An ordeal of the most grievous kind...
Americans must now face the difficult task of saving themselves from their own ruling class.
Civilizations tend to die in interesting ways. Likely because few civilizations have escaped eventual extinction, the topic of how they do so has obsessed historians and poets since the Fall of Troy.
This sense of ultimate doom has troubled the dreams even of the men who make history. In their moments of greatest triumph, such men were often haunted by visions of the end.
For example, as he watched his vast armies cross the Hellespont on their way to attack Greece, the Persian king Xerxes reportedly wept at the realization that not one of those men would be alive in a hundred years.
More famous is the account of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus. According to the historian Appian, as Scipio watched his legions burn the great city of Carthage to the ground, Scipio sensed a terrible omen:
Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for a long time, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Troy, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said:
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.
And when Polybius, speaking with freedom to him for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment, he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human.
Scipio was prescient, as he knew he must be. It took many centuries, but Rome eventually fell and passed into dust. In the 18th century, perhaps the first great work of modern history, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, examined precisely the doom that Scipio foresaw. Since then, millions of words have been expended on reexamining it and, quite often, reexamining Gibbon himself.
Nor have other collapses and catastrophes been neglected. Everything from the Bronze Age Collapse to the fall of the civilization of Easter Island (leaving behind its uncanny stone heads) has been the object of an evolving science of catastrophism. Indeed, at least since the apocalyptic violence of World War I, Western scholars and intellectuals have been declaring and predicting the inevitable decline and fall. Crisis is always upon us and apocalypse just around the corner.
Civilizational collapse, both in general and in particular cases, has been ascribed to numerous causes. Today, perhaps the most popular is the ecological. Given the current obsession with climate change, this is not surprising. Nonetheless, it has resulted in a benign neglect of other, less concrete forces.
In the case of the United States today, it seems not to be the ecological or the economic that threatens the collapse of the republic, if such a collapse is indeed in the offing. If the US suffers from any potentially terminal condition, it is likely the metastasizing pathologies of its ruling class—that is, its elite.
II.
Elites are inevitable in any human society and by no means undesirable. As Wilfredo Pareto pointed out, in any given system, roughly 20% of those involved will dominate and run it, while the other 80% remain largely subject. Moreover, given the extraordinary specialization of knowledge and skills required to run a modern industrial or post-industrial society, there is essentially no way that things could be otherwise. 80% of the people are not going to become tech innovators or experts in renewable energy. Only a small minority of the population will ever achieve sufficient competence at any given complex skill.
This has been the case throughout history. Even in the most democratic societies of the ancient world, such as classical Athens, affairs were always in the hands of a small group of leaders. The only question in any given political system was how answerable the 20% were to the 80%. The more answerable they were, generally speaking, the freer the society. The worst of all governments were those like tyranny (in which the leader is answerable to no one) or ochlocracy (in which the leader is answerable only to the mob). None of these societies, however, were without elites of some kind. As many have noted, even the Soviet Union, supposedly founded on absolute political egalitarianism, quickly developed into one of the most elitist societies in history, with a small cadre of party leaders and bureaucrats wielding absolute power.
The question then, is not whether there should be elites. There will be elites whether we like it or not. The question is whether that elite serves the good. However, as Gibbon noted in the Decline and Fall, this is not just a question of morality or even practical considerations. It is an existential question.
Gibbon posited several explanations for Rome’s fall, but perhaps most important among them was the decadence and decay of its ruling class. In Gibbon’s opinion, the Roman elites were once hardy, tough-minded, practical, strong, and unsentimental statesmen and soldiers who forged an empire through a combination of strength of will and stoic leadership. This was unquestionably an idealization of reality, but it was by no means wholly untrue. But as the republic gave way to the reign of emperors, Gibbon asserted, Rome became richer, more despotic, and increasingly decadent. Its leaders turned to luxury and self-indulgence. They relied on a multitude of slaves to serve their every need and desire.
The emperors, who achieved power through assassination, nepotism, or military coup, were occasionally virtuous and skillful. But just as often, they were petty epicurean tyrants interested in nothing but comfort and the cultivation of their own power. The senators and other officials who still held to the old virtues were politically impotent. Without a worthy elite to lead them, the ordinary citizens forewent martial courage or personal industry and gave themselves over to bread and circuses.
As a result, Gibbon claimed, Rome rotted away from within. Its elite became both unwilling and unable to defend what their ancestors had built. Eventually, the empire ran headlong into the vigorous, aggressive, and warlike barbarian tribes whose leaders did not suffer from similar vices. It took the barbarians only a few centuries to topple the house of cards that had stood for almost 1,000 years.
Gibbon’s theories were controversial from the moment they were published and have remained so ever since. Nonetheless, it is impossible to deny that there is something—and perhaps more than something—in them. In many ways, a society is only as good as its leaders, if only because the 80%, however virtuous they may be, cannot exercise that virtue without doing so through those leaders.
One cannot read Gibbon without thinking of the United States today. His remark that Rome fell because of its “immoderate greatness” forces one to remember that no other nation in history has been as immoderately great as the United States. But while it still manages to stand astride the world, the U.S. is showing signs of possible decline and that decline could well become precipitous. Rome was not built in a day, but it fell much faster than it was built. As Hemingway once wrote about going bankrupt, it happened slowly and then all at once.
So, one must ask: Does America’s current elite serve the good? The answer, unfortunately, is almost certainly no.
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