This week we put a special focus on the Emancipation Proclamation, in its context and meaning for its time and beyond.
Critics of Lincoln then and now point out that when the war began slavery, or ending slavery, was not seen as a motivating factor in the conflict. In an immediate and particular context in 1860-61, this was undoubtedly true. Before Lincoln even took office several Southern states seceded, but many (VA, NC, AR, TN, KN, MD) had not. Lincoln believed he needed to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible. To make the war about slavery might have driven every slave state out of the Union and made reunification impossible.
But very soon after the war started events began to take over and push policy in a different direction. Slaves ran away and took shelter with Union forces. England might recognize the Confederacy if the war had nothing to do with slavery. If it did, Lincoln knew that England could never go against a country trying to end slavery when they themselves had already abolished the slave trade. By 1862, Lincoln thought the time had come to make slavery an official issue of the war.
Historians have their fashions just as any other discipline, and opinion has swayed back and forth on Lincoln’s actions and motivations surrounding his famous Proclamation.
Most of us grew up with the idea of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator” who freed the slaves with the Emancipation. In this view, Lincoln gets the lions share of credit for ending a great stain upon our democracy, culture, and so on.
More recently, however, scholarship has shifted. Many critics, both from the “Long live the South” community and African-American scholars have pointed out that:
Technically, the Emancipation freed no slaves, since the only slaves that Lincoln freed were slaves in areas in rebellion — areas he did not control. Slavery in the border states loyal to the Union remained untouched.
Some African-American scholars have argued that slaves had begun to liberate themselves by leaving plantations, finding Union armies, etc. long before the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus, Lincoln only added window dressing to an already existing reality. He jumped on the band-wagon and got credit he did not deserve.
Some constitutional scholars argue that Lincoln had no authority to end slavery by executive fiat. The Constitution did not forbid slavery, therefore at the very least Congress would have to make a law regarding slavery, or more likely, a Constitutional amendment would be needed.
With these two extreme points on the pendulum, others have come down somewhere in the middle. The Emancipation Proclamation, they argue, had no technical legal authority, and in this sense made no difference. But the Emancipation did accomplish other things, i.e.
It freed no slaves but did transform the war into a war of liberation, giving extra moral impetus to Union armies.
It sent a clear message to England (who had at times seriously considered recognizing the Confederacy) that the war would now be about slavery, and England (having banned slavery and the slave trade themselves) could not now easily side against a country trying to end slavery in their own territory.
It did not start slaves freeing themselves, but it gave active encouragement to other slaves who may not have considered it otherwise. Not only that, the Emancipation guaranteed slaves legal protection from Union armies.
While slaves in the border states could keep their slavery, Lincoln’s message surely implied slavery’s eventual demise across the nation.
But this “middle ground” position still leaves open the question of Lincoln and the Constitution.
Lincoln believed that he had a right and a duty to defend Constitutional democracy. History told him that wars and democracies do not always mix well. Athenian democracy destroyed itself in the Peloponnesian War. Many believe that Rome’s many wars brought down its Republic. Machiavelli praised Rome for at least making the possibility of a temporary dictatorship a provision of its constitution, as it seemed better to do something drastic by law than otherwise. But even this did not save them from the Emperors. French Revolutionary democracy quickly turned into Napoleonic dictatorship. Lincoln himself knew that some of his generals, like George McClellan, contemplated the possibility of military dictatorship. Today we think of Lincoln as a strong war leader but many at the time saw him as weak, bumbling, inexperienced. We can’t sit back comfortably this side of history and tell Lincoln, “There, there, it will be alright.”
Lincoln’s perception of the danger of dictatorship led him to embrace occasionally aggressive measures, and a “generous” reading of the Constitution. The Constitution does allow for the suspension of habeus corpus, for example. Article I, Section 9 reads,
The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
This seems straightforward, but this clause is part of the section on the legislative branch of government, not the executive. Of course, the Constitution does not explicitly forbid presidents from suspending the right themselves, but it could be said to imply it. In fairness, Confederate president Jefferson Davis also suspended habeas corpus, but the fact that he receives less criticism than Lincoln is probably fair. We did not, after all, build a hagiographic memorial to Jefferson Davis.
Subsequent presidents have also suspended the writ, perhaps FDR most famously during W.W. II. Lincoln felt that this expansive use of power helped him seize firm control of the government, which in turn he felt would prevent the far worse evil of military dictatorship. Lincoln’s critics argue that in order to achieve this, he assumed semi-dictatorial powers. How one evaluates Lincoln depends on. . .
How grave you feel the threat was to the Constitution
How flexible your view of the Constitution is
To what extent you feel that strange times call for unusual measures, or if it is during those times that absolute discipline must be maintained even if it a worse evil results. As many have said, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” But of course, we established a Constitution specifically to protect liberty and put restraints on the powers of government.
The extent to which you feel that “America” means a certain process of separation of powers, or a more nebulous idea of freedom.
Other issues exist besides the problem of Habeus Corpus, such as his establishment of martial law in Missouri. In some ways, Lincoln felt that the Constitution established by the founders had not been sufficient to deal with the crisis. It proved insufficient to deal with slavery. Thus, he felt he had the right and the duty to act outside the system. On this view, Lincoln did well to preserve so much of the original founders vision for America while facing an unprecedented crisis that no other president has faced.
Lincoln also believed that the American people would quickly revert back to normal after the war. A sick man will take necessary medicine, but once cured he stops. The overall result proves Lincoln correct in his assessment, but events in Missouri (where governors and state officials refused to give up martial law in spite of Lincoln’s orders to do so), for example, showed that granting extreme powers and giving them up are two different things. Sometimes, people get addicted to prescription drugs.
I recently moved to a more rural area, but for most of my life lived in suburbia. Suburbia has many charms, but everyone knows that community almost never happens in such areas. Of my 40 years of suburban living, I surmise that I had only a semblance of a relationship with perhaps 6-7 families. I guess this is fairly typical.
I remember some years ago voicing an idea to my wife: What if on a corner house, someone was allowed to set up a small bar or cafe? Maybe even one for each street? My mind raced to the possibilities of front yards set up as family friendly areas with a few games and such. I thought that this could work, and communal bonds form. People generally want to get to know others, but nothing in the suburbs helps foster this in any way. In fact, everything more or less works against it.
Of course even if my idea would work in principle, it would fall afoul of zoning laws. As Jane Jacobs points out in her Dark Age Ahead, “purity” formed one of the key principles of zoning laws in the 20th century. Thou shalt not mix commercial and residential areas. One of Jacobs’ tasks in this, her final book, was to question this and other sacred cows.
In his A History of Needs (1978) Ivan Illich heavily criticized various aspects of the modern world on both the right and the left. Broadly speaking, we could group his attacks under the banner of his intolerance for what he termed “hygienic industrial ‘progess.'” Basically, whatever “made sense” in terms of measurement, neatness, and uniformity we counted as “good.” Illich thought most often the opposite would result.
Jacobs has a few main lines of attack, though she wished that readers would take Dark Age Ahead as a hopeful book in the end. I see her as essentially an heir of Illich, one who urges us to abandon our fixation with “purity” and stratification in order to achieve something more real.*
Zoning laws come under particular fire from Jacobs, though she is hardly a free-market libertarian. She writes,
Only in 1916 did zoning take appreciable hold in North American culture. The three ideas that shaped zoning were these:
High ground coverages are bad.
High densities are bad
The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad.
All three assumptions are rejections of cities and city life, devised by utopians and reformers who tried to overcome public health problems and “disorder” with these abstract, dysfunctional solutions.
Jacobs continues to argue that people object not to these particular things, but poor versions of their implementation. In theory at least, we should have the ability to legislate proper boundaries for all of the above. Jacobs hints at the real issue governments shy away from fruitful messiness–the lack of ability for them to effectively control outcomes. Organic “messiness” resists the neatness governments require, for governments these days govern mainly through data, which requires order to collect.
Jacobs sees that our “Dark Age” cometh because we rely on abstractions and theories, and refuse to properly observe. We might say that proper observation means noticing proper mixing. One of her touchstone examples involved the Chicago heat wave in the summer of 1995, where hundreds of elderly people died. One could easily observe the cascading effects, as overloaded power grids shut down, children opened hydrants, which meant no AC and no water for some poorer neighborhoods.
The CDC came in to study the problem, and Jacobs spares them not a whit. The study, conducted by nearly 100 intelligent people, found that people died because they remained in their rooms and faced heat stroke and dehydration. The study discovered what any 3rd rate medical examiner might–the medical cause of death. Congratulations.
Thankfully, another researcher named Eric Klinenberg came in and performed a far more useful task. He noticed that in some neighborhoods, the death rate was 10x that of other locales. The difference lay not in the temperature or even the direct access to AC and water, but in neighborhoods. In some boroughs, the at-risk elderly had people to check on them and give direct aid. This happened because different groups of people knew each other, and the elderly trusted those that came to check because they had seen them around. The CDC study pointed out that many who died did not follow the well publicized advice to leave apartments and go walk in the neighborhoods, go to a store with AC, etc. Klinenberg pointed out that neighborhoods with exorbitant fatalities had no place for people to walk to, no businesses to enjoy AC in, etc., because of zoning laws that do not mix the residential and commercial.
For Jacobs, such limited thinking by one of our top scientific institutions, combined with neighborhoods that do not allow for real life to take place, risks conjuring up a new Dark Age. The “high” of our institutions cannot properly assess the “low” of everyday life and appreciate what actually makes civilization possible.**
As Jane Jacobs wrote Dark Age Ahead (2005) we experienced the erosion of the situation in Iraq, and some might say, the end of American hegemony. In 2019 the Rand Corporation published a study entitled The Battle for Baghdad: Lessons Learned–and Still to be Learned. I feared that the book would have a know-it-all tone and paint everyone as idiots who should have known better. I found it fair and sympathetic to most everyone, while at the same time avoiding explaining everything away.
More than enough blame exists between civilians and the military to go around. The authors point out that some things went right–food and water distribution went according to plan. Few Iraqi’s died of starvation, malnutrition, or improper medical care. Huzzah for us, but aside from that . . . well. . .
The long list of what went wrong begins with:
The U.S. has a good record with humanitarian relief. It is one of our strengths. We spent tons of time and resources planning for such aid, but never had a chance to implement it effectively, because the war continued long past the conventional stage. We prepped for something that we never could implement.
Conversely, time and money spend prepping for humanitarian aid was not spent on preparing for the political, cultural, and asymmetrical military mess we had after we took Baghdad.
We expected that the Iraqi government would continue to function after top-level ministers and advisors (i.e. Saddam’s cronies) left office. Since Saddam’s regime depended on highly centralized decisions, we assumed that those ministries operated as effective state structures. If so, then the top leadership could be replaced without much fallout, and no large-scale reconstruction would be needed. Instead, we badly misread the nature of Saddam’s governance and Iraqi society.
The military won a brilliantly clean conventional campaign. As for what came next, as one commentator put it, “The military wanted to put a civilian face on it, while the civilians [State Department] wanted to put an Iraqi face on it, and meanwhile we had 150,000 troops on the ground, and a UN order saying that what we were doing wasn’t what we thought we were doing, which was an occupation.”
The question of looting confused many people on the ground at the time. One general talked of how he saw the looting as non-violent wealth redistribution. They expressed no hostility towards the army or each other. He saw the looting as a natural response to Saddam’s oppression, as a communally peaceful way to solve a problem, so why stop it? In hindsight of course, this “wealth redistribution” set the stage for lawlessness later.
We need to seek a path through such confusing events and attempt to find a central cause or problem.
I tentatively venture that the core problem involved just what Jacobs diagnosed stateside, a failure to embrace or even recognize beneficial messiness/appropriate mixing between agencies, peoples, and so forth. We can see this through a couple of different issues.
To start, a lack of cooperation between the Departments of Defense and State led to an elimination State’s meaningful role, for all intents and purposes. We always need unity of command, but not unity of perspective. This lack of cooperation hurt our available intellectual resources.
This lack of good internal mixing led to external problems. In a variety of instances, the authors cite the problems of our preference to tear down existing structures and build from scratch, rather than use what we found already in existence. This preference was surely easier on paper, but its application in a society with complex social dynamics proved most difficult.
Another example that fit this failure to mix pattern might be the “De-Ba’athification” of top level Ba’ath party officials close to Saddam. The authors acknowledge the deep complexity of the problem. Saddam governed Iraq as a mostly secular Sunni Moslem in a state where Shia’s and Kurds formed 80% of the population. Indeed, the removal of these generally corrupt party officials met with strong approval from this broad 80%. However, this move scarred and humiliated Sunni’s publicly. The authors strongly suggest that perhaps these officials needed removed, but not removed as a matter of public policy, which would bring public shame. Sunni insurgent groups very likely arose from this action. They felt threatened by the new order, and responded in kind.
The U.S. also usually sought to tear down existing structures of government and rebuild from scratch. Iraq had so much unexpected complexity, it made sense to seek more simplicity and clarity. However, this move also backfired. We failed to build an infrastructure for effective governance.
The theme I see often involves a strong avoidance of “mess.” Our democratic, Enlightenment inspired, science driven culture loves clarity, transparency, and simplicity. These values serve us well, up to a point. They fail us in situations akin to Iraq, where we need to ditch many of the qualities that form our society, and hence, our military as well. Among other things, our values lead us towards greater standardization and speed. These qualities will not promote the wisdom to recognize a good “mess” when we need to.
Jane Jacobs began her diagnosis of this problem with her groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The pristine clarity sought by developers, the separation of residential and commercial, would prevent real communities from developing like those that saved the lives of many of Chicago’s elderly in 1995. Jacobs thinks that “the people” often get betrayed, in.a sense, from on-high. Perhaps. I tend to think that democracies get the kind of culture they want, and thus, the kind they deserve. Our current cultural polarization, i.e., our failure to mix well, may not be the byproduct of the debacle in Iraq but its cause.
Dave
*For the sake of clarity, purity is not a morally bad or good thing–it is a descriptive term of something that can sometimes be good, sometimes be bad, depending.
**One can see significant similarities between the CDC’s handling of this limited incident, and their handling of COVID 25 years later.
I am a believer in the revealing power of architecture in a civilization. There are many ways to get insight into the past, but I think that architecture is one of the best, for it puts a civilization’s creative power on display, and it involves much more than the work of one individual. One of themes I wanted to stress with this was a shift in emphasis in how Rome built its buildings, and what this revealed about them as a civilization. Arches, for example, were a great innovation used in aqueducts to bring water into cities.
The design of cities pushed people toward the center, which was in keeping with Rome’s Republic (literally a ‘public thing’).
But as time went by, arches are used to build monuments to emperors, and whatever talent they possessed went to make things like the Emperor Hadrian’s villa:
Here below is the general outline of the whole of Hadrian’s villa:
And again, another so-called “good emperor” of Rome (Marcus Aurelius) put his focus on the building of private monuments, like this personal “arch” monument below (contrasted with the public use of the arch for water above)
And another personal monument column to add to that. . .
If Rome was committed to understanding the changes in their culture, perhaps they may have been used for good, but Rome would not do this, and preferred to live in the past. Their innovations (never a strong point) dried up, and whatever was new in Rome was simply borrowed from the Greeks (as the statue in Hadrian’s villa indicates). Rome had grown stale and petrified, but would they see this? As we noted, this would not be likely, for another thing the architecture reveals is whereas in the past their energies were directed to the public sphere, now most of what they did centered around the emperor.
A bored and uncreative people will tend to think bigger is better all the time. The Romans were no exception. Like an addict, it takes more and more over time to get the same response. As the activity’s reward decreases, more effort only gives diminishing returns. As we began our discussion of the games, we saw how an old Etruscan funeral rite grew into an unregulated black market trade, to ‘opening act’ for the chariot races, eventually growing to a hideous and repulsive spectacle on a grand scale before tens of thousands. How did this happen, and what does it say about Rome?
We need to see not only the moral dimension of this problem, but the political one as well. The Games served to enhance the prestige of the emperor and keep people amused and distracted, in a sense, from the reality around them. One may recall the Wizard of Oz’s line not to look behind the curtain. The whole system of Empire had degenerated essentially into a military dictatorship by Vespasian’s time. No emperor could ill afford a populace too rowdy or too thoughtful. The Games helped buy them off.
Casinos, for example, want you to lose money, but not all of your money. After all, they want you to leave happy so you will come back. When you start to lose too much, often times an employee will appear suddenly, encourage you to stop, and offer you a coupon for a free steak dinner at their award winning restaurant. Their goal of course, is that you think, “Hey, that casino is really great for giving me this free dinner,” instead of, “I just lost X amount of money at that casino.” I think the Games worked much in the same way.
Certain emperors, of course, may have felt more of a need to establish their legitimacy than others. Claudius, for example, was a big proponent of the games, and he was the ‘runt’ of the Julio-Claudian line, and Caligula’s uncle. Vespasian built the Colosseum specifically for the games, and he came to power after a year of civil war.
There are other means of cementing your power, notably, buying your friends. This dynamic was not, I think, the main reason for the debasement of Roman currency, but it surely did not help. I passed this chart out to the students showing the general decline of currency value, with some being more responsible than others. Those emperors that rose to power after a change in dynasty often did so after civil war (marked with an *), and would have extra need to buy the loyalty of key people, and especially, key army legions (though to be fair, Nerva does not fit this pattern).
This week we looked at the aftermath of Nero’s suicide in 68 A.D. Having no heirs, Nero did not establish any process for a succession. Three generals, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius ended up holding power alternately before the last, Vespasian, remained standing and took up Imperium himself and stability returned.
The Civil Wars did not last long and probably did not impact the common people very much, but this “Year of 3 Emperors,” portended ill for Rome.
It showed that in the absence of any family successor, power could simply go to the strongest
The system Augustus established at least maintained a fictional role for the Senate. Some emperors (like Claudius) used the Senate to a moderate degree. Now however, the Senate lost all role in who governed Rome. The mask was off the pig. Power belonged to the army, not to any of the pre-existing public institutions.
Vespasian looks like a solid sort, and he ruled well by most standards. He eliminated a massive debt (largely through raising taxes). He had no obvious vices to bring himself or Rome down. He began the project that turned the land that housed Nero’s ridiculous private palace into a large public building for all people, known then as the Flavian Amphitheater (after his family name), known to us as the Colosseum.
One of the main functions of this intricately engineered building was to house the gladiator contests, that by Vespasian’s time, became more and central to Rome’s way of life. What began as a holdover from old Etruscan funeral rite ca. 600 B.C. then became ad hoc neighborhood entertainment by 50 B.C., and finally turned into a horrendous spectacle where criminals (and Christians) were tortured and killed for amusement by 100 A.D. When we realize that Rome financed much of the construction from looting the Temple in Jerusalem, and that thousands of Jewish slaves built it, we see that even when Rome tried to go “good” it brought about a terrible evil. We discussed how this could happen. . .
1. Among other things, the Romans demonstrated what happens to addicts. More and more is needed as the ‘drug’ gives less and less back, but it becomes so much a part of you that stopping is near impossible, at least humanly speaking. Along those lines we discussed how in Scripture sin is described as a ‘power,’ a kind of black hole like vortex. We delude ourselves when we think that we can easily jump back and forth between sinning and not sinning. Quicksand doesn’t work that way.
2. The games satisfied Rome’s need for glory and courage. Rome believed that they were still Rome, but very few citizens fought anymore. Cicero, among others, thought the games served the purpose of ‘toughening’ the citizens. The Pax Romana created a breathing space for Rome that they could have used to transform themselves to some degree. However, the very foundation of the Augustus’s principate system was built on the idea that Rome had not changed. The games allowed the Romans to imagine that they were just like their ancestors, tough and able to deal with violence.
3. The games were also related to Rome’s broken political system. Like the Wizard of Oz, Rome’s emperors could ill afford the citizens a look behind the curtain. The games proved a marvelous distraction for the populace. Also, since all power became centralized with the emperor, he needed to appear all powerful. The bigger the spectacle, the better it tended to reflect on the emperor.
But the political problem had broader foundations than this. With the rise of wealthy landowners gobbling up the small farms, thousands ended up flocking to the cities to find work, especially Rome. What could be done with these people? Ultimately. . .
4. The games also show Rome’s continual band-aid approach to its problems. They were not good at making hard choices about who they were at this point in their history. The games distracted people and bought the short term favor of the lower classes, but it produced nothing for their society. Whole armies of soldiers, slaves, and animals perished, countless money was spent, merely to enhance the image of the emperor and entertain the people. But no creative or productive activity flowed from the games. It was all ‘sunk costs.’
5. The Romans viewed the games as a means of displaying their power, in at least two ways. First, it meant that Romans could say something to the effect of, “Look at what we can make people do for us!” Perhaps this was more subconsciously believed than stated. But the variety of people and the different fighting styles they employed did serve as a visual reminder of the scope of their power.
Had Rome been more productive or creative economically, this population influx might have led to a economic revolution of sorts for Rome, if we imagine the mid-late 19th century Industrial Revolution on a smaller, less technical scale. However, being economically creative can’t just happen when you want it to. It takes a foundation in education and attitude that Rome did not have.
Thus, the games reveal not only Rome’s moral bankruptcy, but its political and economic stagnation.
7. Finally, the games reflect Rome’s social and cultural climate “gone bad.”
When thinking of how the empire functioned we cannot lose hold of the context of Rome’s past Republican history. Rome’s revolution in 508 B.C. created some measure of what we would call democracy, but it mainly gave the aristocracy/patricians more direct control over policy. Americans view aristocracy as a dirty word, but Rome’s Republic functioned very well for many centuries. One reason for this is that Rome’s aristocracy usually considered themselves patrons and acted as “patrons of Rome” without being overly “patronizing.” The “patrons” sought to look after the lower classes, to provide for them, give them gifts, and sometimes be the stern father figure. In fact, the patrons of Rome came from the “patrician” class, i.e. the “fathers.”
Good Roman fathers have many roles. They lead worship. They provide law. They provide continuance of the family line. Sometimes, too, they give gifts. “Here’s 20 bucks, go have a good time at the movies with your friends,” and so on. Emperors served as Rome’s ultimate patrons. The Civil Wars of 133-31 B.C. decimated Rome’s aristocracy and left the Senate impotent. Thus, whereas before Rome had many “fathers,” now for the most part, they have just one, the Emperor.
We understand Roman reaction to their emperors better if we view it through this lens.
Augustus cast the perfect balance between stern, reliable Roman father upholding the morals of Rome, with a sprinkling of gifts (of money, bread, etc.) and indulgence.
Tiberius was a great manager of money, but viewed as a miser. He never threw a party, never gave gifts, etc. He had no “heart.”
Caligula was a disaster — completely unreliable, giving no family stability
Claudius didn’t look the part, which was a drawback. He had some problems with women — also a drawback. But in the main he followed Augustus’ model.
Nero was the dad in perpetual mid-life crisis, who spent your inheritance and that of his brothers. He steals from other families when that runs dry. He quits his job to become a very unsuccessful opera-singer and provides no leadership, no example, for his children.
Roman fathers had to show that they identified with their children’s interests. The Roman Games were one big party, given as a gift. Of course because Rome’s political system meant that they had just one father, the party had to be huge to cover the whole population. The expense, the expectation, and the length of the games (by the 2nd century the games might last 4-5 months) all grew as each emperor tried to establish his credentials as a proper Roman father.*
All of this is bound to catch up with them at some point. This week we will take a look at Rome’s decline through the lens of economics and architecture, and begin to find our way towards the coming of Constantine.
Dave
*We want dads to provide the party for his teenage children, but not really to join in the party. That would be weird and off-putting, most “un-fatherly” conduct. Hence, the Romans did not like it when Emperor Commodus “joined the party” by participating personally in the gladiatorial games.
The phenomena of Roman gladiators has gotten lots of attention over the years, and that’s no surprise. One way of quickly getting a sense of an ancient people is to seek what details stand out and makes them look odd, impressive, or otherwise shocking to modern eyes. The gladiatorial games, like human sacrifices for the Aztecs, Egyptian tombs, or medieval cathedrals all fit the bill.
We usually see the gladiatorial contests as evidence of Rome’s decline. Rome got wealthy, Rome got bored and decadent, and so it needed the bread and circuses to maintain order in a tumultuous political climate. “How sad,” some say, “and how dramatic a change from Rome’s hard and flinty past! But, when a big empire goes south, it will go south on a grand and terrible scale.”
So the story goes. But, what if, like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, we had it contrariwise? What if the Rome of the gladiatorial games is simply the Rome that always was, and money and power just gave them more opportunities to expand their sense of themselves? Such are the implications of Carlin Barton’s eye-opening The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Barton wants to show us that our modern categories of thought and experience will not work for Rome. We cannot say, “Well, we like football so we’re just like the Romans.” This shallow method will not cut it for Barton. She asks us to go deeper and to notice the Romans on their own terms, and gives us plenty of food for thought to reconsider the meaning of Rome, and what it means that Rome was a “religious” society.
Barton examines the gladiatorial games, one of the more sensational aspects of Rome’s past. The title focuses on the concept of “sorrow,” but Barton tries to examine the games through a lens of the tension between asceticism, discipline, glory, indulgence, and exaltation. We might think of the Romans as orderly people who lived in the middle of the road. If true, Barton suggests that they could do so only by holding opposites in constant tension.
For an example we have the Roman triumph. Anyone familiar with Roman lore and tradition knows that Rome itself, not a particular individual, occupies the heroic position. They wove their fear of too much individualism into their laws and customs. They valued communal fraternity so much that one of their laws states that,
If any person has sung or composed against another person a song such as was causing slander or insult…. he shall be clubbed to death,+
and they valued order and gravitas to the extent that they banned excessive mourning at funerals.
But at the same time they gave massive official “Triumphs” to certain generals on occasion, where the whole city came out to shower the victor with praise. But as the victor processed, his soldiers could–and perhaps should?–sing bawdy or insulting songs about their general in direct violation of law, while a slave rode with him as well to remind him of his mortality.*
Barton tries to explore this at least seeming tension through the lens of the so-called “circuses” of Rome, which Barton writes were a, “Powerful opera of emotions in which the gladiator was the star.”
Most people, most of the time, imagine themselves doing good more often than not, and suppose that others will naturally share the assumptions they make about themselves. The same holds true for countries and perhaps especially for imperial powers, who tell themselves that they come with blessings for all, and get a shock when they find themselves not always as appreciated as they feel they deserve.** So too with gladiators and the games, the Romans saw themselves as benefactors. Barton pushes back on the modern notion that they served as mere entertainment for a swelling populace that needed distracted.
The Romans saw themselves as giving gladiators a chance to redeem their low-estate, even to become something more than a mere man–an act of generosity. The crowd attends to cooperate and encourage this transformation, not so much to gratify idle curiosity but rather to partake in a kind of religious apotheosis. To begin, the military oath had a great deal of similarity to the gladiatorial oath. Seneca wrote,
You have enlisted under oath. If any man say that this is a soft or easy form of soldiering they will only wish to mock you. But be not deceived: the words of this most honorable of compacts are the very same as those of the most foulest [i.e., the gladiator’s oath]: to be burned, to be bound, to be slain by the sword. You must die erect and invincible. What difference will it make if you gain a few more days or years? We are born into a world in which no quarter is given.
Thus, Barton comments, the gladiator became a kind of soldier/philosopher, one who lives between life and death, understands both, and can mock at both. This in turn gave him license to become a new man. If the emperor claimed his life, one might see it as akin to a god claiming his own. His death, then, was not necessarily a cause for sorrow.
This gives us a new image of the crowd’s role at the games. The crowd does not so much cheer for life, or death, but for a communal religious right. Seneca again comments,
I judge you wretched because you have never been wretched yourself. You have passed through life without an adversary. No one will know what you are capable of, not even you yourself will know. And so there are men of their own accord [i.e. gladiators] come forward to challenge reluctant misfortune, and sought an opportunity to blazon forth their worth when it was about to pass into obscurity. Great men glory in adversity, as do brave men in battle.
The injuries inflicted by the powerful must be borne, not just patiently, but with a glad countenance. At the table of a king every meal is a delight. So must they drink, so must they respond, so must the laugh at the funerals of their loved ones.
To glory in suffering is to become glorious. So even in death, the gladiator wins. He shows his exalted status by despising life. As one commented on D. Junius Brutus: “He behaved so basely that he deserved to live.” The crowd could occasionally assume risk as well, flocking to rickety theaters that could collapse or catch fire at any time. They cheer on the gladiator toward his glorious suffering just as they–albeit in a more limited fashion–participate in that same suffering, that same embrace and defiance of death.
With this in place we can view the decadence of the Romans in new light. Gladiators lived beyond normal life, so they could indulge themselves freely, embracing the extremes of life and death. St. Augustine commented that the life of the gladiator involved licenstious cruelty, an excess of indulgence in everything. And yet at the same time, they functioned as Rome’s ascetics, able to abandon their very lives to the people of Rome. Their lives do not belong to them and in so doing their lives can belong to all. They simultaneously embraced both extremes, the demi-gods of Rome who lived beyond the lot of mortals.
This is why the crowd could cheer even the losers in combat, for in their death they display their superiority to death, unblinking, and unafraid. It was only when the combatants shrank from death that crowd turned on them, and then with stern vengeance. Showing fear of death made them normal once again, and once they became “normal” they turned the games into something shameful and cruel, rather than something “exalted.” A gladiator’s fear of death ended the crowd’s participation in the ritual and suddenly transformed the event to a mere butchery. Who wants to see that?
This is why Rome embraced fleshly decadence as a kind of asceticism. In Rome one must learn to endure all things and keep going. A Roman can embrace everything and maintain his dignity. He can die, and he can eat, vomit it all up, and eat some more. He can endure death and every form of excess life throws at him and “triumph.” It is hard to say whether the banquets and excess of late-Republican Rome derived from gladiator culture or vice-versa, but I suspect the former. J.E. Lendon at the University of Virginia seems to suggest in his Soldiers and Ghosts that the Romans had an extraordinary ability to do almost anything to avoid shame. That ability could include
A strong aversion to any kind of trickery in warfare. The only honorable way to fight was to march straight into the enemy and smash them in the mouth.
A strong aversion to a fear of death and ready acceptance of suicide as superior to even small personal or political failures among the political elite, and
As Barton points out, a refusal to accept any limits not just on pains^ but even on the pleasures that one could endure, such as eating six meat pies, spewing it out, and still look forward to eating the seventh. We know that no matter how much one loves pizza, for example, there comes a point after eating too many slices that one starts to despise pizza. For the Romans, the man who lost the ability to desire had lost something of himself.
One might see the how these practices could stray into some rather bizarre sexual realms. Clearly gladiators enjoyed status as sexual objects, and Barton is hardly the first to discuss this. But she did, if it be possible, help me understand Caligula, at least indirectly. Of course no one can possibly excuse Caligula via “understanding!” But in Caligula we see the same kind of excess of cruelty, physical and sexual indulgence, along with religious ecstasy as we see in gladiators. Caligula claimed a kind of deity for himself. Perhaps this was insanity, but perhaps he was simply following the gladiator ethic of testing himself, pushing himself, to extremes of vice and religious glorification, courting disaster but not shirking from the challenge.
Maybe.
I found Barton’s book in turns fascinating and perplexing. I don’t know what it means for understanding the breadth of Rome’s existence from start to finish. In the preface to his history, Livy wrote that, “Of late wealth has brought us avarice, and abundant pleasures, yearning–amidst both excess and the desire to perish and destroy all things.” It is a familiar trope of ancient historians, but that has no particular bearing on the accuracy of his interpretation. Still, I tend to see what happened with gladiators not as a weird appendage of the late-Republic/Empire, but as an integral part of Rome that lay under the surface initially, and grew in prominence over time.
For example, the Romans established the office of aedile very early in their history in the 5th century B.C. Most aspects of how they functioned look very Roman in our usual sense of the word, as they maintained buildings, streets, laws, etc. But, they also had charge of public entertainments or other public events, such as large funerals. Aedlies were expected to fund these out of their own pocket, and many could easily go bankrupt during their time in office.
But the Romans saw the role of aedile as a crucial stepping stone to higher office, where the opportunities for glory and riches increased. Caesar risked everything and beggared himself to win the election of pontiff, then used the office for fabulous gain. This pattern was established long before him, however, this yo-yo between poverty and wealth, despair and exaltation.
It seems fitting to give the last word here to an important critic of all of this mess, St. Cyprian of Carthage, who wrote,
Man is killed for the pleasure of man, and to be able to kill is a skill, an employment, an art. He undergoes discipline in order to kill, and when he does kill, it is a glory. What is this, I ask you, of what nature is it, where those offer themselves to wild beasts, whom no one has condemned, in the prime of life, of comely appearance, in costly garments? While alive they adorn themselves for voluntary death and miserable as they are, they even glory in their sufferings
Dave
+It seems particularly Roman to me that their wouldn’t say, “shall be executed,” but rather the more stark, “shall be clubbed to death.”
*Some might say that these exceptions have much in common with medieval carnivals or days of “misrule.” I disagree, and I assume Barton would as well. The medieval carnival temporarily suspended normal reality to a) reset/refresh the existing order, and b) demonstrate the reality of a world beyond our own. The Romans seemed to live in perpetual earthly tension within one plane of existence.
**I do not mean for this to serve as an all-encompassing statement on the question of how empires do or do not benefit those under their control. The question is complicated and perhaps no one good general answer exists. All I mean to assert here is that imperial powers assume that they are helping and not hurting.
^If we look at the 2nd Punic War, one can imagine almost any civilization surrendering in 216 B.C. after Cannae. Poylbius points out the political structure of Rome as one of the keys to their ultimate victory and ability to persevere. Certainly that helped. I think the real key, however, was Rome’s culture/religion that told them to suffer–to embrace suffering. This should tell us that:
Indeed, what we saw with gladiators was present earlier in Rome’s history (in a more noble form).
Culture and religion trump politics. One can see a parallel in W.W. II where Germany inflicted unimaginable losses against the Soviets in the first few months their attacks. Any rational man would assume a surrender would be forthcoming. Yet, somehow, the Soviets kept going and eventually destroyed the Nazi’s. The Soviets and the Romans had very different political systems, but both drew from religions that taught them how to suffer–albeit in different ways for different reasons (in the case of the Soviets it was Orthodox Christianity, which made a significant unofficial comeback during the war).
Given that I was 17 when Nirvana released Nevermind, the album obviously completely blew me away. For some time the subversive nature of the lyrics eluded me, lost as I was in the joy of our culture granting new-found permission to wear flannel shirts untucked. But then, one notices their audience mockery, suchas in “In Bloom”–“He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, but he knows not what it means.”
I confess to feeling a bit guilty for thinking of this song in reference to the monumental achievement of J.M.C Toynbee and her book Animals in Roman Life and Art (yes, she was the sister of that Toynbee). I have no wish to mock as did Kurt Cobain, but I confess frustration with the traditional British historian. The British, like all cultures, should own and even celebrate their quirks. And perhaps nothing quite says “British” like the charming codger who has spent his entire life curating a particular old building, and can tell you everything that has ever happened to every plank of wood. This same trait gets passed on to many of their historians, our esteemed author included. In her day she stood as a substantial authority on Roman art in general, and perhaps the authority for the Romans and animals–no small achievement.
But she takes all of that knowledge and . . . writes a reference book. She fails to make her facts into a poem, to make her knowledge sing. Knowing everything, she “knows not what it means.”
I will make a meager attempt to do so.
But first, some of the fascinating facts about Romans and their relationship to animals.
Some years ago I saw a documentary on gladiators, and the video mentioned the “ecological disaster” inflicted upon wildlife. Surely, I thought this must be overdramatized. Apparently not! The numbers are numbing:
Some 9000 animals were killed at the inaugeration of the Colosseum, many of them “ordinary” animals which were not ferocious, such as foxes. Women killed some of these animals.
Trajan killed 11,000 to celebrate his Dacian Triumph
In one show, Nero’s bodyguard brought down 400 lions and 300 bears
Having beasts fight each other formed part of the spectacle as well.
From the late Republic on, having thousands of animals killed (most of them threatening) for a particular “celebration” was rather ordinary–the examples are too numerous to list to here, though Toynbee lays them out nicely.
All in all, some estimate that as many as 1,000,000 animals died in the arena (not to mention 400,000 humans), and it does indeed appear that certain species disappeared from certain regions of the globe due to this.
Some other more “tame”(zing!) factoids:
Elephants may have become a symbol of divinization for the Romans by the time of Emperor Tiberius. In addition, the Romans appear to have been able to train elephants to do unusual tricks, including walk a tightrope.
Aelian noted that he had seen a monkey trained to drive a chariot.
Lions were frequently featured on tombs by the age of Augustus, and dogs also were symbols of death.
On rare occasions, they kept bears as private pets.
In contrast to Judeo-Christian civilizations (and most others), the Romans regarded snakes as beneficial creatures.
The Romans had little regard for the tortoise, but the term they used for their interlocking shields was “testudo,” obviously borrowed from turtles. Turtle shells were also prized as baths for infants.
And so on. The book has hundreds of observations akin to these. So far, so good–she brings forward a variety of interesting facts. She helpfully reminds us that in a civilization that Rome’s relationship to its animals would have been much closer than ours. They relied on animals for farming, transport, and the like far more than we, and perhaps more than other contemporary civilizations (given their size, road structure, mobility of their army, etc.). But the data points never take us anywhere. Some might find this a humble attitude. I do not. Certainly there are plenty of times when one should keep their mouth shut, but I think Chesterton’s quote applies here:
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table
If you are the world’s foremost authority on animals in Roman art, surely you can risk some of your accumulated capital and venture some highly educated guesses. Alas that she does not.
Two points in particular raised eyebrows with me that might shed a more general light on Roman civilization.
One is from page 68, where she writes,
[Here] two mosaic panels show a well-maned lion devouring a dark grey fawn. . . . The lions are arena beasts . . . [Another example] shows a lion holding in its maw the head of an antlered stag, which drips abundantly with blood. Lively amphitheater scenes are indeed, not uncommon on the floors of well-mannered houses.
Later, on page 83, she writes about leopards and describes another mosaic:
Above the three are dying leopards, each transfixed murderously by a barbed spear, writhing in agony, one rolled over on its back. Below, two venatores, one labeled MELITTO, are each driving a spear into the leopard’s chest, from which gush streams of blood. A dying leopard, also speared, lies in the background. . . . the realism with which they are portrayed is excruciating; and this picture raises in a most acute form the problem of how householders could wish to perpetuate such scenes of carnage on the floors of their home.
Though the problem be “acute,” she says not one word about it!
In a few other instances, usually involving lions or elephants, Toynbee tells of written texts that speak of people starting to sympathize with animals in the arena, even coming to root for them against their human counterparts, with thousands in the crowd weeping as they were killed. One might expect that such instances would serve as a spark for moral revolution, but this never came close to happening. Objections to the practice in any written record can be listed easily on one hand over a period that spans many centuries.
Can we put these curiosities together?
On one hand we have the “modern” answer to the problem which would run like so:
The Romans were a calloused, bored, and violent people. Such people would go to the games, cheer the games, and celebrate the games. The fact that they decorate their floors with scenes from the games is not much different than us putting up posters of our sports heroes in action.
Yes, they did lament the cruelty of the games at times. But again, when a player gets badly injured we too get quiet. If the injury is particularly bad players and fans might cry. But though the injury may cause us pause, this will not stop us from watching the next game or even the next play.
This explanation might be true, but I doubt it is. It seems too neat, too comfortable to the modern mind, to fit an ancient civilization.
We can start an alternate inquiry by asking what purpose the games served in Rome. Based on Carlin Barton’s wonderful insights, we can say that the games did not serve strictly as entertainment, but rather as an extension of their religious belief. Moderns like to separate religion from other aspects of life, the ancients would not have understood this distinction.
Most know that the Romans saw themselves as “tough” and “hard,” so we naturally assume that their drunken revels were a departure from that, a sign of decadence. But the Romans saw these seemingly disparate aspects as part of the same cloth. We are hard on ourselves in the army–we are hard on ourselves at parties too. We will eat until we cannot eat, then vomit, and eat some more–and still strive to enjoy it all. We push ourselves to endure both pain and pleasure in its maximum degree. Moderation?–not a thing in Rome.
My guess, then, with the animals and the arena, is that they could weep for them not so much because they felt sorry for them, but because they saw them as partners in the struggle of life. They weep for them falling as they would lament the deaths of their soldiers. Toynbee points out the close and varied relationship Rome had with animals, so this might fit with her work. So too, they have mosaics of dying animals in their homes not to revel in their destruction, but to honor them as fellow participants in the “Roman way,” just as we have posters of our sports heroes to honor their achievements.
So too, seeing lions and elephants as symbols of death and divinization might explain why they participated in the arena. Just as a Roman could be “divinized” by transcending normal human attributes such as fear of death, so too the animals could achieve this same level, in a sense. The title of this post recalls Milton’s poem, “Samson Agonistes.” Milton portrays Samson as a great champion,, but one imprisoned also by his “inner struggle” (a rough translation of “agonistes”)–and perhaps glorified by this same struggle? The Romans may have thought they were being generous in sharing their glory by sharing their struggle with the animals.
I may be wrong, but I do feel that ancient civilizations are generally “weirder” than we usually expect, and taking this approach will eventually lead to the right answer. Given how many unusual observations Toynbee made, it grieves me that she failed to use her enormous gifts to attempt a synthesis.
This week we looked at Emperors Claudius and Nero and the problems he caused Rome.
Claudius had his good points. He was intelligent and hard working. Some of his legislative and judicial reforms improved things in Rome. His bust tells us that he was a “normal” guy, and he did not demonstrate any of the insanely cruel tendencies of Caligula.
But generally he is known for three things:
1. The conquest of Britain
What Julius Caesar began in the most tentative way, Claudius finished. Ostensibly, Rome did this because Gaul may have been receiving aid from across the channel. To me at least, however, this conquest served no real purpose for Rome accept to continue to delude itself that it was still strong as ever. Some conquests could potentially make geographical sense even if based on shaky moral grounds. It’s hard to see how the conquest of Britain fits into any category except that of Claudius’s ego. But it may simply been a way to solidify his legitimacy as emperor. In other words, Claudius (a scholar, a man with a speech impediment and slightly deformed shoulder — not things Romans would have valued) may have thought that some kind of conquest was necessary to prove himself as a Roman leader.
Claudius may have further justified the action as ‘for the good of Rome,’ because if his regime faltered civil war might result, and Rome as a whole would suffer. If we accept this line of reasoning we see how Rome’s system of government may have worked against the chances of Rome’s success.
We talked of how empire expansion can in some ways, resemble acquisitions done by companies. I I listened months ago to an interview with the CEO of Ebay, who mentioned that the company’s mission was to “connect buyers and sellers.” Previously Ebay bought Skype, and then under his tenure, sold it off again. I asked the students if they had ever used Skype to call a business or seller, or if they had ever received a business call on Skype. No one had, and this was Ebay’s CEO main point. However neat Skype may be, it did not fit within their company mission. Dumping even a “neat” product made their company healthier.
So too, territorial acquisitions have to make some sense, have to fit within the “mission” of the conqueror for it to have any hope of benefitting them (I realize that for the moment, I am not directly considering the moral issue of conquest). I can’t see how Britain’s conquest could possibly fit within Rome’ s interests, though one student suggested that it fit perfectly well — Rome only cared about being bigger than before.
2. The expansion of the civil service
Claudius can be admired for having a soft spot for recently freed slaves who showed intelligence. But, being clever, he used them to expand his own power. The civil service was in many ways necessary, but it was also a tool to bypass whatever vestiges remained of Republican government in the Senate and other elected officers. The Senate did little to object. Some have commented that our own predilection for appointing ‘Czars’ (“Education Czar,” “Drug Czar,” over the last 20-25 years for the war on drugs, the economy, trade, etc. does the same thing, putting more and more in the hands of the executive branch.
3. His taste in women
For all his intelligence, Claudius had a blind spot when it came to women. His first wife was named Urganulilla (enough said there), who may have murdered his sister. Some suggest he divorced his second wife for emotional abuse. His third wife had numerous affairs and probably involved herself in a plot to overthrow him. Grudgingly, he executed her for treason. His fourth wife probably instigated his death via poisoned mushrooms. Well, no one’s perfect!
Claudius seemed to have a thing for women stronger in personality than him, and maybe was a glutton for punishment. Perhaps a connection exists between his taste in women and his love for the gladitorial games, which he frequented.
Nero’s reign, like that of Caligula and other bad emperors, raises a question: Can anyone be, in historian Will Durant’s words, “both omnipotent and sane?” Nero was not on the scale of say, Caligula, but clearly he distanced himself from reality.
He had a passion for the arts. He spent much of his time devoted to singing. He held concerts, where attendance was unofficially mandatory for Rome’s political class. The Roman historian Seutonius writes that some feigned death or heart attack in hopes of being carried out of these concerts early. No doubt many volunteers rushed to the scene to “help” if they could. Nero appears not to have noticed.
Nero’s passion surely must have struck the Romans as bizarre. Imagine a campaign ad for a president that showed him, not shaking hands or looking smart at a desk, but taking lessons in how to sing an opera aria.
Nero attended the Greek Olympics in AD 68, giving many concerts to “wild applause.” Nero also entered the chariot race, but alas, his chariot broke during the competition and he did not finish. Nevertheless the Greeks awarded Nero first prize, and gave him their most distinguished award for excellence in competition. Any normal person should have seen right through this, but Nero appears to have missed what the Greeks were trying to accomplish. He proclaimed that the Greeks recognized “true greatness” and in appreciation removed Greece from the list of provinces that paid annual tributes to Rome.
Whatever their faults, no one ever said the Greeks were idiots.
I find something almost childlike about Nero’s utter lack of self-awareness. But as we have said in previous updates, distancing oneself from reality to such a degree, combined with great power, would inevitably lead to disaster. Nero’s self-delusion manifested itself in other ways. He may have murdered his mother to obtain the divorce and remarriage he sought. He may have had a hand in the great fire of 64 AD that burned much of Rome. Nero had always talked of redesigning Rome on more aesthetic lines, and now with much of the city destroyed he could (Christians became a convenient scapegoat). He almost certainly did not really “fiddle while Rome burned,” but the story points to a truth about his character.
When he died by suicide, he is reported to have lamented, “What a great artist dies with me!” delusional to the bitter end. Few of us will always like the limits imposed on us by law, custom, circumstance, and conscience, but maybe these are some of the things God uses to keep us from being enslaved to our own self, and trapped in our own view of reality.
The aftermath of Nero’s death removed all traces of what remained of the Republic. While under Augustus, the Senate at least served as a rubber stamp, now the position of emperor simply went to the general who could control Rome.
The Romans were glad enough to get rid of Nero, but eliminating him meant the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and a power vacuum that needed filled. Rome burned in A.D. 64, but Rome itself played with fire with a political system bound to rupture at some point.
Historians are people too, and they need jobs just like everyone else. One way some seek to perpetuate their role in society is by coming up with new and different perspectives on the past. I am all for reexamining things and keeping them fresh, but . . . recently I have noticed a few attempts to redeem Rome’s most notorious Emperors, Nero and Caligula, and I wonder if this carries things a bit too far.* Still, despite my concerns that this represents something “weird for the sake of being weird,” we must contend, for example, with the fact that Nero had a great deal of popularity with the masses in general. We need not assume that Tacitus and Suetonius deliberately lied and distorted things to wonder if they failed to give us the full picture.
Aloys Winterling recently published a well-received biography of Caligula. Some reviews got my ire up with the word “rehabilitation,” but upon further examination, Winterling seeks to condemn Caligula in a different way, and not “rehabilitate” him. Winterling allows us to understand Rome and his reign in a different light. Traditionally most assume that Caligula’s actions had their roots in some type of madness, and this allows for us to excuse them in some ways, obscuring Caligula’s true motives.**
The Augustan synthesis fixed the bleeding in Rome after a century of intermittent civil war, but at a price of the straightforward approach Rome prided itself on. Augustus may have “pretended” not to want power and the Senate likely “pretended” to rule. But in the end, Augustus had the power and the senate didn’t. Augustus performed an intricate kibuki dance of sorts that allowed everyone to assume, if they wished, that Rome was still Rome, after all.
Caligula wanted to end this charade, Winterling argues, by carrying its logic as far it went. He deliberately sought to expose the hypocrisy involved amongst Roman elite. So, he made his horse a senator and consul as a deliberate insult, as a joke, not because he was “crazy.” Nero had a thing for the stage and part of me wonders if we might not see Caligula’s time in power as something akin to Andy Kauffman as Emperor, where all masks come off because all masks are on, and things are funny because they are . . . not really that funny. His goal seemed to be make people feel uncomfortable, something slightly akin to an act of social ‘violence,’^ which of course would presage the very real violence that characterized Caligula’s reign.
In attempting to strip off masks by putting on masks–such as “pretending” to be a god (though he might really have believed it? Anything is possible). Many other examples exist of this. When Caligula fell ill one Senator prayed for his recovery and, in an act of great ‘devotion,’ pledged his life for the health of the emperor. When he recovered, Caligula made him go through with his pledge and end his life. No more masks, no more empty words. Caligula sought to break everything down and rule by himself with no need for social niceties. One might think of Caligula’s reign as a 3 1/2 year stage act of a much more evil version of Andy Kauffman.
Diplomacy (and most aspects ofpolitics, I suppose) involves masks, and wearing such things must get tiresome. One has to say things indirectly, if at all. One says things with posture, and what one eats. The job grants one high status and honor, yet it often requires a self-effacing temperment that often will not mesh with such requirements. To say what one wants, to be an authentic man, such is the dream of every romantic. It is this same romantic who no doubt envisions that his bracing personality is just what the world has been waiting for.
Liuprand of Cremona came from northern Italy as an ambassador for Emperor Otto in the middle of the 10th century A.D. Otto sent him to Constantinople in hopes of arranging a royal marriage. Liuprand’s life as a churchman gave him an excellent education, and he had a reputation as a fine speaker. He seemed the best possible candidate to navigate the highly developed and occasionally strange world of Byzantium.
Liuprand wrote Otto an account of all of his exploits, and what makes his work so enjoyable is that he thinks he’s doing a great job. He’s “telling it like it is,” not giving the Byzantines an inch! He fights a valiant war of words on behalf of his emperor, of whom he seems to forget . . . wants a marriage into the Byzantine royal family.
One exchange, involving precedence and the tension between eastern and western churches, got a bit testy. The Byzantines speak first (Liuprand writes in the first person) . . .
“But he will do that,” said Basil, the head of the imperial bedchamber, “when he makes Rome and the Roman church obedient to his nod.”
Then I said, “A certain fellow, having suffered much harm from another, approached God and said, “Lord, avenge me of my enemy!” God answered him, “I will do it, on the day on which I will give each according to his deeds.”
But to this Basil relpied, “How late!” [this exchange weaves together quotes from Ps. 61:13, Lk 18:3].
Then they all left the disputation shaking with laughter . . .
Liuprand walks away angry, but doesn’t seem to recognize the light-hearted touch from the Byzantines throughout this conversation, obvious in their laughter over his theological “zinger.”
In another instance, Liuprand grows incensed at the “masks” of the Byzantines, as they honored the emperor’s father, with the traditional song, “God grant you many years,” often sung in Orthodox churches even today. We enter his narrative moments after he has been chastised by the emperor for finding their food too dainty and smelly.
[The Emperor] did not permit me a reply to his words, but instead ordered me back to the table. Then his father entered and sat down, a man, it seemed, born 150 years before. In their praises, or rather, their venting, the Greeks sang out, asking God to multiply his years.
From this we can discern just how ignorant and greedy the Greeks are, and how enamored they are of their own glory. They wish upon an old man, indeed–a walking corpse–what they certainly know nature will not allow, and the walking corpse wishes that which he knows will never happen, which he knows God will not do, and would not even be good for him if He did do it, but bad.
Liuprand is just the man to set them straight, if only they would listen! How greedy the Greeks are, indeed!
As one might surmise, Liuprand failed to secure a royal bride for Otto. He has no capability to see his role in this disaster, or perhaps thinks it just as well. How awful, he must have thought, to think of his leige Otto allying himself with these fish-eating onion lovers. Early during his visit he had been allowed to purchase some costly robes (though LIuprand seemed to despise all he saw and met, he did like their robes), but now the Emperor asked for them back.
When this was done, they took from me five very precious purple robes, judging that you [that is, Otto] and all the Italians, Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Swabians, indeed all the nations, are unworthy to go about decked in cloth of that quality. But how unsuitable and how insulting it is that soft, effeminate, long-sleeved, tiara wearing, hooded, lying, unsexed, idle people strut about in purple, while heroes, that is, strong men, who know war, full of faith and charity, in submission to God, full of virtues, do not! What an insult, if that is not!” [he does add, we should note, that they reimbursed him for the price of the robes].
Thus ended his hilariously inept diplomatic career.
I know that many noble and worthy souls love the poem “Invictus,” by William Ernst Henley, but I have never liked a thing about it. The bald pagan statements in the poem always seemed to me a bit ridiculous and silly coming from the pen of a Victorian Brit. I won’t argue the point too strongly, but I think we can at least say this, that when diplomats and politicians in sticky situations attempt to be “captains of their souls” and give nothing to no man, they become at best failures, at worst, a horrible wreck of humanity. The final irony may be that such scrupulously confident people often end up the butt of jokes.
Dave
*Most academics, especially in the humanities, tend to lean left politically. I wonder then, if we should be encouraged or worried that a variety of them seem to be trying to redeem, or perhaps lean towards “explaining away,” autocratic emperors.
**We should not call Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., “mad” unless we do wish to excuse them in some way.
^For any who might not know, Tony Clifton is Andy Kaufmann. I am one of those who (his Might Mouse routine aside), do not find him all that funny. In my defense, reading the entire Great Gatsby on stage as his ‘act’ might be audacious (he actually did this at least once), but is it funny? You might laugh at hearing about it, but would you pay to see it?
This week we continued our look at the early Roman emperors. After the death of Augustus came the reign of Emperor Tiberius.
There is good evidence that suggests that Tiberius never wanted to be emperor at all. Duty bound, he did not shrink from service. In many key ways, Tiberius was a good emperor (generally just, sound money manager, no foolish military adventures), but his introverted personality distanced him from the population and the ruling elite. His bust shows him at least at a young age to be a decent, unassuming man. As time went on, he grew more bitter, more distant.
His time in power raises a few questions:
As the Republic faded and Augustus’s system took over, was it possible for the emperor to be a simple civil servant? Did the principate system of Augustus require a more dynamic kind of leadership than Tiberius could muster? I recently heard an interview with an actor who had senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein guest-star on the sitcom he is a part of. He mentioned how naturally acting came to the politicians. It initially surprised him at first, but then he thought that in fact, politicians play a role all the time.
Some decry this situation, while others accept it passively. But we should wonder if our system of government and our society do not almost require our leaders to be at least part image. They need to represent something abstract beyond themselves in order to appeal to a broad enough cross-section of people to get elected.
Tiberius’s reaction to his unpopularity exacerbated the problem. Tiberius took his unpopularity personally. He grew distant and sullen. The distance eventually became physical as well as social, as he withdrew from Rome and ruled from the island of Capri. His isolation forced him to trust a select few. When one of them named Sejanus betrayed him, Tiberius went off the rails. Now no one was trustworthy, and many were arrested on flimsy treason charges. Once he could take refuge in the good work he did for Rome, but now he spent much of his time trying to find “traitors.” Whereas before people may have grudgingly respected him without liking him, now he had the hatred of most of the political class in Rome.
So strong was their dislike of Tiberius, the Romans rejoiced at his murder in favor of Emperor Gaius, known to us and his contemporaries as Caligula. With Caligula, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Here was a man of some charm, but almost no real care for the actual demands of office.
Unlike Tiberius, he actually had a sense of humor — but this often had a cruel edge to it even when expressed in its most benign forms. Growing as the mascot of the army in Germany, the son of the beloved but murdered General Germanicus, Caligula never had any check on his whims. In normal society he would have been an annoying brat. Unfortunately for Rome, his birth and connections made him emperor of the most powerful empire in the western world.
As his reign progressed, he grew more and proud and insane with power.
Caligula may never have been “normal,” but he wasn’t always insane (however unnerving this most famous bust of him might be, with that smirk and those distant eyes). We call those insane who cannot cope with reality, and pride and delusions of omnipotence certainly distance us from reality. This distance can lead to paranoia and erratic behavior, perhaps out of fear. A paranoid and erratic emperor would spell disaster for Rome’s political class.
Can a person make oneself insane through their actions? We can consider Daniel 4 and the story of Nebuchadnezzar, where his pride led to his insanity. The same might be said of Caligula.
Next week, we examine the reign of Claudius and Nero.
As I mentioned at Orientation, the class this years is entitled, “American History” even though we will not spend the entirety of our time studying America particularly. Still, 19th and 20th century America will receive special focus. In light of this, I introduced a few key questions that will form the backdrop of our study this year:
What does it mean to be an American?
Is America unique? If so, in what way? Our founders indeed believed that America did represent something unique in its time, but our way of life has influenced others over time. If we are no longer unique, how has that impacted our sense of identity?
Many have commented that America gets birthed from an idea, rather than “within history.” What advantages and disadvantages does this bring, and how has this impacted us?
Hopefully students will enjoy grappling with these difficult questions.
We began the year looking quickly at the early American presidents during the years 1788-1800. The founders did much to lay down on paper a workable outline of government in the Constitution. But the Constitution could not answer every question or foresee every circumstance that would arise. How would the principles laid down in the Constitution work themselves out in real life? Nowhere does the Consitution explicitly guarantee the right to privacy, for example, but does that mean we don’t have that right? Does the Constitution forbid what it does not explicitly allow, or does it allow what it does not explicitly forbid? The founders themselves did not agree on this question, and the Constitution does not say one way or the other.
We looked at the transformation of American democracy under Andrew Jackson, and this ultimately led to discussions on the following topics:
1. Do we elect our representatives because of their wisdom, experience, etc. (the attitude of George Washington), or to simply be ‘the voice of the people (more of Andrew Jackson’s idea)? Do we want our representatives to follow their own ideas and convictions, or to follow the opinion polls?
2. In some ways, Jackson was our first “American” president. Washington, Jefferson, Monroe — all of them had an essentially European style upbringing and education. Jackson grew up on the frontier without the formal training. Previously, government was for the “best” men to rule on the people’s behalf. Jackson believed that if he could be president, certainly anyone could be Secretary of State. He began the so-called “Spoils System” by rewarding his political friends with government posts. However distasteful this might be, it had its roots in a passionate belief in equality, that no one should be thought of as “elite.” His inaugural celebration had a much more loose and informal feel than that of his predecessors.
3. Just at the end of class Friday I introduced political philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s formulation of ‘Negative’ and ‘Positive’ liberty. Does liberty mean freedom from outside constraint, or are we not truly free unless directed toward a greater good, as the Puritans might have argued? Do restaurants rob smokers of their liberty by banning them, or does that ban in fact enhance the freedom of non-smokers not to inhale second-hand smoke? Non-smokers are certainly in the majority, but every democracy must protect minority rights to be considered a democracy at all. How much, and what kind, of protection should minorities receive? This becomes all the more problematic when extending rights to the minority means the minority inconveniences the majority.
The interesting and problematic part of this debate is that both sides believe they are enhancing liberty. The restaurant that allows smoking everywhere believes that they are simply letting people do what they choose to do, even if the choice is a bad one. What business is it of theirs what people do with their lives? Who are they to make choices for others? On the other side, some would say that such ‘liberty’ is in fact liberty only for the minority to do as they please. The ‘liberty’ of some is ‘oppression’ for others forced to breathe in the smoke. With everyone smoking in restaurants, the freedom of non-smokers to eat where they please has significant limits.
Many of our political debates, I feel, may have something to do with these different definitions of liberty.
Of course this discussion of liberty cannot divorced in our context from a discussion of slavery, and may help us understand why many came to defend slavery in the name of liberty. To help us understand slavery in America we will look briefly at the history of slavery at some point next week. Why did it disappear in the Middle Ages? Why did it start to return in the Renaissance? Was indentured servitude slavery? Why did slavery linger in the South? Why did we not ‘solve’ the slavery question with the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? Below I include the brief reading selections I gave the students on the issue of “Negative” and “Positive” liberty if you would like to read yourself.
Next week we will look at the expansion of America to the west and south in the 1840’s, and what impact this had on the political climate of the period. I look forward to a wonderful year.
Dave Mathwin
Negative and Positive Conceptions of Liberty
Negative Liberty
Philosophers such as Locke or Adam Smith or, in some moods, Mill, believed that social harmony and progress were compatible with reserving a large area for private life over which neither the State nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass. Hobbes, and those who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another and making social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep them in their places; he wished correspondingly to increase the area of centralised control and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed that some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere of social control. To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism. The most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy, Benjamin Constant, who had not forgotten the Jacobin dictatorship, declared that at the very least the liberty of religion, opinion, expression, property must be guaranteed against arbitrary invasion. Jefferson, Burke, Paine, Mill compiled different catalogues of individual liberties, but the argument for keeping authority at bay is always substantially the same. We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to ‘degrade or deny our nature’. We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating.
What then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature. What is this essence? What are the standards which it entails? This has been, and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite debate. But whatever the principle in terms of which the area of non-interference is to be drawn, whether it is that of natural law or natural rights, or of utility, or the pronouncements of a categorical imperative, or the sanctity of the social contract, or any other concept with which men have sought to clarify and justify their ‘convictions, liberty in this sense means liberty from, absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always recognisable, frontier. ‘The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’, said the most celebrated of its champions.If this is so, is compulsion ever justified? Mill had no doubt that it was. Since justice demands that all individuals be entitled to a minimum of freedom, all other individuals were of necessity to be restrained, if need be by force, from depriving anyone of it. Indeed, the whole function of law was the prevention I of just such collisions: the State was reduced to what Lassalle contemptuously described as the functions of a night-watchman or traffic policeman. What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he declares that, unless the individual is left to live as he wishes in ‘the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns himself’, civilisation cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market in ideas, come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for mental energy, for moral courage. Society will be crushed by the weight of ‘collective mediocrity’.
Whatever is rich and diversified will be crushed by the weight of custom, by men’s constant tendency to conformity, which breeds only ‘withered’ capacities, ‘pinched and hidebound’, ‘cramped and dwarfed’ human beings. ‘Pagan self-assertion’ is as worthy as ‘Christian self-denial’. ‘All errors which [a man] is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.’The defence of liberty consists in the ‘negative’ goal of warding off interference. To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live. This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus (some would say of Occam) to our own. Every plea for civil liberties and individual rights, every protest against exploitation and humiliation, against the encroachment of public authority, or the mass hypnosis of custom or organised propaganda, springs from this individualistic, and much disputed, conception of man.
Positive Liberty
One way of making this clear is in terms of the independent momentum which the, initially perhaps quite harmless, metaphor of self-mastery acquired. ‘I am my own master’; ‘I am slave to no man’; but may I not (as Platonists or Hegelians tend to say) be a slave to nature? Or to my own ‘unbridled’ passions? Are these not so many species of the identical genus ‘slave’ – some political or legal, others moral or spiritual? Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or with my self at its best.
Dominion and rationality necessarily presuppose freedom. Moreover,freedom is a necessary condition of morality and love, love cannot be coerced. Man’s freedom and will is at the very heart of man made in God’s image. But as we will see man’s freedom is complex. Freedom has two stages, the first stage of freedom is an imperfect freedom which if used properly leads to perfect freedom. The first stage of freedom is the condition man is in at his creation, it is freedom to choose, I will have the pear and not the banana, I will not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I will obey God, I will ignore God.This kind of simple choice is not perfect and true freedom but only the means by which we achieve true freedom. Perfect freedom in the fullest sense is not about choice. This is the lie of the Devil, we believe that freedom means being free to do what one wants, free to choose for oneself. But true freedom is achieved when man simply becomes, when he comes to the place in his being thathe is free from the possibility of choosing the bad.St. Augustine distinguishes between “the first freedom of the will, the ability not to sin” and “the final freedom… the inability to sin.”St. Augustine writes in The City of God,
Nay rather, it will be more truly free, when set free from the delight of sinning to enjoy the steadfast delight of not sinning.. . . This new freedom will be the more powerful just because it will not have the power to sin; and this, not by its unaided natural ability, but by the gift of God has received from him the inability to sin . . . It surely cannot be said that God Himself has not freedom, because he is unable to sin?
Our era eschews compromise–it seems almost a dirty word to some. We prefer purity. Of course, neither compromise or purity describes a something morally good or bad. Too much purity and you have the desert. Life cannot exist without proper mixing. But . . . too much improper mixing and coherence breaks down and chaos follows soon after. Life cannot exist amidst the flood.
Purity seems simpler than compromise, but purity too has its twists and turns. With COVID, for example, you have the ‘anti-vax’ group, who refuse to ‘contaminate’ themselves (either medically, religiously, or politically) by taking the vaccine. This seems the very definition of purity. But then, this group mixes with much greater ease with the general population. Then you have the incongruous practice of requiring the “purity” of having the vaccine/boosters to “mix” (or compromise, in a sense) with others. Usually, purity involves the absence of something rather than the addition of something. But, this same group shows much more hesitancy actually mixing with others. So, which group should have the higher rank on the purity scale?
The ascendancy of purity signals that for reasons good or otherwise, for many mixing even of a moderate kind (socially, politically, etc.) means “the flood.” We can take the recent Supreme Court abortion decision as an example. In the Clinton era, “safe, legal, and rare,” were the watchwords. But as opposition to Roe v. Wade continued, the position hardened. Now, many encourage pro-choice proponents to Shout Your Abortion. They require affirmation–tolerance will not suffice any longer. Purity (which again, may be good or bad, depending) requires absolutes. The recent decision overturning Roe did not ban abortion, but rather, put the question to the states, requiring pro-choice and pro-life states to mix with each other, which many on the pro-choice side lament.
Something similar happened with the slavery issue in America. I realize the two issues have differences, but their trajectory in American political life looks quite alike up to a point. With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the country had a chance to deal with the slavery issue with one blow. We failed, partly for good reasons, such as the need for unity, and partly for bad ones, such as the usual human problems of power, greed, and fear. But part of this failure lay in the near universal consensus that
Slavery was foisted on us by the British, and with them gone, slavery would fade away.
Slavery was an evil, though for a time a necessary evil. Straight out emancipation immediately could be dangerous.
Slavery would certainly fade away within a generation or so–no need to stir up a dying hornet’s nest.
When slavery in fact started to grow rather than fade, slave states changed their tune. Slavery grew from a necessary evil, to an entrenched political right inherent in our system, and finally to a positive blessing for one in all. Robert Forbes’ excellent The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath picks up the national dialogue at the “entrenched political right” stage. Forbes sees 1820 as the year that the nation shifted the dialogue on slavery, where the fragile unspoken consensus which allowed for political cooperation between slave and free states started eroding. The new narrative that emerged would put the country on a potential collision course.
Forbes has a a difficult task. Writing about the political machinations surrounding slavery requires a degree of detachment, which can come across as cold. Secondly, slavery is one of the few moral questions where we have more clarity now than in the past, and this brings a temptation of judging people in the past only according to their vices and not their virtues. Despite the fact that Forbes writes nearly entirely about the politicians and not the actual slaves, he steadfastly avoids the first pitfall. The second task is harder, and he mostly succeeds there as well.
Before diving in, a few preliminaries . . .
Many who claimed anti-slavery beliefs compromised with others to keep slavery around. Some pro-slavery advocates talked of the issue more in terms of state’s rights vis a vis federal power, and not in terms of race, humans as property, and so forth. What should an historian make of this?
The first question involves sources–do we believe what people say? Barring something unusual, an historian has to trust what people say, and avoid playing armchair psychologist to those who lived 100 or 1000 years ago. This might change when confronted with a difference in personal v. public actions, or a comparison of public and private statements. In other words, we should need solid evidence not to take what people say at face value. Possibly, this means that when people say that they are against slavery in principle, but believe that we have to tolerate it for a time, that we in turn believe them.
The second relates to the first–should we have an optimistic outlook on our country’s history and give it the benefit of the doubt? Evidence exists for both the narrative that a) slavery was essentially an aberration on the American project, and b) that, while slavery may not have been the raison d’ etre of America (a la 1619 Project, a framework which I believe has no real support in evidence), nevertheless, it was inextricably woven into the American fabric and our concept of liberty from the start.
Starting by thinking of a country involves too much abstraction. We can start instead with a family. I think it important, for example, for parents to give their kids the benefit of the doubt with their actions and choices (kids should do the same for parents–a novel concept!). It should take a lot for you to have the a priori assumption that your child is lying and up to no good–though possibly you need to get there.
The state is not your family, but . . . it bears some resemblance. We owe the state less than we owe our family (or friends), perhaps much less, but we do owe it something. Do we owe it the benefit of the doubt? I will put my cards out there and say, “Very slightly,” and this colors my interpretation of the events as follows. Though certainly, this tenuous “benefit of the doubt” for American history should get strongly challenged by the persistence of slavery.
Forbes begins sketching national attitudes towards slavery at the turn of the 19th century. In the late 18th century, America had two chances to decisively deal with slavery, first with the Declaration, then with the Constitution. In both cases, one could argue that the need for unity trumped the consequence of the “United States” never coming into existence. Politically, this unity was made possible in large measure because of an alliance between slave states and some northern farmers, many of them in Pennsylvania. This may surprise us, for PA had a high concentration of Quakers, who had strong anti-slavery sentiments. Quakers, and others, however, made the following calculation:
Slavery (as everyone agreed at the time) will disappear within a generation. So, while it is odious, it is not a threat to Republican liberty
Northeastern merchants back the expansion of Federal power, through the ‘Federalist’ party. As everyone knows, power, once granted, only tends to grow. In other words, slavery will go away, but checking federal power requires constant vigilance.
Federalists strongly opposed America’s war with England in 1812. Had the war ended differently, their political fortunes might have waxed, but Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans (which took place after the war was technically over) gave the Americans a sense of overall triumph. This finished the Federalists, which in turn, ended the alliance between northern farmers and southern states. Suddenly, the growth of federal power seemed much less of a threat, and, oh by the way, slavery seemed not to be going away any time soon. Now without direct political allies, and the slavery issue under more exposure, southern states banded together. Now too, cross-sectional political alliances dissipated, opening the door for more direct north-south tension.
Much of the north already distrusted the south. The north saw no possibility of pleasing them. Seven of the first eight presidents came from the south, yet they remained cantankerous and loved to play the victim. For their part, much of the south had for some time distrusted the north. Most every great political thinker associated liberty with agriculture and warned of the dangers of excess commerce. The north’s love of trade would inevitably bring in a greater Federal presence. Manufacturing interests would demand tariffs and other protections for their goods, and this meant a growth of national power.
Many supporters of the south today claim that support for slavery involved not supporting slavery as such, but a certain idea of freedom and belief in limited government that inevitably had consequences others might not like. Still, one must safeguard this freedom. So, we can draw a comparison between, say, the presence of pornography and the presence of slavery. No one should question the evils of pornography and its negative effects on women and men both. But, we might tolerate that evil to get the greater good of government not deciding what “speech” to restrict . . . or so the argument goes. I think this argument might have merit for a period of time. It reminds me of a professor of mine in college who told all of us pro-life advocates that
She and many others like had no love for abortion as such, but
We needed to appreciate the attendant opportunities that came for women in the aftermath of Roe, a point hard to deny historically.*
In her mind and those of others, then, abortion served as a kind of symbolic stand-in for something much larger, i.e., equality and the rights of women.
Again, however, the abortion dialogue, like the slavery issue, morphed into abortion for its own sake. And now with the internet, pornography can have a ubiquitous presence in people’s lives.
President James Monroe took office amidst the collapsing consensus around slavery and its future, but had the “good feelings” of the aftermath of the war of 1812. Churchill famously commented of Monroe that, “He was a humble man, with much to be humble about,” but Forbes sees Monroe as a man of clear vision, even if attaining it involved a difficult tightrope walk. Monroe came from the Virginia school of thought, which stressed limited government. But Forbes sees him leaning anti-slavery in ways that blended with a soft nationalism. Monroe saw slavery as a divisive factional wedge that would split the country. Connecting states through commerce, he believed, would help smooth the rough edges and induce dependency and cooperation. He shied away from tackling the slave issue directly as this would inflame sectional tensions. One problem with this . . . does increased trade in one’s property mean increased trade in slaves? Monroe hoped not, but the logic of slavery eventually worked against him. Slavery proved something of black hole for our politics.
Many southerners stood against even Monroe’s plans, foreseeing that an expanding national economy meant expanding federal power. And if federal power expanded, the government could claim the right to eliminate slavery all together. If Monroe sought to thread the needle, many pro-slavery advocates sought to go through its eye. They wanted to expand commerce in slaves, but have no attendant increase of federal power. They wanted to block construction of the Erie Canal on the one handand allow more freedom of movement in the slave trade.
Around this time we see the first serious growth of the movement to send slaves back to Africa–the colonization movement. However distasteful such an idea seems to us, and however distasteful it became in later decades, Forbes shows great fairness to the idea’s early advocates, a mark of a good historian. He points out that the movement initially came from those most anti-slavery, those who made real sacrifices to try and aid the cause of slaves.
To understand this, we need familiarity with classical political theory on democracies, which ran thusly:
Democracies need to be small in size to allow for everyone to know each other. With our size, we had already blown this criteria.
One reason for the small size was the need for trust, and shared religious and cultural heritage.
In other words, since democracies are built on the premise of disagreement and conflict, they need a firm, wide base of agreement to make sure our disagreements center on the color of paint on the walls, and not on ultimate questions.
Colonization advocates saw such great cultural differences between Africans and Europeans that they surmised that neither group could exercise self-government amongst the other. Returning slaves to Africa allowed them as well as us to pursue our own political destinies.**
All of this brings us to 1820 and the Missouri Compromise. Forbes gives us a high volume of precise detail about the how the deal went down. To get a compromise, one must brand the outliers on both sides as extremists. From our vantage point, we can easily do this to the ‘anti-restrictionists,’ who wanted to take the twisted logic of slavery to its conclusion, i.e., the national government has no power to restrict slavery anywhere.^
Looking back, we can see the Missouri Compromise as fatally flawed, not only because of the evil of slavery itself, but also because it opened to the door to the expansion of slavery. At the time, however, many of those against slavery felt content. A look at the map showed a legislative future that looked to bend in the right direction.
My reason for slight optimism regarding our history referenced above . . . even with 9/10 of future territory destined to exclude slavery, many Americans (as opposed to the politicians) hated that the compromise meant any expansion for slavery at all. Many politicians in free states that voted for the compromise saw their political careers finished.
And yet, we know that slavery continued, and in fact grew over the next few decades. One could argue that this is what you deserve if you compromise with slavery. One could also reasonably assume that the slavery question would have peacefully resolved itself if it had not been for the Mexican-American war, which opened up vast swaths of land eligible for slavery under the 1820 agreement.
I have great sympathy for those that voted for the compromise. As an overall optimist for America, I can see myself believing that north and south could eventually get along, because eventually what kept us apart would no longer be around. But had I lived long enough after, that vote would have haunted me.
Thomas Jefferson lived to see the Compromise vote. He saw abolitionists, and even strong restrictionists, (those that wanted to restrict slavery to where it currently existed and have it go no further) on the wrong side. In a letter to a friend he wrote that
The Missouri controversy, is a question of having just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of people, and to fanaticize them; while with the knowing ones it is simply a question of power. . .. Real morality is on the [anti-restrictionist] side. The spreading of slaves over a larger surface adds to their happiness and renders their future emancipation more practicable.
Jefferson had a brilliant and incisive mind, but here he is not just dead wrong morally, but his great learning has made him insane. To honestly think that spreading slavery further throughout the country would more speedily bring emancipation boggles my mind. It would, however, make it harder for slaves to revolt.
Perhaps Jefferson’s quote illumines the tragedy of slavery. His belief here seems genuine to me. The only conclusion to draw is that his sins regarding slavery, and the sins of the nation, have warped his sense of reality. When that happens, we cannot expect to have the wisdom to seek the right kind of compromises.
Dave
*The question then might be–was this worth the cost?
**I have very limited knowledge, but I think it fair to say that later advocates of colonization likely based their reasons more on the “inferiority” of blacks, and not merely their cultural differences, though some early advocates no doubt shared this conviction.
^Such a demand comes across as morally repugnant, of course. Forbes shows, however, that this claim also made hash of the Constitution and of our history. We established the Northwest Territories explicitly as free states at the time of the Constitution’s ratification. To deny the government this power was tantamount to denying almost any power to government.
This week we continued our look at the formation of the Empire under Augustus Caesar. His leadership gave Rome peace and stability, but this came at a price. Augustus solved some of the decayed Republic, but his solution created other problems.
Decades of civil war faced Rome with the need for change. Rome’s society, however, was built on tradition. Augustus carried himself as a leader in the old tradition, but in reality eroded all of the old checks and balances of the Republic. He was much more careful than his uncle Julius, who made no secret of his power. In reality, however, Augustus had just as much, if not more power than Julius ever did. He certainly understood the power inherent in manipulating his image. . .
The problem may not have been the power itself, but the fact that it was done more or less secretly, and so did not encourage Rome to face reality. We talked of how Rome was in a sense, ‘pretending’ — living in a fantasy land that told them that Rome was still Rome, after all. This pretending, however, can be dangerous for a civilization, because the tension between your imagination and reality can grow over time.
In their “Res Getae” assignment the students got an idea of the subtlety with which Augustus worked. He saw what happened to his uncle Julius, and modified his actions accordingly. He never (or hardly ever) took power, he waited to receive it from others. He rejected the title of Dictator which would have brought odium upon himself, but he took bits and pieces of other offices that added up to total control in the end, a kind of “majority ownership” of Rome.
Next week we will see that one problem Augustus faced was the German frontier along the Rhine and Danube river. He was right to recognize its weaknesses. This map shows the wedge into Roman territory created by the meeting of the Rhine and Danube river.
Do rivers make for good frontiers? We might think so, for rivers are not easy for armies to cross. But when compared with mountains or deserts we see that rivers can be quite porous. Neither side, after all, has a barrier to using the river on their side of territory. Furthermore, most people use rivers for fishing, travel, and commerce. Thus, rivers often act to bring people together rather than separate them. The MD/D.C./No. VA area is a good example of this. Augustus needed a new frontier, a more secure border.
Prudence might dictate falling back to something more secure. But Augustus built his power in part on the fantasy that Rome had not changed. Rome never falls back! He tried to push forward further into Germany to the more advantageous Elbe/Danube frontier, seen here below. . .
and picked the arrogant Varus to command. Varus fell for Arminius’s trap and led his army to disaster at the Battle of Tuetonburg Forest. We will discuss how Augustus was right about his frontier being vulnerable, but was he right in his solution?
We shall see that their are limits to what the military can accomplish when the situation requires a political solution While Rome would win battles against Germans in the future, they could never end their power of resistance.
Next week we will do an activity where I want the students to rethink the Roman frontier. In the ideal world Rome could have pulled back a great deal. But of course that would completely ignore political realities. If he withdrew in one place, would he have to advance in another? If so, where? I hope the students enjoyed this change of pace and the chance to view the problem in a different way.
Here is a map of the Empire from a topographical perspective:
Where could Rome get an ‘easy’ victory to allow them to withdraw on the German border? Where should troops be concentrated?
When we wrap up Augustus we will discuss various aspects of his reign. He ended a century of civil war and brought peace throughout the Roman empire. Under his leadership the economy and culture of Rome revived. The system he established did give Rome stability long after he departed, and as far as masterful politicians go, I would rank Augustus as one of the all-time greats. On the other hand, while Augustus was very effective, he had to curtail civil liberties to achieve his goals. He never sought to make Rome face reality, to take them from their current perception of reality at point ‘A’ and bring them to the necessary point ‘B.’ In this way, Augustus lacked true leadership greatness.
After Augustus we will see how the system he established fared under different emperors. Tiberius and Caligula will get our attention next week.
It’s always exciting to begin a new year, and I have enjoyed the students and our interactions. I trust that we will have a great year together.
We begin the year resuming the story of Rome in 44 B.C., after the death of Julius Caesar. I am aware that for new students, it is not easy to pick up the story in the middle. We have reviewed the context of Caesar’s assassination, but I would urge all students (and parents if you wish) to read this and this — both will hopefully help provide some additional insight into the background from Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire. I would also suggest a review the Five Elements of Civilization that formed the backbone of the 8th Grade Ancient History class. If anyone wishes to review that (especially new students), look here.
To get new students up to speed, we went quickly through the first two of Rome’s three stages. The first stage was the monarchy phase (753-508 B.C.), the second the Republic (508-44 B.C.). Whatever their differences, both phases showed forth Rome’s main characteristics:
An emphasis on tradition. Rome looked back to the past for guidance, not forward to the future. They valued stability over change.
Rome began as an agrarian oriented society, which usually goes hand-in-hand with tradition oriented societies. Though Rome began to develop a wealthy merchant class around 100 B.C., the ruling elite always thought of themselves as farmers.
In the Republic phase, they shared and divided power amongst different people and institutions, though usually monopolized by the nobility. They feared that a concentration of power, especially in executive offices, would bring about a tyrannical government.
We spent this week reviewing the decline of the Roman Republic, setting the stage for our look at the Roman Empire and Augustus next week. I wanted to with a few main themes:
1. Don’t Pretend
We reviewed the basics of the structure of the Republic, and how this helped form Rome’s identity, along with their self-image. In Rome’s eyes, they were, and had always been, a nation of self reliant farmers. But Rome changed over time, and because of Rome’s strong (at least stated) belief in tradition, Rome never felt the need to change. When they did change, they usually pretended that they were, in fact, not changing at all.
Next week we will discuss how potentially dangerous this attitude can be. For example, a couple years ago during the summer I got a minor shoulder injury at the beach. Thinking myself to be 24 instead of the 38 I was at the time, after a few days I used the muscles much too soon and tweaked it all over again. I need to realize that things take longer to heal at 38 than they did at 24, however sad a realization this might be! This is all the more true for me at 41. If I were to continue to pretend to be 24 the damage and bodily dysfunction would grow worse. Imagine if a whole civilization did this, and what consequences would be in store for people that did so.
As the Republic collapsed, the distance between Rome’s self-image and reality grew wider and wider. Will Augustus help solve the problem, or will he exacerbate it?
2. The Power and Vulnerability of Tradition
Most of us have probably experienced the positive power of tradition. It provides structure, and sometimes comfort to our lives. Many families have holiday traditions that add depth and meaning to the occasion. Tradition seems to have a magical power of sorts — we do something because that’s what we do, and it works. In this way, tradition can be stronger than law. It has a power all its own.
But the spell of tradition can be easily broken. There is nothing, for example, to stop you from violating tradition. Once you stop, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Tradition’s power can be broken in a moment, whereas law takes much longer to whittle away. Rome prided itself on being guided by the past, of “not departing from the ways of their fathers.” Yet a century of civil war eroded most, if not all of those “old ways.”
Did they perceive this truth? Can a tradition oriented society make necessary adaptations? It’s safe to say that nearly every civilization would likely collapse after so much inner conflict and turmoil. Rome will survive under Augustus, but they will pay a steep price to do so, as we shall see.
Next week we will look at some of the dilemmas facing Augustus as he ruled Rome, and see how the dynamic of ‘pretending’ likely pushed him into the disastrous Battle of Tuetonborg Forest. We will also ask the question, “Should you ever trade liberty for security?”
The Bill of Rights occupies a cherished place within American life and jurisprudence, so it comes as a surprise to many (as it did to me back in high school) that the founders added the Bill of Rights only reluctantly to get the Constitution ratified by enough states. It seems that the framers found such cherished guarantees as essentially unnecessary, and so adding them could only create confusion.
But they did add them, likely thinking that, “We think such things are not needed. Obviously, the federal government has no power to regulate speech, assembly, etc. But if you would like it made crystal-clear to alleviate anxiety, fine–here you go.”
The idea of “freedom of religion” in America comes in part from our history and our ideology. In a legal sense, it arises from the 1st Amendment, which reads,
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
What once seemed solid now melts into the ether, as many today question proper limits for freedom of speech and religion. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) passed through Congress in near unanimous fashion back in 1993 (97-3 in the Senate) but might not pass through Congress today. No one has yet made a direct attack against freedom of religion, but recent controversies about sexuality have led to many now sniping at the edges.
As a conservative of some kind, part of me feels the obligation to defend religious liberty and our past traditions. But Steven K. Smith’s book, Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Principle of Religious Freedom made me rethink everything. His 2018 book Pagans and Christians in the Cityis bar-none the best book on the legal problem of religion and sexual ethics. This work details how legally and logically, the idea of everyone having complete “freedom of religion” was never attainable and should not be attempted. What I find most impressive is that Smith saw our modern problem coming back in 1993 when he wrote Foreordained Failure, a time when it seemed when America had re-enshrined religious liberty for all time with RFRA. Reading Smith is akin to cold water on your face in the morning–startling, but in the end, you draw a breath and see more clearly.
Onto Smith’s argument . . .
First, we should not see the Establishment Clause as an attempt to formulate a grand principle that could be used to adjudicate the future of the United States. Great differences existed among the states that ratified the Constitution, for example:
Relatively liberal Pennsylvania had blasphemy laws on the books well into the 19th century.
In New York, though they had no explicit laws, we find prosecutions for blasphemy into the 19th century as well.
Many states had Sabbath observance laws, the range of which differed widely. Virginia’s law (proposed by Madison the same day he proposed a religious freedom bill) prohibited disruption of services and unnecessary labor on Sundays. Many New England states went much further.
Many objected to these laws–John Adams thought blasphemy proscriptions inappropriate, for example. Still, while some questioned the laws’ morality or efficacy, none challenged the state’s legal right to have such laws.
The Establishment Clause could never have proclaimed a tight-knit principle about religion for the country because no national consensus existed. Rather, it proclaimed what everyone more or less agreed with–that the federal government could not make laws respecting religion, however much the states could do so.
Even the intellectual founders of the Liberal Order cannot accurately guide us. Smith looks at John Locke, whose A Letter Concerning Toleration outlines much of the modern ideology concerning religious freedom. Locke writes,
The care of souls cannot belong to a civil magistrate, because his power consists in outward force: but true and saving religion consists in inward persuasion of mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by force.
In this sense, Locke’s influence shines clearly–the government cannot regulate religion because it has no power to do so, and whatever power it hopes to exercise will have no real effect anyway. Church and commonwealth are “perfectly distinct, infinitely different from one another.”
To some this could seem like the absolute principle we need for modern times, but Locke also seemingly contradicts himself. For one, he admits that morality comes under the purview of the state, and that morality and religion share beds. Thus, Locke will not tolerate atheists, because their denial of the existence of God undermines public faith and morality, and he denies toleration to Moslems, whose potential loyalty to foreign sultans make them suspect.
The second dilemma . . . Locke’s theory of toleration depends on a view of religion not shared by many religious people (Smith impresses me again and again in this book by catching what many often miss). Locke assumes that:
Saving faith is a purely voluntary act
The church’s only business is that of ‘saving souls.’
He has no concept of the importance of ritual or outward observance or “show.”
For Locke, truth is where we arrive through independent and careful consideration of evidence, not through our communities, our rituals, etc. These inner beliefs can resist any outside coercion.
Even many secular Americans today would question at least one of these premises–probably #2. Most would criticize a church that sought to have no broader impact on the community. In America’s history we have numerous examples of churches seeking political and social goals that many would approve of, such as the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century, and the support given to the Civil Rights movement by many churches in the 1960’s. Smith writes,
The object of this discussion is not to determine whether either Locke’s premises or conclusion are sound or not. The point is that Locke’s account of toleration is dependent upon background beliefs about religion, government, society, and human psychology [that many will not agree with].
Whatever practices and precedents we set, we will have to favor a particular set of assumptions. We will have to discriminate, in a sense, as every law discriminates by declaring some things ok and some things not. The problem is that we
Believe that we are not discriminating, and that we can arrive a place of “neutrality” where all can agree, and we
Believe that we can find a universal principle to guide us in all circumstances
Smith thinks otherwise. At least in the 18th-19th centuries we left religion to the particular variances of the states, and so avoided our modern problem.
“Religious freedom,” then, will inevitably contain high levels of relativity.
Smith gives an example of a community with four hypothetically different perspectives:
Religious Voluntarists (traditional Baptists, non-denominationalists, etc.)
Religious Behaviorists (Catholics, Orthodox, some Lutherans and Presbyterians, perhaps Jews and Moslems as well)
Secular Optimists–those in favor of the idea of public good and collective action (progressives?)
Secular Pessimists–those opposed to collective action and the concept of public goods (libertarians).
Imagine a man named John wants to marry 3 wives, believing sincerely that this will aid in the salvation of his soul, and that of his family.
The religious voluntarist would grudgingly support his claim. Nothing should stand between a man and his conscience. The religious behaviorist would deny it–we cannot allow people to willfully harm their souls in such an overtly blatant fashion. The secular optimist might also deny it, based on a belief that polygamy hurts women, but the secular pessimist would likely allow it out of fear of too much state power.
Whatever the decision about John’s desire, some kind of religious belief must be preferred, and others discriminated against. We cannot avoid it, as it is the very essence of law itself to “discriminate.”
As an example, Smith takes the case of Epperson v. Arkansas, which overturned a law which forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. The court understood that the law had at its root religious objections to evolution, but “the state may not adopt programs which aid or oppose any religion. This prohibition is absolute.” Smith finds the Court’s (basically unanimous) line of reasoning faulty.
First, it creates a syllogistic reasoning that could favor either side. If we cannot aid or oppose any religion, then the law in place aids some religious believers and opposes others. But the same happens if you strike down the law. Either way we must “aid” or “oppose” certain beliefs.
Second, those that favored banning evolution from schools did so not because six day creation was a religious idea, but because they thought six day creation true and evolution false. Many other religious ideas lend support to evolutionary theory. The plaintiffs had no interest in generically “religious” teaching, but in “true” teaching.
Smith pushes against this false idea of neutrality with a quick examination of Grove v. Mead School District, in which the plaintiff objected to the book The Learning Tree in her daughter’s public school curriculum along religious grounds. Judge Canby sided with Mead. He admitted that The Learning Tree challenges certain religious dogmas. But he took pains to point out that a variety of Christian thinkers, among them Paul Tillich, Hans Kung, and Karl Barth, all argue that “honest, and even agonizing doubt, is not incompatible with Christian theism.”
Whatever one thinks of the above quote, those who object to The Learning Tree on religious grounds would likely not respect Tillich and Kung as authorities on the question. Again, the issue is truth, not religion. Grove felt that the inclusion of the book was wrong, not anti-religious. Grove might not have minded a book her daughter had to read that criticized Buddhism or Greek paganism. Judge Canby favored one religion over another–and would have done so no matter how he ruled.
Smith also dismantles the idea of a “common denominator,” a frequent and comfortable refuge for the centrist American. The argument runs, “Some favor religion ‘X,’ some religion ‘Y,’ some favor no religion at all. But we can base jurisprudence on what all sides have “in common.” Smith writes,
In more familiar contexts we would immediately spot the common denominator strategy as fraudulent. Suppose Dad and his daughter have a disagreement about dinner. Daughter proposes: “Let’s just have desert.” Dad suggests it would be better to have a full meal . . . then desert. Daughter reponds: “Dad, we have some disagreements. But there is something we both agree on; we both want desert. Clearly . . . the “neutral” solution is to accept what we agree on. So serve up the desert.”
Dad is not likely to be taken in by this ploy.
Again, as in other examples cited here, for both daughter and Dad, the issue is not desert itself, but the meaning of desert. For the daughter, desert is dinner. For Dad, desert has no meaning without dinner. Smith quotes Michael McConnell, who writes,
If the public school day and all its teaching is strictly secular, the child is likely to learn the lesson that religion is irrelevant to the significant things of this world, or at least that the spiritual realm is radically distinct and separate from the temporal. However intended, that is a lesson about religion. [That curriculum] is not “neutral.”
Smith asks his readers to dismantle false ideas about freedom and neutrality. Much like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, he has a magnificent diagnosis of the problem. Like Deneen as well, he has no particular path forward. Liberalism–love it or not–we can’t really leave it. We have to make the best of it.
In 1993 those that disagreed with Smith could look around and see the ground holding in a general sense. Now, our religious divisions seem much more obvious. “Secularism,” as Smith points out, will not fix the problem, but probably just deepen the religious divide because it too picks a side. It appears, however, that we have gone through different dominant religions, and need to accept that at certain times, different religions take center stage and receive preference.
We might see it this way:
1776-1846 — a frontier, democratized, individualistic Protestantism
1846-1918 — a more universalized/nationalized Protestantism
1918-68 — A civic faith in work, nation, and gain
1968-2008 — Democracy as faith in self-discovery and self-expression
2008-? — Something else that has yet to be decided. Who can say, but also –who can deny we are in the midst of another religious upheaval and redefinition?
This is a rather lame attempt to trace our religious history, but I might prefer open recognition of our particular religious faith over continual confusion. As always, religious dissenters will have protections and freedom of conscience and worship. This is a great thing about America. The “losers” need not lose everything. But they will lose something, and we should be prepared.
Dave
*Writing as someone who is Orthodox, reading Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, it now makes perfect sense to me why early America had a great suspicion of Catholics as detrimental to democracy. They–and the Orthodox–both believe that we know truth not primarily though independent and abstract investigation, but through community, tradition, participation, and ritual–in addition to some notion of “faith,” of course. As Mark Noll wrote, American democratic practice seeks to reduce truth to simple abstract propositions. Our beliefs about liberty eschew tradition and hierarchy, both crucial to Catholic & Orthodox practice.
Catholics, Orthodox, and others like them can “shoehorn” their beliefs and practice into democratic society, but they may not find it naturally compatible with their worldview.
You will notice the dated references from 2019 to the Covington kids caught on film at pro-life protest. I repost this in conjunction with the start of our American History class.
***************
I did not grow up watching a lot of TV, as my parents were (thankfully) on the stricter side of things in that regard. Yet, like most everyone else, I watched what I could when they were not around. Almost anything would do when these opportunities struck, and I distinctly remember even watching a few scattered episodes of Fantasy Island. Some of you will remember this show, in which Ricardo Montalban presided over an island resort of sorts, where people would come for vacations. But inevitably, guests would have some kind of unreal and usually traumatic experience, whereby certain unknown issues in their lives would attain resolution. The guests would leave happy, Montalban smiling benignly as they left.
Again, I watched this show even though I never particularly enjoyed it (it was on tv, and that was enough). What’s more, I could never grasp its basic premise or understand what was happening. Were the experiences of the guests real or not? They seemed unreal, but then if unreal, why did people feel so satisfied at the end? How could the island produce just what was needed for each guest (The Lost series, after an intriguing start, definitely borrowed way too much from Fantasy Island in its later seasons)? I remember no explanation, just that, “it had all worked out” somehow in a package that always seemed too neat and tidy
Again, the aggravations I had with the show didn’t prevent me from watching. In my defense, how can one look away from Ricardo Montalblan (still the best Star Trek villain to date)?
Much has been said about the dust-up over the brief video clips from the Pro-Life March involving the “clash” between Catholic high-school students and other protestors. I will say little here, except that
I was glad to see some who made ridiculous and ill-founded statements retract their comments when new, extended video evidence came to light. I wish I saw far more laments that thousands of people rushed to extreme judgment of a 17-year-old after seeing 1 minute of video–in other words, the very exercise of commenting on Twitter “in the moment” is desperately fraught with peril. It wasn’t just that people got it wrong, but that no one should have commented in the first place.*
I basically agree with David Brooks, who argued that 1) this scary and tribal rush to judgment happens on both sides** (this time the left was at fault) , and 2) the problem we have is also a byproduct a new technology (phones and social media) that we must understand more fully and use more wisely.
But as much as I appreciated Brooks’ wisdom, I think he misses something deeper and more fundamental. No one questions the impact of smart phones on how we interact with each other and the world. We should remember, however, that inventions do not simply randomly drop from the sky. They emerge within specific cultural contexts. While the phone was certainly not fated to arise in America, it makes perfect sense that it did. Apple marketed its products with the letter “i” in front, itunes, the ipod, the iMac, and of course, the iphone. Apple wanted one to think of these tools as a way to radically personalize our worlds, which fits within our cultural and political notions of individualism. It’s no surprise that their products made them billions of dollars. They did not create the need for radical personalization of our lives, they tapped into what already existed and helped us expand the horizons of our collective felt need.
I agree that we need to work as a society to understand the technologies we create, but that is just another way of saying we need to understand ourselves.
Harold Bloom’s The American Religion attempts to do just this. He argues that, as diverse as we are religiously, every culture must have some unifying belief, even if this belief remains below the level of consciousness. Bloom states that America is in fact a gnostic nation and not a Christian one, and he defines gnosticism as:
A belief that the physical world is essentially evil, and the “spiritual” is good.
That all people have a “divine spark” within them covered over by experience, culture, history, and materiality (the “all people” part of this is our particular democratization of what was an elitist religion in the ancient world).
We must find a way to liberate our true selves, this “divine spark,” from its constraints. Culture, tradition, history, etc. often stand as enemies in this effort.
Bloom postulates that this faith lies underneath other professed faiths, be they agnostic, Baptist, Jewish, or Mormon. It has invaded and colonized our institutional religions and our overall mindset. He finds it particular present in Southern Baptists of his era, but today he would likely look to the various mega-churches, which operate on the idea that Sundays should be friendly, relatable, accessible, and above all, not “boring.” Ralph Waldo Emerson no doubt helped found our particular version of gnostic faith, writing in 1838 that,
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it . . . . Alone in history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. . . . He spoke of miracles, for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the character ascends.
1838 Divinity School Address
So too William James wrote that
Religion, as I ask you take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. . . . as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.
“The Variety of Religious Experience, 1902
We could easily sandwich Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in between these two thinkers for the trifecta of the prophets of non-contextualized, disembodied, American hyper-individualism. This kind of individualism has as its mission liberation from other groups other entities that would seek to mold, shape, and define. And, as we look at the crumbling of institutional churches, our lack of respect for governmental instiutions, the crisis at many universities, etc. we must declare that the individualism of Emerson and Whitman has triumphed almost completely.^
I can think of few things more compatible with this faith than combining Twitter and iphones. We can both memorialize our lives (which are of course special and worthy of documentation) and express our inmost thoughts to the world at any time. Conventions of privacy, or politeness, you say? Sorry, the god of individualism is a jealous god and will brook no rivals for his throne. Do we contradict oursevles and treat others as we would rather not be treated? Well, we are large, to paraphrase Whitman, and contain multitudes. We believe firmly that our souls should have the right to break free at all times.
Thus, if Bloom is correct, if we want to avoid such miscarriages of justice in the future, we may need to do much more than get a better understanding of technology. Brooks is wrong. No quick and mysterious sitcom-like fix is in sight. We need a new religion to avoid such disasters in the future. Our nation, relatively isolated as it is, is still not an island. And, double alas, Ricardo Montalblan is not here to save us.
Dave
*I know that we need journalism, public records of public events, etc., but I will go one step farther. I don’t know why anyone was filming the students in the first place. I know this happens all the time, but it seems to me that you should go to a protest march to protest, not film others protesting. If you want to counter-protest, do so, but don’t go to film others counter-protesting. I agree with Jonathan Pageau, who argued that our incessant desire to mediate our experience through screens fits into the kind of gnosticism Bloom describes. The screen inevitably creates an abstraction, a disconnect between ourselves and reality. He writes,
It is only in the 17th century that men framed their vision with metal and glass, projecting their mind out into an artificially augmented space. Men always had artificial spaces, painting, sculpture, maps, but the telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them.
from his “Most of the Time the World is Flat,” a post for the Orthodox Arts Journal
**I am basically conservative and run mostly in conservative circles. So, while I feel that it is mostly the left that mobs people for now for breathing too loudly through their nose, I should say that the right engages in it as well. I remember some years ago glumly sitting through a presentation where a commentator dissected and destroyed the whole personality of Bill Clinton based on 6 seconds of a video clip played in slow-motion.
^Patrick Deneen has related that when he taught at Princeton, an important study came out that on the Amish that showed that more than 90% of all those who experience “rumspringa” (when as later teens they leave the community to experience the world) return back to their communities. Deneen was taken aback by how much this bothered his colleagues, who could not conceive of living a life bound by tradition and communal standards. For many of our elite Princteton dons, such a life could only be termed as oppression, and some went so far as to suggest that they should be liberated from this oppression.
This, I’m sure, backs up Bloom’s thesis all the more.
A Stick in the Mud 