Why Edward Gibbon’s masterwork is still worth our time.
Gilbert T. Sewall
No matter who wins the 2016 election, the American political scene brings to mind Rome in the age of bad emperors. The days of a wise Trajan or Hadrian seem distant. The republican politics of a Cato or Cicero, long gone and barely recalled. The dowager empress plots her triumphal entry and revenge. The man on the white horse makes impossible promises to the rabble in demotic language. Sclerotic bureaucracies and armed mercenaries overextended abroad; a restless client class; migrants with alien idea systems and languages moving in uninvited; collapsing verities, and related, indolence and unreason: all aboard for imperial decline.
To the good, U.S. politics do not yet match the days of the Emperor Elagabalus who ruled from 218 to 222 A.D. and who makes a memorable cameo appearance in Gibbon’s first volume. The next president will not be a teenage Syrian transvestite parading up Capitol Hill to worship a black conical meteorite as Sol Invictus. But the louche 2016 presidential election portends politico-cultural shifts as dramatic as the late Roman Empire’s. Who can imagine the Election of 2020?........Almost 250 years later, this republic endures as a global empire. An age of bad emperors has arrived, and with them, it is easy to suppose, further turmoil and political distress. “The kind of culture that can maintain reasonable human commitments takes centuries to create but only a few generations to destroy,” the late political scientist James Q. Wilson warned. “And once destroyed, those who suddenly realize what they have lost will also realize that political action cannot, except at a very great price, restore it.”........To Read More....
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