By Sheldon Greaves

Ruines romaines avec le Colisée – Roman ruins with the Colosseum. 1798.

There is a lot of talk these days comparing the United States to the late Roman Empire. Like Rome, we are an empire, which people more freely acknowledge than they did even ten years ago. There is also a growing sentiment that we, like Rome in its late days, an empire in decline despite strenuous efforts of the DC Hawks to demonstrate otherwise. When the greatest military machine in history gets fought to a standstill in Iraq by irregular light infantry, it’s time to rethink a few things. But that’s not what this post is about. Maybe some other time.

Another point of comparison is in the are of culture. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with culture. Liberals tend to love it, Conservatives claim to love it, sort of, but they also love to censor it, decry it as subversive, and defund culture and the arts whenever possible. But that is only part of the problem. Our culture is slowly cooking itself down into a miasma of corporate kitsch. Many have commented on this, but I think that Morris Berman’s Twilight of American Culture is the best overview of this phenomenon if you only read one thing on this. It was written back in the 80’s, but it is as timely now as it was then, perhaps moreso.

Berman makes the suggestion, which I have mentioned elsewhere, that the decline of American civilization is on a ballistic path, and that it will eventually collapse. He further suggests that those concerned with the preservation of culture might take a page from the monks of the Dark Ages, who saved so much of classical learning to our enormous benefit. He describes them bravely scribbling away through the aforementioned Dark Ages, even as their own learning crumbled, they kept the flame of classical civilization alive. Berman proposed a “monastic option” for moderns who feel the need to preserve cultural treasures from the ravages of the collapse that must inevitably come. Small, quiet groups or individuals who somehow keep alive the great music, poetry, literature, and so on against the coming chaos.

It’s an interesting theory, but there is one serious objection: it turns out that the Dark Ages were not nearly as “dark” as was previously believed. It turns out that this view of the “Dark Ages” originated as an 18th century polemic by Protestant scholars who wished to describe a cultural and political hellscape that emerged when the Catholic church was running things. Rodney Stark’s interesting and provocative book The Victory of Reason argues that once the government by Rome’s 1% was out of the way, life actually got a whole lot better for the vast majority of people. It was, in fact, a time of unprecedented invention, innovation, and cultural flowering.

It is pretty much agreed that late Rome underwent a cultural decay not unlike our own. The monks and their allies rescued what they could from the flotsam when it all fell apart. That’s the story.

But suppose that’s not how it worked. What if the fall of Rome enabled the salvaging of its cultural treasures, that otherwise would have succumbed to attrition against a growing, irresistible mountain of cultural crap? What if it had been necessary for Rome to fall in order to preserve itself? What if the chaos provided a window of opportunity in which those discerning minds were able to save what was really worth saving?

What does that mean for our situation? Must America “fall” in order to save what is best about it? I’m not sure what that would look like. I don’t think it would become a Mad Max dystopia (with iPhones). It might not even be more than just more of the same slow compromises that bleed away our economic and civic virtues. In fact, I think that if there is a “fall” there will be considerable debate as to when it happened, barring something decisive like an invasion or other major attack.

I do agree with Berman, that we are facing cultural death. I also like the idea of a monastic option even if it does not involve actual monks. There is much that we have that is worth saving, worth cherishing and savoring for ourselves and the future. How we rescue ourselves from ourselves is a fascinating and increasingly urgent question.