Roman Colosseum. He says the Romans had no understanding of their attackers or their values.
``Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore.
``Instead, the enemy is characterised as `jealous of our way of life', `hateful of freedom' and so on. Hence President Bush, no less than the Islamic terrorists, uses the language of religious war: we are on a `crusade'; the military operation was initially called `Infinite Justice'; and the enemy is `evil itself'.
``Along with this is the belief that the Pax Romana/Americana is the only `reasonable' way to live. In the American case, we have a military and economic empire that views the world as one big happy market, and believes that everybody needs to come on board. We global corporate consumerism are the future, `progress'. If the `barbarians' fail to share this vision, they are `medieval'; if they resist, `evil'."
Berman says his book is ``for oddballs, for men and women who experience themselves as expatriates within their own country. It is a guidebook of sorts, to the 21st century and beyond".
Guide Berman seems to rely to some extent on Oswald Spengler, a gloomy prophet who wrote The Decline of the West after World War I. He develops Spengler's view that every civilisation has its twilight period.
Berman lists four factors present when a civilisation collapses: accelerating social and economic inequality; declining returns on investments in organisational solutions to socio-economic problems; rapidly falling levels of literacy and critical understanding; the emptying out of culture, a kind of spiritual death.
On the dumbing down of America, he quotes a Time magazine poll showing that nearly 70 per cent believed in the existence of angels, another poll revealing that 50 per cent believed in the presence of UFOs and space aliens on Earth, and a US Department of Education survey in 1995 saying that 60 per cent of students had no idea how the US came into existence. Berman says that the US ranks 49th out of 158 United Nations countries on a literacy table. About 60 per cent of adults have never read a book of any kind.
Berman can be glib, with a broad-brush approach leading to sweeping statements based on limited evidence. He also heavily qualifies his theory, sometimes tortuously, regarding a descent into barbarism as ``certainly possible, and may even occur to some degree toward the end of the 21st century, perhaps for a short period of time; but the general outlook, it seems to me, is one of slow, rather than sudden, disintegration, for this country seems to be very good at crisis management".
He says that the dissolution of corporate hegemony is at least 40 years away. What's more, it might not be a collapse but more of a transformation, even if the United States is a cultural shambles, ``an empire wilderness". If the 20th century was the American century, the 21st would still be the Americanised century.
Then there might be the dawn of a new American culture. This could happen provided the good bits are saved, like the good bits of the Roman Empire were saved during the Dark Ages to re-emerge in the Renaissance.
Berman goes on: ``The phrase `twilight of American culture' implies an eventual dawn, and at some point we are going to emerge from our contemporary twilight and future darkness, if only because no historical configuration is the end of history."
That's a relief. We don't want any more of that ``end of history" silliness, just because one empire had won out against another.
This took me back to Todi. The victory of the Goths at Adrianople in AD378 was not the first Roman defeat. Hannibal, from Carthage, had ambushed the Romans at Lake Trasimeno, near Todi, in 217BC and killed 16,000 centurions.
The Etruscans have long gone from Todi but whatever happened to the Carthaginians? Well, they're part of Tunisia, in northern Africa.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald