About the Analogy

As you know, I find historical analogies valuable. Most germane to our current times are the old Soviet Union, 16th and 17th century England, and – probably most telling – Rome in late republican and early imperial times. Maureen Mullarkey of the Federalist has addressed this subject. Here’s her going-in squib:

We learn from history only if we draw the right lessons from it. The radical distance between the Roman world and our own is far-reaching.

Radical distance? What does she mean by that? Read on.

Here are excerpts from the article itself:

One thing everybody knows about Rome is that it fell. Just why it did is still debated. Classicists can count 200-plus reasons for the dissolution – or evolution – of what was once the known world’s superpower.

Fall, however, is a sexier word. It goes well with caricatures of Neronian debauchery fondly promoted in nineteenth century moralizing paintings or in movies like Fellini’s leering ‘Satyricon.’

Taking cues from Gibbon, we graft decline onto fall and use it as a stick to beat ourselves. Indeed, a caning might help. Still, we should be cautious in drawing analogies between the classical world and our own. By reading back into history today’s milieu and preoccupations, we look into the past but see only ourselves…

She then quotes from a recent sermon given by the priest in her Tridentine-mass Catholic church:

“I have become increasingly convinced that we are now living in a pagan society. Our country is pagan. Our civilization is pagan. Pagan, not just secular. I used to think, Yes our society is very secular, but certainly we are not quite as bad as was the pagan world in the time before Christianity. Now I have to admit, yes we are that bad.”

And raises an important quibble with it:

…Steeped in gods, the pagan world was deeply religious. Religion was a matter of ritual, not dogma, and proper worship was crucial to the wellbeing of both the state and individual households. Ethics remained the province of philosophers and moralists, who defended the sense of duty – pietas – at the core of what it meant to be Roman. Men might wonder about the nature of the gods, or to what extent they concerned themselves with humanity. But there was no question that they existed. They were significant powers on whom men depended. The pagan temperament was not nihilist.

By contrast, modern man has put God out of mind. Modernity declared him dead or missing some time ago, an outdated hypothesis. Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray identified the mark of modernity as “the will to atheism.” If God is present in the midst of men, then man is obliged to recognize himself as a being made by God with a distinct essence, nature, and destiny. He is not free to fashion himself ex nihilo according to his own wishes.

What is the advancing transgender phenomenon if not an extreme exercise in self-design? What we face today is not paganism. It is the desolate freedom of the nihilist…

Hence the “radical distance.”

This is a good point, but is it really correct? She draws attention to the modern era’s “will to atheism.” Yet what I see in modern leftism – now, not in Karl Marx’s time – is a resurgence of what you might call the “will to religion.” The need for belief is, after all, a constant in the human condition. The left is far along in creating a new official pantheon of gods and goddesses. Among them are the ruling deity (currently Obama Optimus), the powerful god Diversity (and its attendant furies Islamophobia, Homophobia, Racism, and Sexism), the goddess Gaia (lady of global warming and climate change), and other lesser supernatural beings (like Fortuna, patroness of those idiots who chose to fund the nanny state by playing the lottery). The left’s clerisy stresses the importance of ritual – politically correct words (“Say it this way and only this way”) and special devotional sacrifices (taxes rendered and freedoms foregone). And there is the persecution of unbelievers, especially Christians, which goes forward with increasing enthusiasm. Salve, citizen. All this seems very Roman to me.

I’ll agree there are differences between now and then. Those old Romans were never deliberately self-destructive and never anti-military. They never took the side of Rome’s enemies. Another difference lies in technology. While Roman times were marked by ubiquitous slavery, our times are characterized by ubiquitous machines, by electronic devices and – increasingly – by robots. Yet functionally you could argue this is all the same. Sedan chair, Tesla, different tech, same end.

There are many, many similarities. Among them are the corrosive effects of a major military victory and a rapid run-up in wealth (ours after World War II, their after the Punic Wars), the progressive crumbling of the pillars of self-government, rising corruption, the role of personal ambition in subverting the republic, the shift in politics from philosophical-ideological to personal-factional (leading to the death of politics), barbarian invasions (aka uncontrolled immigration), bread and circuses (welfare and mass entertainment), and the related penchant for viewing violence (virtual now vice actual then).

So, on balance, I still think there is value in reading those old Romans, from Tacitus to Marcus Aurelius, and their chroniclers, from Edward Gibbon to Tom Holland. I guess I’m more with Mrs Mullarkey’s priest than with her. Therefore I also see value in re-reading those portions of the New Testament wherein the apostles describe the Roman World – its failings, its contradictions, its dangers. In that at least I’m confident columnist Mullarkey and I will agree, given the motto with which she ends her article:

Spera in Deo.

Hope in God

Big G, not little g. Certainly not Obama Optimus, Diversity, or Gaia.

– Tacitus

Copyright 2016 Tacitus
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