Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
― Edward Gibbon
This is a long, long post that you probably need to spend some time on (especially watching the embedded videos). This post is in particular for the folks that think that the end of America will be a cakewalk/simple/glorious. I don't argue with the Desired End State; I'm not at all sure of what will be left when it's all done. You know, this glorious future:
I've written before about the fall of Empire, and how fast and hard it falls:
This is Monte Testaccio in Rome. It is a hill made entirely of broken pottery, and it dates to the first and second centuries AD. It's over 100 feet high, around a kilometer around, and historians think that it used to be much larger but has eroded over the last two millennia. The Roman "bread and circuses" was a huge welfare project that fed much of the city's population, and which required huge imports of not just grain but also olive oil - over a million gallons of oil each year, every year, for hundreds of years. The oil was shipped in big clay pots, but what do you do with the pots when you've distributed the oil? The Romans were the best engineers until at least the eighteenth century, and so they came up with an engineering solution: they made a mountain out of broken up pots.
And then it all fell, and fell so far and hard that it was forgotten. The Roman Forum itself - the political center of the Ancient World for four centuries or more - became a cow field, the Campo Vaccino.
The Testaccio-monte is being excavated today, and is a treasure trove of ancient Roman economic knowledge that had long since fallen into a barbarian black hole. You can skip this video if you don't care about how hard Rome fell; but if you think that the end of the American Empire will be comfortable you really should watch it all.
The Roman Empire was unique until the 1700s, in that large amounts of bulk goods were shipped all over their Empire. Back In The Day, you could eat off of dishes made in North Africa and drink wine from Greece even if you lived in England. But then it fell. And it fell so hard that it took a millennium to recover.
Kenneth Clarke's outstanding series Civilization confronted this head on in a way that looks to get him canceled in today's "everybody gets a trophy" world. Clarke really gets to the heart of the matter about what caused a great civilization to fall between about 7:30 and 10 minutes into his first episode. I recommend you watch all of them ( all 13 episodes), all the way through which will make you better educated than 90% of anyone you will ever run into.
And in answer to the inevitable questions, yes I did watch this series when it was shown on PBS in the early 1970s. Dad was a history professor and Mom was a librarian - of course they made me stay up and watch this. And so if you have a problem with posts about events with historical interests - posts of Borepatchian length - I blame my parents.
Except they never played this, which circles back to those who think that it's time to hoist the Black Flag:
Man, Freddy Mercury and Queen were a talent for the ages, although I'd also love to hear the music that was composed by Nero. Presumably he was also a talent for ages, but we will have to be satisfied with his final words: What a talent dies with me. Probably he was no Freddy Mercury.
None of this is to say it's not worth fighting for the America that we knew and grew up with. It's just to recognize that like Monte Testaccio, that may already be lost in the past. But we should also realize that the fight - if fought - will be brutal beyond our imagination. When Civilization falls, it falls hard and takes a long, long time to recover. The 1200 year recovery is shown well here between 2:30 and 5:00 into the video, although (as with all of the videos here) I encourage you to watch them all. Think of it as Borepatch University:
And so to the fall of Civilization: there have always been winners and losers, down through history:
Rome's Intelligentsia had been failing from the mid- Second Century, say around 140 A.D. The Dark Ages arrived by the Fourth Century. Certainly it seemed that way to the bulk of the population. Those who were not chattel slaves were bound to the soil as serfs by 330 A.D., by an act of Constantine. Sharecropping the huge latifundia estates, they neither knew nor cared who was running the show. An ever smaller elite, relying on a fabulously expensive bloated bureaucracy, held on by hiring barbarian mercenaries until the barbarians finally realized they were running the show in all but name. It was then but a short step, and sic transit gloria mundi.
Certainly the elites were horrified at the change. For them, it was the beginning of a Dark Age, as the skills they had carefully nurtured suddenly were seen to be worthless by the new Overlords. It's said that history is written by the winners; the history of the fall of Rome was written by the losers.
The current Intellectual Elite sound eerily similar to those ancient scribblers. A world view has run out of gas, and is looking like it will be replaced, and those at the top of Fortuna's Wheel fear that the wheel will keep spinning, and the only direction for them to go is down. The Progressive Agenda has had a 160 year run, but has not produced a truly first rate intellect since John Kenneth Galbraith, or possibly Pat Moynihan. The last 30 years have been a desert, where the interesting intellectual action has all been on the other side.
And so back to the original topic of the post, those who think that the end of America will be a cakewalk/simple/glorious. I don't argue with the Desired End State; I'm not at all sure of what will be left when things are done. It think it might be a lot like this (although I can't understand the language, but things get particularly spicy around the 5:00 mark). [Embedding is disabled, but I strongly encourage your to watch this]
Like I said, I don't argue with the Desired End State; I'm just not at all sure of what will be left when things are done. But I do have a feeling, like one written down in the 11th Century and put to music in the 20th. O Fortuna:
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
Fortuna's Wheel has winners and losers. We shall all of us have to choose when we think we have more to win from another spin of the wheel. Just understand that while you might win, others might lose. Your calculus should consider who they are and whether fate should pluck their vibrating string.
Because when Civilization collapses, it falls hard. I posted before about the Fayum Mummy Portraits from the Roman Empire and how portrait painting was a thriving (and stunningly competent) part of their civilization. Then that civilization fell and it took a millennium to recover.
My opinion is that this was the greatest portrait (that we know of) for 1500 years, faded by 1900 years. It dates from around the reign of Emperor Claudius, or possibly Nero.
And then it was gone, as if it had never been.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.- Horace Smith, "Ozymandias"
May God Bless this Republic. We will need it.
13 comments:
Well done, BP!
Besides "Civilization" I was going to recommend both "Connections", and Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man".
I agree, if the balloon goes up it's going to bring great violence to people who have never seen it, experienced it, or know how to deal with it.
There will be blood....
This is a clip from YouTube of a BBC presentation of Carmina Burana from 1994. It is one if my favorites.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d801fHGW1yk
It took decades of constant, dedicated action by the enemies of civilization to get us to this point. Even now, war is by no means desirable. It is merely necessary. We can fight and hope to survive, or surrender and be marched onto the cattle cars.
80 million dead. 100 million displaced. It will be like another WWII fought entirely inside our boundaries. And the outcome will only be this good if we win.
It is possible to maintain a constitutional republic if we let/encourage the Clinton Archipelago to go its own way and try to restore constitutional forms and Western civilization in what amounts to most of the land mass. It will be a tough slog but it will be completely impossible if we have to drag all the leftists along with us while they are trying to kill us. Otherwise McChuck is absolutely right. Pay special attention to his last sentence.
A thoughtful post to be sure.
Oddly the immediate post Fall world did not look bad to those living in it. The various Gothic, Frank and Vandal states did at least as good a job as the late Roman Empire, even giving token recognition to their predecessors. As such post Roman coins of this era always call the Boss Rex, as if to keep up the fiction that he was just running things for the Eastern Empire.
It was actually Civil War that split and eventually ruined the Roman empire, and issues of how power is transferred are very important in that regard. Once the West fell it was still going reasonably well until the East attempted to reconquer it. Justinian and Belisarius were undoubtedly the greatest ruler/general combination of ancient times, and I can think of few modern ones to rival them. But they were guilty of over reach. Once the aqueducts fell in the Gothic Wars Rome became a near ghost town.
So I'm not inclined to think of Civil War in any of its forms. It's the worst kind of human conflict.
Rather I wonder if the current Progressive ascendency is not a mirage just as the Soviet Block turned out to be. Gerald Ford, the last truly admirable President was castigated for saying in a debate that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. He was a prophet, and so of course was not appreciated in his own time.
T.Wolter
Well done, sir! And agree on the Ascent of Man!
Hey Borepatch;
I had commented that we would have to wander in the desert for 40 year like the Israelites did after leaving Egypt until most all of the ones that were born of bondage were dead and the ones that were left were born free and were of a far hardier constitution than the ones that walked out of Egypt. I believe that we will have to do the same thing, the ones will have to be born under freedom or adversity until all the ones that remembered their time of bondage in Egypt and were mentally soft were no longer in charge, and the ones that were born free were the ones in charge.
I fear The Fourth Turning is upon us.
I think it might look more like Venezuela. It's no longer about the socialism, though that's what initially brought it about. Now their whole society is broken. How do you fix that? If you've seen Caracas before and after it's staggering.
Their best people are gone, you can't just rebuild a highly evolved society with manual labor. Once you break an advanced society, as Rome was, the road back is nigh on impossible. It can only be replaced with something new.
I think it might look more like Venezuela. It's no longer about the socialism, though that's what initially brought it about. Now their whole society is broken. How do you fix that? If you've seen Caracas before and after it's staggering.
Their best people are gone, you can't just rebuild a highly evolved society with manual labor. Once you break an advanced society, as Rome was, the road back is nigh on impossible. It can only be replaced with something new.
If the empire collapses but we can have a Republic for our troubles, the suffering will not have been for nothing.
Despite what the money junkies tell you it can be done less than a hundred years ago we made 95% of what we used here at home.
We throw out the foreigners and the crooks and tighten some belts we can do that again.
America for Americans would be a nice change from invade the world, invite the world , loot the world.
This is an exceptional post ... well done!
We should all be speaking about the United States and the American Republic as a thing of the past. This country has never been "united," so that label is a lie, and the American Republic has long been taken over by a leftist dictatorship (some of whom dress up in sheep's clothing). The Soros plan for America is working.
There is no more "we, the people." We should stop using such delusional terms. It is one thing to BS others -- quite a different matter when we BS ourselves. What now exists is an oppressive state run by political elites who boss around 330 million peasants. That's the "new reality."
What is the solution? After 100 years of leftist brainwashing in our public schools, there is no solution. It's far too late for solutions. Now, it's just a matter of adjusting to the effects of own malaise, just as in Rome.
Let's all readjust our time clock. The year is 500 AD ... there is no more Rome.
I believe I read somewhere that there are still certain building techniques that the Romans created with concrete that we still cannot replicate to this day.
The Fall of The Empire - as admirably written up here - was a long slow, painful affair. As pointed out, even the conquerors held on to the fiction of the Empire (really, until the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806) as the levels of civilization fell. That is the tragedy that Borepatch points out to so well. You went from Grecian plates in Britain to civil wars and burning and the large disruption of trade.
I do not know if America's tale is told. To me, I suppose, it already is: I cannot see coming back from where we are. This works for large portions of the rest of the world as if we are fighting amongst ourselves, we are scarcely able to fight someone else.
I am not really sure when, but at some point in the last year I lost the hope of things improving. Now, I just prepare as I can and hope that I can weather the coming storm.
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