Time for more upbeat historical memes
Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is David Walker – the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, no less – who writes in the FT that:
America’s fiscal, healthcare, education, energy, environment, immigration and Iraq policies are in need of review and revision. Timely action is needed because Washington’s historical crisis-management approach to dealing with hard public policy choices is no longer prudent.
Rather than discussing whether America today is or isn’t like Rome’s last days in the late fourth century CE, I’ll just note how successfully the “US heading into a decline-and-fall scenario” meme continues to propagate itself (c.f. last week’s post about Thomas Homer-Dixon‘s latest book), not least among Americans themselves – and make two additional observations.
One is that the “decline and fall” meme of popular imagination – riots, starvation, conquest, a thousand years in the Dark Ages – rests on an incomplete, and rather Atlanticist, view of Rome. After all, there is the small matter of the eastern empire, i.e. Byzantium, as it became. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome runs for a full 1,045 years beyond Alaric’s conquest of Italy in 408CE, all the way to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium’s rise after the split of the Roman Empire provides a precise illustration of Homer-Dixon’s central point: if breakdown can lead to collapse, it can also be a springboard for transformation and renewal. This is a useful and important counter-meme to the riots / starvation / Dark Age meme – and one which deserves to be propagated more often.
The other observation is simply: we could do with some more constructive historical analogies than the ones we have today. Other than the decline-and-fall analogy, the other one most discussed today is Vietnam; another relentlessly gloomy reference point in the popular imagination. (Update: I have just remembered the subject of my last post – whether Iraq is at a ‘Weimar moment’. So I include myself in this criticism!)
Maybe we could do with some more hopeful historical analogies; so here are three starters for ten. Other suggestions welcome.
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