
The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad - diodorus
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/in-the-fall-of-rome-good-news-for-america/596638/
======
Elrac
I realize I don't have the chops to argue against a professional historian,
but here's what I'm seeing:

The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is often called "The Dark Ages,"
though a lot of revisionists try to make us think this wasn't nearly as
ominous as it sounds. OK, we know that time wasn't called "dark" because the
Sun failed to shine; it's called "dark" because we have a dearth of historical
information about it.

What does this tell us? The Greco-Roman civilization produced truckloads of
books on all topics of interest; there were libraries both public and private,
and schools to support general literacy, often bilingual, among the upper
class, at least. A good part of the literature from that age survived the
multiple sackings and burnings of Rome, etc.

In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the
clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period
where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where
intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period
of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any
scientific progress.

In another top-level comment, user "causality1" mentions a large handful of
side effects of this intellectual decline, including decreases in population,
life expectancy, trade, infrastructure and technology. Unlike the author, I
believe a decline in a whole slew of markers of societal functionality is bad
indeed.

~~~
drewcoo
All history is revisionist. Those dark ages were so called because of people
who called their time the enlightenment, throwing a little shade at their past
to make themselves seem all the brighter.

~~~
dTal
Revisionist? Are you saying it _wasn 't_ a period of intellectual stagnation
for the many reasons detailed in the comment you're responding to?

~~~
mcv
I don't know if drewcoo is saying that, but I certainly am. There was plenty
of intellectual stagnation during the Roman Empire, and plenty of progress
during the Middle Ages. The claim that the Roman Empire was so enlightened
while the Middle Ages were stagnation, is revisionism.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
One thing that this analysis ignores is how the Roman Catholic Church stepped
in and filled a lot of the void left by the collapse of the Roman
administrative state. Although, the various Germanic kingdoms fought each
other, by the time the Roman Empire fell, they had all converted to Latin
Catholic Christianity. Because, of this the Roman Catholic Church could serve
a unifying purpose and hold in check the worst impulses of an individual
kingdom.

Now, there is no such authority. Maybe 10 years ago, we could have thought
that multilateral institutions like the UN, EU, IMF, World Bank, NATO, etc
could step up, now, if anything, those institutions might have more of a
credibility gap than the US.

The collapse of the American "Empire" would be very painful for everyone, not
least Western Europe.

~~~
nordsieck
> Maybe 10 years ago, we could have thought that multilateral institutions
> like the UN, EU, IMF, World Bank, NATO, etc could step up, now, if anything,
> those institutions might have more of a credibility gap than the US.

I'm skeptical. Fundamentally, the all of civilization is built on the rule of
law, and the rule of law is built on enforcement.

The UN is nothing without the mailed gauntlet the US brings to the table.
IMF/World Bank depends on international law, they can't enforce it.

The EU/NATO has the same problem as the UN. I suppose many of the EU countries
have a functional military, but they just can't project power.

~~~
DuskStar
> The EU/NATO has the same problem as the UN. I suppose many of the EU
> countries have a functional military, but they just can't project power.

Only the UK and France have relevant militaries within the EU Nations as far
as I'm concerned. Or at least they're the only ones with nukes - Germany's
conventional forces _might_ qualify otherwise.

And you need some sort of retaliatory strike capability to really take a seat
at the big boys table. (Which they both do, with their SSBNs)

~~~
adrianN
Germany's army is barely functional.

What we need is a small, well trained and equipped, EU army and a disbanding
of the national armies. It makes no sense that each EU member has their own
army.

~~~
coldtea
> _What we need is a small, well trained and equipped, EU army and a
> disbanding of the national armies._

So that the people of European nations would give up the sovereignty their
ancestors and them fought hard to gain, for a bureaucratic federal scheme
nobody asked for (it was built and promoted by bureaucrats and force-fed with
promises, threats, and bribes) that prioritizes the top dogs (Germany, to a
lesser degree France) to smaller countries detriment?

~~~
adrianN
No, so that Europeans don't pay extra taxes for duplicate stuff. It's not like
France will invade Spain anytime soon. There is no point of both having
armies.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's not like France will invade Spain anytime soon._

Well, Europeans powers fought twice among them in the 20th century. And in its
beginning many said the exact same thing (there was even a popular book called
"The Great Illusion" about how a great war in Europe is no longer conceivable,
because peace and commerce). Similarly, after the collapse of the USSR a
Japanese-American thinker smugly wrote about the 'End of history'. We saw how
that turned out...

The main reason Europeans powers have stopped in-fighting in the latter part
of the 20th century is because they were devastated by the previous wars, in
the process of losing their colonial empires (and like Britain, France, etc)
and so had their concerns elsewhere, e.g. France in "Indochina". Some were
also under control (from USSR), and Germany was split into two and under US
and USSR supervision. The power balance had shifted between the US and USSR,
so there was little at stake for the European powers to fight, even if they
had the might.

If more things get at stake, including after long and deep recessions,
perceived or real threats to sovereignty, resources, etc, in a troubled
climate-change-hit late 21st century, all bets are off.

> _No, so that Europeans don 't pay extra taxes for duplicate stuff._

The EU only makes sense if it's a shared political and cultural vision (which
at the moment it's not).

If European countries want to avoid "extra taxes" and want to think of their
economic interest, then should probably do the inverse, and split from the EU
(keeping only the trade deals), so that they have their own local currency
they can control, instead of a currency that's tuned to Germany's economy (or
to some compromise that either hurts the weak economies or the strong ones).

------
siavosh
Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical author, has had a long running thesis that after
the end of the cold war, the US no longer has a motivation to maintain the
post WWII order of multilateralism and ensuring the safety of global free
trade with its navy. The current administration has only accelerated that
timeline. The end result, he claims, will be nations acting more like nations
have always acted which unfortunately means more conflict. The US will simply
watch from afar and swoop in when its interests are directly threatened. So in
his opinion, it very much is NOT the US falling, but simply withdrawing
because the economic order it used to bribe most of the world to be allied
against the USSR no longer makes sense.

~~~
SllX
An alliance without a definite enemy is a sad state of affairs.

Russia was an existential threat to the United States in a way that the PRC
simply isn’t. They’re more of a threat to their immediate neighbors than
anything, and near as I can tell they just want US to back off and let them
be, let them have Taiwan, do what they want with Hong Kong and Macau, and let
them assert a local hegemony. I don’t want to see Korea, Japan, Vietnam, or
others to fall under a PRC hegemony, and Americans don’t necessarily want that
either, but it’s a tough ask of my countrymen to continue to allocate
resources to maintaining the world order in a sort of stasis when that
proposition is increasingly expensive, bad for business and we we have strong
isolationist tendencies. The post-WWII order was the exception, not the norm
for American sentiments.

Charles Krauthammer wrote in the wake of the collapse of the Cold War when we
weren’t sure what the hell we were going to do as a country that it was
actually pretty obvious: we would move from a bipolar world to a global order
of American dominance, and if we were lucky, it would last about 30 years or
so. Krauthammer[1] hasn’t lived to see how that turned out, but we’re creeping
up on the end of that third decade.

[1] Krauthammer 1) has about the coolest name for a Jewish man to have and 2)
was a guest on Bill Kristol’s podcast “Conversations with Bill Kristol” where
he gave an excellent interview in 2015. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

~~~
roenxi
> and let them assert a local hegemony

Why would they stop at local hegemony? The Chinese don't dream small scale.
Without opposition; anyone would be happy seizing global hegemony. I'm not
saying anyone should do anything in particular about it but the only reason
China only talks about local hegemony is because anything else would get the
US involved.

If the PRC maneuvers into a position where they are bigger and stronger than
the United States they could become an existential threat in a way that the
Soviets never really were, and they'll probably look for global hegemony if it
is a possible option.

~~~
SllX
They might not stop there, my statement was more a comment on the prevailing
attitude in the PRC _today_ , or at least its leadership. I’m not convinced
they have any kind of grand plan to secretly assert a global Chinese hegemony
just as soon as these pesky Americans get out of the way, to be honest I’m not
sure that even with the means, they would have the political fortitude to do
anything other than clamp down on criticism of themselves.

What we are learning from the last 30 years is that no one, really, has the
ability and/or the will yet to assert any kind of global hegemony and sustain
it for much longer than a decade or two. Certainly not the Chinese yet, but
maybe in another couple of decades?

If America withdraws substantially, at least in spirit if not in forces
deployed anytime in the near future, then we enter a multipolar world again,
filled with Great Powers rather than one or two dominant powers. It is
possible we are already undergoing this shift and haven’t fully realized it
yet. What happens after is anyone’s guess, but I don’t think anyone should
want to live in a world where there are multiple competing powers for
dominance and where nukes also exist. Seeing the Chinese step into a space
that America vacates would almost be a relief in a way if it were to happen,
even if I would prefer to see the US continue to fill that space.

~~~
uncletaco
How does China’s heavy investment in Africa and Eastern Europe fit into the
thesis that they only want to be local hegemons? I believe they’ve even setup
naval bases in some of these nations.

~~~
monocasa
And the New Silk Road project is aiming to connect this interests, while
pulling those west Asian countries into their political sphere.

------
blub
Acording to this historian it was pretty awful: [https://www.amazon.com/Fall-
Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-
Civilization/dp/0192807285)

"The book recaptures the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman
world, and reminds us of the very real terrors of barbarian occupation.
Equally important, Ward-Perkins contends that a key problem with the new way
of looking at the end of the ancient world is that all difficulty and
awkwardness is smoothed out into a steady and positive transformation of
society. Nothing ever goes badly wrong in this vision of the past. The
evidence shows otherwise."

We've seen how this looks like in modern times with the fall and decline of
the Soviet Union. The US could end up similarly in the future: invading
countries under flimsy pretexts, assassinating opponents, politics utterly
corrupted by money, trying to bully other countries into submission, etc.

~~~
goto11
Well the glory days of the Roman Empire was pretty awful for all the people
who was conquered and killed or enslaved by the Romans.

~~~
HNLurker2
Well it is true just like the USA the Roman Empire attacked tribes (especially
Caesar in Gaul) with pretext like abducting a diplomat (just like the United
States did in Afghanistan, Vietnam etc)

But for the most part the Roman Empire where the peak of humanity civilization
and we still awe at their ahead of time way of life (they had roads,politics,
gyms, and many other public institutions we hold dear today)

------
Causality1
How bad it was depends on what you value. Did splitting up societies across
Europe lead to more differentiation? Yes, absolutely. Here's some other things
it led to:

-Population totals and density dropped. -Life expectancy dropped. -Trade fell in volume, trade routes shortened, and the variety of available goods dropped. -The trend of urbanization reversed and Europeans became more rural. -The likelihood of dying to disease/plague increased. -The number and length of usable roads shrank -The plow fell out of common manufacture and farmers began relying on picks, hoes, and shovels instead

It's up to you whether those things count as "not that bad".

~~~
Spooky23
All of those things are true, but it’s easy to overcredit late Rome for their
advantages. Remember a lot of the history, perceptions and analysis we get
really grows out of 19th century work, where glorification of empire was
something of a vested interest of gentlemen of the day.

The western Roman Empire had stagnated for years and lost a lot of ground.

~~~
joe_the_user
This just and similar rebuttals just make the point that the lost ground
happened in a gradual fashion. When the parts of the structure fell, much had
already rotted away, sure.

That doesn't change the basic outline that the situation involved a decline in
"civilization" and general quality of life. IE, it was a rather bad time, in
contrast to the OP.

------
dantondwa
This article is bad. Instead of focusing on the actual topic of the book, it
immediately jumps into an absurd comparison between the fall of the Roman
Empire and today's America.

The two situations have NOTHING in common. None of the factors that led to the
Western Roman Empire's fall plays any role in the US.

Also, the argument that the Roman Empire allowed things like individual human
rights is absurd. Modern notions of individual and individual rights appeared
in the 16th century. How is it possible to link the downfall of the empire
with something that happened more than 1000 years later? How could we know the
same development wouldn't have happened inside the empire?

~~~
TMWNN
>This article is bad. Instead of focusing on the actual topic of the book, it
immediately jumps into an absurd comparison between the fall of the Roman
Empire and today's America.

It's a coatrack to justify a claim that "Trump is destroying America, and
maybe that won't be as bad as that sounds". Which, in turn, leads to Fallows's
related article (linked at the bottom), "Trump is so bad that he is destroying
America, which is justification to actually destroy America (in terms of
dissolving the Union)".

------
scythe
Rome endured repeated leadership crises from the death of Commodus in 192 to
the conquest by Odoacer in 476. Put another way, Rome spent more time
“falling” than the US has even _existed._

------
JumpCrisscross
Why is classical education so much more fascinated with the sacking of Rome
over the collapse of the Republic? The latter is, to me, far more fascinating
and far less explored in our common curricula.

~~~
goto11
It is not, and the article hints at that:

> If a civilization could descend from Cicero and Cato to Caligula and Nero in
> scarcely a century, how long could the brave experiment launched by Madison,
> Jefferson, and company hope to endure?

This describes the fall of the _republic_ , not the fall of Rome half a
millennium later. Nero and Caligula are among the first emperors, not the
last.

~~~
Keysh
> the article hints at that

Unintentionally, perhaps. Really, this is an indication of the article's
incoherence and sloppiness. It purports to be mostly about the aftermath of
the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th Century, and how this supposedly
cleared the way for assorted awesome developments (five or six hundred years
later). So the transition from Republic to Empire is irrelevant to the
argument.

------
zt
This article fails to live up to its premise of thinking through what the
dissolution of the American empire would look like but does end up making an
interesting case for local vitality and governance.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice read, and I think it likely that the article describes how things will be
in the future. re:

> by large margins, Americans feel dissatisfied with the course of national
> events—and by even larger margins, they feel satisfied with and connected to
> local institutions and city governments

This. Ever since the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, I have been
unhappy with resource allocation by the US federal government. I am happy and
proud to pay local and even state taxes. I think that the very large amount of
federal taxes that I pay goes to some expenses that I don’t approve of.

Since retiring this year, I am putting much more effort into my community,
mostly volunteering at our local food bank. It is difficult to overestimate
the value of local networking.

------
kragen
Slatestarcodex did a well-sourced and highly entertaining job rebutting this
goofy “the Dark Ages weren't” meme:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-
ages/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/)

Also, life expectancy collapsed, Diocletian instituted what became near-
universal serfdom, population density feel by a third (maybe nice if you were
born afterwards, but can't have been super fun for the people watching their
progeny diminish decade by decade), and the loss of learning inside the Empire
was so complete that medieval Europeans called their standard text on
astronomy the “Almagest”, its Arabic name, even though its author Ptolemy
lived in the Roman Empire and presumably wrote in Greek; only Arabic
translations survived. (Some other books only survived in Ireland, outside the
former Empire.) The Romans were no scholars—think of the detestable Sulla or
monstrous Marcellus—but what came after was far worse.

From the point of view of human rights, of economic prosperity, and of
scholarship, the collapse of the Western Empire began a disaster that lasted
nine centuries.

~~~
onetimeusename
I can't answer to all of those points but, at least in Post-Roman Britain,
life expectancy increased after the fall of the Roman Empire.[1]

[1]: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/114150...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/11415022/The-best-thing-the-Romans-did-for-Britain-was-leave-historian-
claims.html)

~~~
Keysh
I would be skeptical about attributing too much to a newspaper report about an
unpublished conference presentation, particularly as the reported increase is
only 2 years (with no quoted uncertainties).

From this review article about post-Roman Britain:
([https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00085.x))

"There is just no alternative to the conclusion that urban life ceased in most
places by the mid‐fifth century, doomed by the virtual cessation of market
activity, a climatic downturn which arguably destroyed the capacity of
agriculture to deliver a reliable surplus, the collapse of state funding of
officialdom and the soldiery, and the impact on trade of an era of barbarian
raiding and internecine warfare."

Of course, since historically urban life expectancy has tended to be _less_
than small-town and rural life expectancy, it's even possible that the de-
urbanization of Britain _did_ lead to a slight increase in life expectancy.

~~~
kragen
It's good to be cautious. (It would be interesting to find out if the author
did eventually publish the work.) It's certainly plausible, as you point out,
that while life expectancy was plummeting in Turin and Paris, it might have
risen in Britain. We just have no written records from that time period — not
even graffiti or runestones — adding to the uncertainty. More than _All
Creatures Great and Small_ this bare fact makes me think of _Threads_.

------
jjuhl
This made me think that "The End of the United States of America Won't be That
Bad". Might actually be a good thing.

------
thedudeabides5
"The ancient university towns of Palo Alto and New Haven may lie in different
countries."

This world is definitely possible, but I'd say as likely as one where the two
Cambridges are part of the same union again.

------
coldtea
The title perhaps means that we are we getting at the acceptance stage of the
end of the American dominance?

(Hmm, the subtitle is: "Maybe the end of the American one won’t be either", so
I guess I called that)!

As for the end of the Roman Empire, in the Eastern part it had a succession
regime. In the Western parts, where this was slow to emerge, it was the end of
tons of things the citizens of the Roman republic (and westwards) took for
granted, for several centuries...

------
cjf4
Kind of funny to refer to Palo Alto and New Haven as "ancient" adjacent to
Rome.

------
fictionfuture
The fall of Rome led to a power vaccum that was filled by organized religion.

Religion then outlawed science and philosophy (competing ideology)... Which
led to the dark ages.

Yes, it was that bad.

