01-30-2017, 01:41 AM
(01-28-2017, 08:49 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:(01-28-2017, 06:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-28-2017, 05:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: And yet the Empire had been demographically stagnating for a couple of centuries, trade was already breaking down during the crisis of the third century, the Empire itself broke into pieces, and the Huns themselves did not end up toppling the Empire, even in the West. The very fact their army increasingly relied on Germans auxillaries and generals towards the end should be a sign.
Historical revisionism is fun and all, but this sort of thing is a little absurd. The Romans were not going from strength to strength until they encountered a civilization they couldn't handle, they had been falling for 3 centuries before Odoacer topple Romulus Augustulus.
The Roman Empire was also stagnating in technology and culture. The slave system that became even more dominant ensured the absence of as middle class of entrepreneurs and technical people who might have given the Roman world a stimulus that might have forced it into something more modern. Just imagine the Romans with steam engines (which would have proved useful for steamships and railroads), bicycles, and the printing press. Imagine them with a fully-capitalist order. Sure, it would have been an environmental catastrophe...
People in despair from economic distress and political chaos quit looking forward to happiness in This World, and turned to what desperate people have often done -- to Pie in the Sky When You Die, which Christianity eventually expressed best. Thus Christianity won out over alternatives in exotic cults. But Christianity had its demographic consequences in encouraging multitudes to become monks and nuns and to not procreate, and in disparaging business. The Roman Empire was both authoritarian and chaotic, offering safety to nobody but plenty of opportunity for the most ruthless operators.
The big question was not when the Empire would collapse. By the mid-5th century, what remained of the Roman Empire was a shell. Odoacer simply deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 and had no need of another Emperor as a vassal that the successors of Julius Caesar had been.
I'm pretty sure he actually sent the insignia of office to the sitting emperor in the East with the expectation that he would be confirmed as the next one, as had frequently been the practice over the past couple hundred years. The Emperor sent Theoderic instead, and he was the one who eschewed the title of Emperor in favor of King.
And the Empire up to about 180 was actually a pretty thriving place. Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius really had their shit together. The Antonine plagues, Commodus, the whole of the 3rd century, is when the wheels really started to come off the whole thing.
So that, yeah, by the 5th century the Western Empire was pretty much a bad joke.
I have read a two-volume condensed version of Toynbee's A Study in History, in which Toynbee recognizes the civilization as the unit of history. The civilization goes into decline when one political entity comes to dominate the civilization, whether that civilization is an internal figure (like Julius Caesar) who consolidates the civilization around one political entity or a foreign power (the Spanish Crown in Mexico or Peru, or the British in India) take over the entire civilization and standardize the political and economic life. Just imagine the West falling to the Mongols (who turned back at Liegnitz, Silesia (now Legnica, Poland) upon news that the Great Khan had died. The most powerful Western kingdoms of the time in Austria and France could not have stopped the Mongols. (An aside: the timeline that I imagine has the Mongols intermarrying with the Bourbon monarchs of France, and the line of the Marseillaise
qu'un sang impur/abreuve nos sillons
that bastard blood/ shall moisten our fields
would have been literal in its meaning, referring to an aristocracy with an obvious Mongol admixture). Or some of the 'evil empires' that we could have had -- Inquisition-era Spain, Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union as the Universal State that seals the demise of the civilization. All gone. Should the USA become the Evil Empire with such a prospect of encompassing the entire West, then it probably brings about the steady demise of the West.
What happens? A privileged elite defines itself as the object for which the whole civilization must defer. The system crushes innovation, imagination, and enterprise. Of course one can read anything into someone like Toynbee, and I can read "Donald Trump is a nightmare" into his Study if I so wish much as I can read "Adolf Hitler was the Antichrist" into Revelation. Toynbee used the analogy of a pleasant Indian Summer to describe the Antonine era. After Marcus Aurelius, the western part of the Roman Empire simply rotted. (Some evidence suggests that the civilization associated with Rome died around AD 535 with some meteorological calamity unleashed upon a weakened world, which coincides with the disappearance of King Arthur in Wales, and bad times from Byzantium to China and the New World). Soon after the Indian Summer comes to an end comes winter.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.