Angry Planet - Rome Was Always in Decline

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Are we living in a declining empire in need of renewal? Maybe.But one thing to keep in mind? Romans thought the same thing centuries before the great empire fell.So what’s up with the fascination with the decline and fall of Rome? And what lessons does it have for US politics?To help us answer that question, we’ve got Edward J. Watts. He’s a professor of history at UC San Diego and the author of a new book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world of their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Are we living in a declining empire in need of renewal? Maybe. But one thing to keep in mind, Romans thought the exact same thing, centuries before the great empire fell. So what's up with the fascination with the decline and fall of Rome? And what lessons does it have for U.S. politics?

To help us answer that question, we've got Edward J. Watts. He's a professor of history at UC San Diego and the author of a new book, The Eternal Declan, and fall of Rome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is a real treat. All right. Painful question. Can you give us an extremely abridged version of Roman history? Who were they? Where were they? And how long did it last? Okay. So I will do my dust here. The city of Rome is founded, we believe, sometime in the 8th century BC. It's of course founded where it is now along the Tiber River in Italy. It's a very small settlement and it grows over time, first by incorporating basically through urban sprawl the other hills around the initial hill

that the city of Rome starts on. And then as you move through the next 200 years, the settlement starts expanding out and conquering more land. What's interesting about Rome as a city state is, unlike most city states, and we think of the Greek city states in particular, when Rome expands out, it makes citizens of the people that it absorbs. And so when the Roman state expands across these first 200 years. And then through the Republic, as it expands for the next 500 years, it expands to eventually encompass all of Italy and it makes all of these Italian citizens. And so what you with the Roman state is a state that is both one that grows very well, but also one that figures out how to, in a way, make a nation out of what starts as an empire. And so by the time you get into the first century BC,

the Republic has expanded from Italy to control territory that stretches from the Atlantic to basically the Syrian desert. And this creates stresses in the republic that ultimately lead the Republic to collapse and the Emperor Augustus to take control. The republic lasted for about 500 years. The empire that Augustus creates lasts for another almost 1,500 years. And so the story of Rome then becomes one of the empire that is initially an Italian empire controlled by an Italian emperor. incorporating more and more of the people in these territories it controls until ultimately you have, in essence, a nation state with citizens that stretches from the Hadrian's Wall at the border of Scotland to basically Saudi Arabia. And the empire at its peak is a state of about 80 million people.

They're all Roman citizens. They live in this massive, expansive land. And then it starts contracting about 500 years after Augustus, 450 or so years after Augustus. And initially it contracts in the West. And so Rome loses control of much of the West by the year 500. And then the East starts contracting with the Arab conquests in the 7th century. Eventually, what you get is a Roman empire centered on the city of Constantinople and what's now Turkey, where the people are Christian, not pagan, they speak Greek, not Latin. And so the great success in a way of the Roman imperial project is to make this nation state that as it contracts, isn't centered on Rome anymore. It's centered on wherever the Romans who remain in this state are located.

And so the last Romans are Greek-speaking Christians in Constantinople. Their state that started in the Bronze Age ends with cannons and gunpowder. And so when you're thinking about the decline and fall of Rome, you're looking at a state that lasts for 2200 years. And from the very beginning that we can eavesdrop on their conversation, they are already talking about its decline. And so for, you know, 200 BC is when we've first, first get our first full existing text in Latin. One of the very first text is making fun of people

talking about Roman decline in 200 BC, when the state still has 1,250 years left to go. Wow. Wow. There's one concept that you just mentioned briefly that I thought might be good to explain, which is citizenship in city states was actually incredibly restricted traditionally, right? So like you could be born in Athens and not be a citizen. Yeah. And so the Roman concept of actually including people, that's revolutionary. And it's why the Romans are able to do what they were able to do. Because with Athens, you're exactly right. Athens has a restrictive citizenship policy. Sparta has probably the most restrictive citizenship policy, where there are people who are born Spardiades who actually drop out of the citizenship because it's too restrictive. It's too complicated. In Rome, instead, you have this idea that we can continue to increase our power and our, resources and the talents of our citizen body. And that's actually a really key point. The Romans are not

just expanding because they want more people. They're expanding because the people they're getting bring something to the society that isn't there already. And so one of the first Roman kings is a man named Servius Tullius, and he comes to Rome actually as either a slave or a kind of mercenary commander, but he brings resources that the state doesn't otherwise possess. And he's brought into the state and ultimately becomes a Roman king. So you're saying that Rome was a melting pot? I think what we would say, and if you were to ask a Roman, we have Romans actually talk about this in the second century, what they say is it's not exactly a melting pot because what you're trying to do is find the best people. You're not trying to find everybody. You know, if you have somebody who doesn't bring

anything to the society, it doesn't matter really if you get them as a Roman or not. But if you have somebody who's talented, you want that person in your society. And so what you're doing until the extension of citizenship to everybody in 212 AD, you're going to pick and choosing who you want to be Roman based on how good it is for Rome that person is Roman. All right. I'm not going to say anything about H-1B visas. We're going to move straight along to, can you tell us what the circumstances were when people first started talking about about the decline and fall of Rome? So the decline of Rome, it's there forever. In the Republic, when the state is expanding, the economy is growing. Opportunities are becoming available,

increasing numbers of opportunities for Romans. You have people talking about decline, not in an economic context or political context, but in the fact that Romans are not virtuous anymore. And so my favorite example of this is you have someone following a major military victory in Syria, where Rome gets tons of treasure and money and territory. And they complain because Roman virtue is collapsing. And the example they give is Romans now have pedestal tables. They don't have tables with four legs. They have pedestal tables. And this is a sign that Rome has lost its virtue. And this is after a great military victory that sparks tremendous economic growth. And so in the public, you're talking about the decline, but not in a sort of tangible way, just this sense that we're

losing who we were in the past. And the first time we have someone talking about the fall of Rome is connected to the year 476. It's connected to the end of the coup by the German general Odo Odoachar, who deposes Romulus Augustulus, who is the last Roman in Italy to reign as Roman emperor. Now, the interesting thing about this is this is the date we all get. We get it in school. We get it on mouse pads. We get it wherever we see it. This is the date everybody thinks about for the fall of Rome. The interesting thing about it is in 476, there's not a single person in Italy who said, yeah, Rome fell that day. Rome fell on September 4th, 476 when Ottawa Walker launched a coup, because there's no reason to think that. What Otowacher did have been done nine times in the

previous 20 years. When Odo Walker takes power, Roman laws still dominates, the Roman Senate still meets, Roman offices are still held, everything is still done in Latin. There's no sign that anything really has changed. And over the next 50 years, we see that the Italian fortunes actually improve under Odochar and then the barbarian Theodoric, who succeeds him. And so it's not until the Eastern Empire and Constance and Opel decides it wants to invade Italy, that people start talking about the fall of Roman 476. And so this is an event that happens in 476. no one notices until 519.19. And then in 519, propagandists and Constantinople who want to fight a war in Italy say, hey, we need to go back to Italy because the barbarians took Italy from the Romans,

and we need to take it back. It's our duty as Romans to liberate these Romans from this non-Roman state. And everybody in Italy is pretty legitimately confused because they still think they're Romans. They still think their state is Roman. And so we see other moments where the fall of Rome is brought up and there's still a Roman state. So Charlemagne does the reverse of what happens in the 6th century by saying there's no eastern state anymore. And so we need to create a Western state that can then attack the East. Okay. Okay. Hold on. I love all the information. And we need to talk about it. But I think we need to talk about we can't overwhelm everybody all at once. Matthew, did you have a question? I do. I'm wondering, it feels like the idea of an empire is an

strictly linked with an obsession over its fall. And I'll just throw out a couple data points. Like, one of my earliest memories is my father's bookshelf. And I remember the Edward Gibbon, the whole series, history of the decline, followed the Roman Empire, with the pillars crumbling slowly as the book series goes on. Every famous sci-fi novel about an empire is about that empire collapsing. America, you know, you say that we're worried about the moral decline. They were worried about the moral decline of the Romans. Well, you just look at everything that everyone, every pundit says on TV about America and its decline and how it's inextricably linked to these moral concerns.

So is it like, is there something about the idea of the decline and fall that's baked into the idea of empire itself, do you think? So I think it's really interesting because for Romans, fall is not part of it. What they're always thinking about is we're declining and we need to do something to fix it. So even when Justinian is talking about, you know, inventing the fall of the West to invade Italy, he's talking about fixing up, and he wants credit for fixing it. Now, the problem doesn't exist. He, you know, invents the problem so that he can then bring a solution about. But for Romans, as long as the state is there, they are talking about fixing and arresting and stopping the decline. And that actually continues, even when the Turks have breached the walls of Constantinople, the citizens of Constantinople believe that there, the Turks can only get as far as the Forum of Constantin, which is about halfway into the city. And then an angel is going to come down and a savior is going to arrive. And they're going to kick the Turks out and the Romans are going to reconquer everything as far as Persian. And so even at the moment the empire is ending, they still believe that the decline is going to be

arrested and there's going to be a recovery. And what changes when the empire ends, and, you know, it's clear there is no empire coming back. Then people start talking about decline and fall. And then Rome stops becoming something that you can fix. And it starts becoming a kind of cautionary tale that you can use to understand really any kind of development that troubles you. And so this is why I think we see it. And Gibbon, I think that you could probably say Gibbon has the best title in the history of literature. The reason that book has not gone out of print since it first appeared in 1776 is because of the title. I think a lot of people own the book and have never even opened it, but they know the concept. because the concept is such a powerful one. Here is this incredible state, one of the biggest states that has ever existed. If Rome was a country now, at its fullest extent, it would be the fourth biggest country in the world. How does that crumble into nothing? And why are there no Romans left anymore? And Gibbon, he finds a way to talk about that question in a very extensive fashion that gives you the

full kind of sense of what the empire is and why it isn't anymore. And so I think that that what we get with Gibbon is this transition from Rome as something that is declining but being but in but is capable of being fixed to the idea of Rome as something that's a cautionary tale that can warn you about really anything that is troubling you at that moment. If we can go back to one of the most crucial things and actually one of the best documented part of Roman history which is the transition as we thought of it as we think of it from a republic to an empire. Now, I guess first you're going to tell us that's not how they viewed it anyway. What I want to ask is, how did the story of decline and renewal fit into the transition from republic to empire? Yeah, I think this is a great question. Because in the sense that Justinian and his lackeys invent the fall of Roman 476, Augustus and his lackeys try to cover up the fall of the republic in 30 BC. What Augustus basically says is the public has failed to perform the basic functions that a state needs to perform. You know, it's not

protecting people. It's not protecting property. It's not protecting the sort of public lands and territories that Rome controls. And what Augustus is doing is fighting wars against other Romans who have fallen away from the principles that make Rome work. And Augustus is restoring Rome to those principles and making Rome stronger again, making Rome better again. And so at Augustus, says he's doing in his res guest eye, this famous document at the end of his life where Augustus outlined on his own terms what it is he was doing, he says, I restored the Republic. I gave it back to everybody. I gave it back to the Romans. And I didn't hold any offices other than what the Republic allows people to hold. And on one level, that's true. He just held a whole bunch of

powers that are associated with those offices that no one had ever assembled in that way ever before. what you have there is a kind of gaslighting where Augustus is saying, in essence, yeah, the Republic's still here. And everybody knows the Republic is not still there. Everybody knows, by the time Augustus dies in 14 AD, this is an autocracy. There's one person who's in charge. And he hands power off to his successor and the Senate has to approve it, but the Senate has no choice but to approve it. And so I think with Augustus, what you have is a process where everybody knows that the protections that the Republic accorded to citizens, the protections that accorded to property rights, the protections that accorded, you know, to rights of appeal and legal

status, those all disappeared. Augustus got rid of them. He brought them back in a new form, and he called it a republic. And everybody knew that's not really a republic, but nobody was safe enough or brave enough or stupid enough to actually say the, you know, the delicate part out loud. It's interesting to talk about how he changed the public sphere, but he also really changed the private sphere, or at least he tried to legislate morality. Speaking of being worried about the declining morals of Romans, right? Augustus. Yeah, this is actually what's interesting. The story that Romans tell about the decline in Roman morality for those 200 years, from when we first see this appearing until basically Augustus, that story is all about being. too ambitious, using any means necessary to get political office, I'm being too desirous of wealth, not being public-spirited enough. It's not really about, like, who are you sleeping with?

And Augustus needs people who are overly ambitious. He needs people who are greedy. He needs people who are willing to do whatever it takes to remain influential, because that's what he's basing his regime on, is people who aren't going to play by the rules, because his regime is not based on the rules that were there before. And so when Augustus addresses moral decline, he does address moral decline. It's just not the moral decline Romans have been talking about for 150 years. It's instead we're not having enough children. It's instead people are having extra marigal affairs. It's personal morality and sexual morality, which Romans had occasionally talked about, but it wasn't what that discourse and that discussion of decline was really about for 150 years. And so Augustus, again, is saying, I'm addressed

this core problem, but he's not. He's redefined the core problem so he can address it in a way that allows him to still take advantage of devices that enabled him to come to power in the first place, while pretending that he's doing something to fix moral decline. Wow, it's almost like he was trying to make people look over there while he was actually playing with his magic trick over here. I've never heard of such a thing in politics. So another track I want to go down before we get too deep into these nerdy history questions is why is this a dangerous political idea, this idea of the decline? You set that up at the top, but I want to return to it. Yeah, I think what I basically realized in working on this and then also living through the last five years is, you know, there are different ways of thinking and talking about decline.

In some cases, there's a real problem. and you can address that real problem either by coming up with a way for society to come together and work collectively to solve it or by saying it's somebody else's fault and we're not going to really address the problem. We're going to instead just do something to these people who caused it. And then there's a third option, which is there's not a real problem. And you're just saying this because you want to do something to the people that you don't agree with. And I think in the last five years, we've seen variations of all of them. We saw the American Carnage speech,

which identifies the problem that really doesn't exist and it didn't exist in the terms that were laid out in that speech. We also see problems that are very real where people are blaming others and not looking to solve them. And then I think we have an approach right now that's coalescing around dealing with coronavirus resurgence where everybody needs to come together

and let's not worry about what you did a month ago. Let's worry about what you can do a month from. now. And so all of those things point to a way of thinking about decline. And Romans show all of those things. And with the Roman story, you can watch how each of those plays out because you have 2200 years to play with. And so if you want to see what happens when somebody makes up a decline and blames someone else for it, Rome gives you lots of examples of that. If you want to see an example of people coming together to solve a problem collectively when they could have blamed other people, Rome gives you examples of that too. And when you see people identifying a problem and doing the wrong

thing to address it, instead using it to divide themselves instead of coming together to solve it, Rome gives a lot of examples there too. And so what I was hoping the book would do is allow us to have big picture frames of reference so we can think about how we approach the challenges in our society and maybe make the right decisions in both diagnosing what's going on, but also thinking about what we collectively can do to address them better and make our society stronger, instead of using these problems as excuses to tear ourselves apart. And not coincidentally, allow people who are guiding us in this direction to become more powerful and more rich and more influential. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to take a break. We will be right back after this.

All right, angry planet listeners, back to the discussion about Rome in its eternal decline. Can we take a positive example? which Matthew's going to laugh because that's not usually what we do. Let's take a positive example. You were talking in the book about Trajan, Hadrian, and they're actually mobilizing people. Can you just sort of talk a little bit about them and why they're part of the five good emperors? Yeah, I think the best one of those is actually Marcus Aurelius. Because with Trajan and Hadrian, you know, there are problems.

But with Marcus Aurelius, it is a horrible time to be alive. This is a moment Marcus Aurelius comes to power and almost is immediately hit with a series of attacks and wars on two different frontiers at once while the empire is hit with smallpox, the first smallpox outbreak in the history of Western Europe. And so something between 10 and 20 percent of the Roman population dies, cities are depopulated. The army can't even campaign for a year because so many people are sick. And so you would imagine, if you read a history of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, people would be talking about this in apocalyptic terms. Instead, this is actually described as a golden age. You know, the Roman golden age is the age of Marcus Aurelius. And when you start reading about what Marcus is doing, and in Marcus's own words, the meditation, Marcus tells us what he was doing. What Marcus says in essence is, I looked around to see what people were capable of doing. And I asked them to do only what they were capable of doing. And I asked them to do only what they were capable of. of doing, and I praised them when they did it well. And so it was a moment where Marcus didn't look at all of the people who had caused problems, all of the people who had failed to do their jobs, all of the people who had been given a

task and didn't complete it. He looked at all of the people around him to see what they could do positively. And then he thought about how you can mobilize these people so they can do what they're capable of to the best of their ability. And all of them can feel like they contributed in a positive way to the recovery that Roman society underwent. And so with Marcus, what you have is a baseline reality that's terrible, right? Economic contraction, depopulation, 20% of the population dying, military campaigns that don't really go well. He's fighting nearly his entire regime or entire reign along the frontiers to stabilize

them. This does not sound like a guy who's going to be seen as the best emperor in Roman history. And yet he is, not because of what he faced, but because of what he was able to build in the Roman so that they could collaboratively come together and solve problems that a lesser person would allow to tear the society apart. So the meditations is essentially seven traits of highly successful people or another business book. It's, well, it's just as a tangent, it's funny you say that, Jason, because the meditations are incredibly popular right now. And stoicism in general is incredibly popular right now among like silicon. Valley Tech Bros. It's become like this big, it's become a book on par for the seven habits

of highly effective people. Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, there's actually, I think, a really popular podcast that works on this too. Works off of kind of Marcus's ideas. And I think what Marcus would say is like, this is not even about success in the world. It's about success as a person. And so I think Marcus would say, like, I started from the principle of making myself better. And I think Marcus would say, like, I started from the principle of making myself better. And in doing that, I recognize that these are ways, not only that it makes me better, but it also emanates out to make society better. And so this is, I think, the achievement that we can see from Marcus, is there, isn't the conditions you live in that dictate whether people see a decline or not. It's in a way the response that you have to those

condition and the way that you can mobilize people to feel good about their participation in that addressing of those problems. And Marcus didn't solve those problems, right? Smallpox continues. After Marcus's death, the empire continues to be hit with smallpox. It continues to fight wars. It continues to have problems with depopulation. But Romans felt like they were moving in a positive direction because all of them were empowered to do something to move the society in a positive direction. And in that case, you know, the feeling trumps the reality. All right. So to go from 180.

And so Christianity is already somewhat of an influence in Marcus Aurelius's empire, somewhat, not a major force maybe, but it's not that much longer until it really does become a force. How did that transition of the empire? Did that also apply some of these same things? Was there talk about the decline and how people would be redeemed? There's actually really fascinating shift. So Christianity grows and probably at a rate of about 10% its population gets to about 10% of the Roman population by about 310. And this is when the roughly when the Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity. And then it takes off. And by the year 400, it's a majority religion in the empire. What you see as Christianity makes progress under Constantine, and especially

in the last years of Constantine's reign, is Christians actually begin talking about Roman history in a new way, a way that hadn't existed before, where they start talking about progress. And so for them, the narrative of decline and renewal is irrelevant for a lot of the fourth century, because they don't want to go back to what Rome was. They think Rome can be better than it ever has been by becoming Christian. And so they are pushing an agenda across the fourth century to remake Roman society in a way that's consistent with the principles of what they believe a Christian society ought to be. Those principles are totally invented, you know, in the 330s. There is no conception of what a Christian Roman Empire would look like until really the 330s.

Because they never imagined it was even possible. But they rapidly start pushing policy in the 4th century to bring into reality this vision of what a Christian Roman Empire would be in the 4th century. And the story they're telling is progress. And this is a very strange story to non-Christian. It's just not how Romans think about things. And if you're a non-Christian, progress looks like decline because you're moving away from what's worked again and again. That's going to be a fundamental tension as the 4th century gives way to the 5th. So this is really interesting to me because I usually think of, you know, we have this, maybe this is my America talking.

But, you know, we look into the past and we say like, oh, you know, just a couple decades ago, everything was good. people were more moral and upright and virtuous. And then it sounds like there was this, there was a brief period as Christianity was taking over in Rome, where they looked back and said, that's debauched. Right. So did that like,

did they always look to the past? I guess pre-Christianity, did they also look into the past in the same way that we do now in America? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they did. Right. I think that the person who most fulsomely talks about Marcus Aurelius' time as a golden age is a historian named Cassius Dio, who's writing in the late

220s. I mean, he lived through Marcus Aurelius. He was actually a senator then. He knew what was going on then. But from the 220s, looking backwards, you have a very rosy, rose-pinted view of the 170s. I don't think anybody would trade living in the 170s for living in the 220s. The 220s, politically, your emperor is a child. He's nowhere near as capable as Marcus Surrealius, but yeah, it's a better time to be alive. Your conditions are better. But with Dio, you have that same thing that we see where people will look back and say, well, I mean, imagine before 1973 when economic growth was something that you could just take for granted, right? And opportunities were available for everybody who graduated from college. And we look back on that

with a certain way of distilling out what we want from that picture without taking into consideration the bigger picture. But for Romans, that was always the way until Christianity starts saying these things. I mean, what's interesting is the emperor Constantine himself, when he's pushing Christian society, he actually says, we are going back to what religion was like before we fell away into paganism. Because there always was just one God, and we lost sight of that over time. And I'm taking us back to where we once were as a human race. And it's only after Constantine's death that you start seeing people saying, yeah, no, that's not what we're doing. We're not looking backwards.

We're looking forwards. We're creating something that has never existed before. And so it is a very new move when they start making this in the late 330s and early 340. And we're, when I say we, we mean the United States, our culture, sort of Western Civ now, are a weird mix of these. two things, right? We believe in progress. We believe that our children should live better than we did, and we believe that they will until, well, recently we certainly don't. But anyway, how do we have both and how do we deal with both? Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting question, because I think that the narrative of progress is also mixed in a modern context with the narrative of decline. I think,

Matthew, you had mentioned that this is actually the story of decline is a huge part of science fiction. So I think that the example that actually was totally formative for me was Osamov's foundation series, which I read when I was in middle school. And I read it and I hadn't read Gibbon yet. And so when I got back, you know, I got back into Roman history in high school, I started reading Gibbon and I'm like, oh, I recognize these characters because Asimov is listing, you know, almost directly from Gibbon when he's writing the history of the future. And so I think that what you see with Asimov, though, is a notion of decline that also has in it an understanding of progress as 1950 understood progress. So for Osamov, the peak of the galactic empire he talks about is nuclear power and easy space travel. And in 1950, that, of course, looks like progress.

That's the story of where humanity is going to go. But that story peaks out in the 70s, right? Like the Saturn 5 is still the biggest rocket that we've launched. power sort of peaks in the United States in the 1970s. And so that story of progress that Osamov laid out in the 50s and the concept of decline, which is moving away from nuclear power and investing in space travel, we've embodied that decline for 50 years. And yet our story has just shifted. And so it's possible that in 50 years from now, someone might go back and say with climate change, we should have embraced what Osamov was saying. You know, we invented the internet

that when we could have created clean energy. And that wasn't a great choice. It's possible that narrative of progress that we think moves only in one direction, 50 years from now, people might say we made the wrong choices. And so I think this is where the decline in progress story for us gets complicated. And it's also when I think that if we look at the reaction to this Christian story of progress, you see that reaction to it. When the empire moves away from traditional religion, there's a pagan senator named Simicus, who says, we're moving away from something that we still have a chance to reverse. But if we go in this direction, there's going to be all sorts of catastrophes for the state. And you have the Christian bishop Ambrose, say, no, we're moving in a good direction.

25 years later, the city of Rome is sacked by barbarians. And Christians don't have an answer to the criticism that pagans made. And so the narrative of progress there is challenged by the story of decline. And ultimately, what Christians end up doing is they put together things like Augustine's city of God, that says, we're just telling the wrong story. It's not about the Roman Empire at all. It's about you as a Christian. And so the bar kind of shifts. But decline in a way always is, even in a society that's embracing progress, it always is a kind of check on that narrative. It's always something that can redirect that narrative so that your progress can be redefined to better suit the conditions that you're

seeing around you. This is a weird question. But since we talked about foundation, I'm actually literally, I've never read it before and I'm literally reading it right now. You're just trying to get ahead of the TV show that's coming out this fall. Yes, that is exactly what's happening. My father gave me all of the paperbacks. I don't remember when. And I just never got, like when someone gifts you a book, you don't read it for 10 years. And so like, oh, shit, the TV show's just coming out.

I've got to read these now. And yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. But what do you think it says? What do you think it says about where we are right now that Apple has spent millions of dollars on what looks like a lavish, intricate adaptation of a story that is about the fall of an empire? Yeah. I think that we all have the feeling that things are not going right, that there are changes going on in our society right now and we're not comfortable with them. We don't like where it's going. And I think that's true if you're on the left, if you're on the right, if you're in the middle.

I don't think anybody is like, you're going in a good direction. And I'm totally happy with the path the world is on. And I think we're all trying to figure out how to understand that. And what foundation gives you is not only a narrative of how things go wrong, but also a story of redemption, because there is the other side of that where what the foundation represents for Osamov is a preservation of the things that will be lost through this decline. And an idea that when you preserve what could be lost, you have the potential for future progress. You have the potential for something to go in a different direction and actually to become better than it ever had been before.

But that starts with preservation. You can't just sort of progress and move in one direction without also retaining and coalescing around the ideas and the traditions and the features of your society that are good. And so I think that's maybe why foundation is so appealing now. I mean, I'm saying this with my students. When I started teaching around 2000, nobody had heard of this. It was just weird. You know, you've mentioned this stuff and your students would look at you like, you know, you're a Martian, like you're referencing the canticle for Leibowitz, something like that. These crazy books that, you know, nobody of their generation has ever heard of. And now they all know it. They all know it. And so I think there is something.

that has shifted in the way that we're thinking about progress, the way we're thinking about preservation, the way we're thinking about the developments in our society, and the basic discomfort we have about some of what is going on in the world around. Yeah, yeah, we should do a show just simply on foundation. Oh, I'd love that. Yeah, no, seriously, it deals with in later books the great man theory of history versus the waves of history. It is. It is. It is. It's. theory. It is really weird to have never read it and be reading it right now. It hits very strangely. I'll just say that. Do you want to get it to Charlemagne and the empire? Yeah. Briefly. Okay. So let's briefly talk about we do. We do. So now that we've talked about

some of my favorite stuff in the entire world, this is actually, if I was to make up a podcast show, this would be the episode between Roman history and Isaac Osama. I'm just going nuts. But anyway, can we talk about the idea of what Charlemagne brings to the table, the holy Roman Empire, the restoration, if you will, of the Roman Empire? Yeah, the situation with Charlemagne is fascinating because there's a whole lot of modern, there's modern conceptual distance that comes about from moves that Charlemagne was making around the year 800. So the basic story, in a very quick nutshell, is in the 6th century, the Eastern Roman Empire reconquers Italy. It destroys the Western Roman state, what everybody in Italy thought was the Western Roman state.

And then 20 years later, there's an invasion by Lombards that cut that state in half. And so the Roman territory in Italy consists basically of southern Italy, and then there's a little Lombard kingdom in the middle, and then the kind of the highway that links Rome to Ravenna, and then there's Lombard kingdoms up to the north. And Venice is sort of Roman at this point, but sort of not. And what happens across the course of the 8th century is the papacy in Rome gets increasing pressure from the Lombards who are looking to unify these two territories. And the papacy first asks Emperors and Constantinople for help, and they stop providing that

help. And so ultimately what the Pope has to do is use his own resources to build some way to protect Rome from the attacks of the Lombards. And what ends up happening is the Pope first declares himself the head of a Republic of St. Peter that's founded in Rome. And so he takes the city of Rome out of Roman control, the control of the Roman state in Constantinople, declares it something else, and then makes an alliance with the Franks where he entrusts the spiritual leadership that the Roman Republic of St. Peter's has, he entrusts that leadership to the Franks and to their protection. And ultimately, there's a series of negotiations where the Franks invade Italy promised to give

territory back to the Pope, basically give only a little bit back to the Pope. And then ultimately, as a sort of power move, what the Pope does is a different Pope. This lasts a very long time. But by the year 800, a Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor or Roman Emperor. And the story the Pope's use is a story called the, based on something called the donation of Constantine, which is that Constantine converts to Christianity, and he gives the Western Roman Empire to the papacy, including the crown. And the popes don't really take that up, because they just want to work on spiritual things. They don't want to be politicians. And everybody forgets about it, but somehow the document shows up in like the 770s. And on this basis, the Pope claims that he can crown Charlemagne, Roman emperor, because they've always

had the power to do that since Constantine, and now there's finally somebody worthy of it. And then what we see in the court of Charlemagne is propagandists begin saying, Charlemagne is Roman emperor, and there is no more Roman Empire in the East. And the excuse they use is the Empress Irene has just overthrown her son and taken power by herself. She's the first woman to openly control the Roman Empire. And Charlemagne's propaganda say, there is no Roman Empire because there is no Roman Emperor because a woman's in charge. And therefore, the throne is vacant and therefore Charlemagne is uncontested as Roman Emperor. And not coincidentally, Charlamagne begins fighting a war against the Eastern Roman Empire. Now, the thing that's interesting

is the war doesn't go anywhere. It peters out. They end up making a peace agreement and they agree to disagree about who the Roman Empire. And both of them claim that they are the Roman Empire until the fall of concerts in Oakland, 1453, gets rid of the Eastern. Empire. And then you have Holy Roman emperors in the West claiming that they need to go back and take Constaninople because, you know, they are the only Romans left. And that should be Roman again. So the story that Charlemagne starts around the year 800 is a story that we see unfolding, you know, through the 16th century. Charles V is still using this. He's using treasuries filled with silver he took from Peru to try to fight the Ottomans to retake Constantinople. So this story lasts

a very long time. But Charlemagne is the one who really is responsible for starting it. It's funny. It's like the history is a cargo cult, right? I mean, we have these remnants lying around, and they become the center of everything. The idea that the Roman Empire, you know, in some bizarre sense, lives long after 1453 because there are people still calling themselves the only Roman emperor. It has nothing to do with Rome. It's got nothing to do with the Republic. It's got nothing to do with Augustus, but it's still there. And I'm just going to say it, you look at American buildings and the neoclassical style in Washington, D.C., where I live now, the Faskees that are on the sides of buildings, all of these Roman symbols. We live with them every single day, and they're symbols of power and strength, right?

Yeah. So what, is America like the seventh Rome or something like that? Well, the founders definitely were influenced by this. And you look at like James Madison, John Adams, Hamilton. You know, they were, especially in the first generation, even Washington, they were influenced by models of Roman behavior that deeply impacted the way they talked about what the American Republic would be, but also the way they behaved. I mean, Washington really internalized this idea that he was an American Cincinnati,

Cincinnati is this Roman who's appointed dictator to deal with a major crisis. The office lasts for six months. He deals with the crisis in two weeks and steps down. And Washington really internalized this idea that the greatest service a leader can do for his country is to do the service that's required and then step away so that the country can then focus on the more pressing problems or other problems or problems that someone else is more capable of addressing. And there is no consolidation of power around a figure like a king. And so I think you're right that we've internalized a lot of the ideas of what Rome is.

And the founders especially did this. The first generation through basically, you know, the 1810s or so, I'm really believed that the project that they were undertaking is something that could be deeply informed by what we saw with the Roman Republic. And on some level, their intuition is pretty good. The Roman Republic is one of the few states that managed to be something of a representative democracy and expand. Generally, what happens is if a state expands too quickly, it doesn't have a plan or a capacity for incorporating the new territory and the new people living in that territory. I mean, the Roman Republic is one of the very few that was able to do that. And so as you are living in the United States in, say, 1793, and you're looking west and you're seeing all of this land that

probably you are going to try to incorporate a representative democracy based around Rome makes sense. A straight up democracy like Athens would make no sense. You couldn't run something like that as the citizen body expanded out and grew, a new territory came under control. But with Rome, you could. And so I think that on some level, their intuition is good. On another level, though, you're right. We embrace this aesthetically to a really extreme degree. Well, where are we now? Do you think that, that we got another 2,000 years. It's fine. Right. Exactly. You know, I think that the, I think that I'm bordering on naive and saying this and I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that.

I think that we are still at a moment where we can decide what we want to do and how we want to respond to the real undeniable crises we're facing. Because one of the things that the decline is, it can be made up, but it also can be something that is real. And with Rome, when we talk about the decline of that society. There's lots of cases where people make it up, but the Roman state doesn't exist anymore. It very clearly declined, and then it fell. And so there are moments where there's no problem that someone makes it up, but there are moments where they are real problems. And sometimes the Romans deal with it, and sometimes they don't. And I think this is very clearly a moment where we have a number of overlapping. We have a pretty serious problem with economic inequality. We have a pretty serious problem

with a pandemic and the response to it. We have a pretty serious problem with political division and a conflict and political violence. And all of those things are related on some level, but all of those things are also separate. And I think what Rome shows is there is a very narrow way to make a society stronger that faces all of these things. But it's something where you have to, I suppose, be naive to think it will work. And the way forward, I think, is to figure out what the actual pass forward that leads to the results we want is and collaborate with everybody who's going to be helpful in doing it and just leave to the side the people who aren't, not punish them, not demonize them for not being part of the path forward, but focus on making a path forward

that people feel comfortable with, people can participate in, and hope that more people will join in when they see that this is about making the country better and the society stronger. and it's about addressing bad policies. It's not about penalizing bad people. That's really hard to do, though, especially in a moment now where literally people have died for their political beliefs in this country. That's hard.

It's hard to say that somebody has made the ultimate sacrifice for a principle, and you're going to compromise that principle. And that's why I think it's potentially naive. But I think what Rome shows is that is a way to move forward. You know, to focus on bad policy, and focus on collaborative ways to address the problems they cause does lead you in the Marcus Aurelius direction. And it doesn't lead you in the say Sulla or Augustus direction where tens of thousands of people

die because Sulla doesn't want to compromise. He wants division. He likes division. It's good for him. And so people die because of this. Augustus liked division. Took advantage of it. And lots of people die because of that.

Marcus could have done that and chooses not to. It's, I think, still possible for us. But I hear all the time from my kids. I'm a naive idealist, and I belong to, you know, a generation of, a generation that just had it better than they do. And they don't think that. And they might be right. I hope they're not, but they might be. Yeah, we need a dream of the future, one that everyone can participate in, everybody.

And we don't have that right now. And the kids were raising are being told that the planet is destroyed. and they have no future. So good times. There we go. I got it to the depressing place, Jason. You did. You did.

Well done. All right. So I'm going to call it a time of depression 4.24 p.m. And I just want to say thank you very much to Edward Watts. And also that I've enjoyed the book, Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome very much. And I think there are a lot of good lessons in it. So thanks for being with us. Oh, thank you. This is wonderful.

That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. The show is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to Angry Planetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com and sign up for our substack, where you can get access to commercial-free versions of all of our episodes, as well as two, count of two bonus episodes every month. Again, that's just $9.00 at Angry Planet.

com. We will be back again next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.