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U.S. and The Roman Empire

  
 
SMS
22:10 / 22.04.02
wembley said
Funny how more and more America is reminding me of the Roman Empire. Excessive eating habits (entire aisles of Kroger's devoted to potato chips!) with no look ahead to the consequences. Soon, vomitoriums.

Can we discuss this concept? I've heard it before, but I haven't ever really gotten into all the detailed parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire.
 
 
Harold Washington died for you
22:34 / 22.04.02
Wow, didn't think anyone noticed that potato chip deal.

I think its an economic phenom. If you've ever played the computer game Sim City you get to that point after you've built all the slums you can based around industrial systems. You check your approval ratings and see your sims complain long and loud about crime and (low)property values, and furiously look for a solution.

Eureka! The commercial systems make almost as much money (measured in population growth and the resultant tax income) and are a lot prettier to boot. The commercial system grows new buildings and branches, maybe plopping in a stadium when you get confident, and makes the sims happy. Happy to the point where they only complain about crime and traffic. Put in a light rail system and watch the population climb towards megalopolis.

After a long hard day selling widgets to the poor cities, your sims love nothing more than a concrete example of their fortune. Concrete, but subconscious, they walk into immaculate food palaces where every variety of every foodstuff is laid before them. Baked, fried, Bar-B-Q, cool ranch, mesquite, salt + vinegar, etc. in three different brand potato chips. Ah isn't capitalism grand!!!
 
 
Hieronymus
23:06 / 22.04.02
Where'd I put my goddamn toga?
 
 
Trijhaos
23:08 / 22.04.02
This is probably going to sound really silly, but professional wrestling reminds me a great deal of the whole gladiator, lion, arena thing. Its basically the same thing. Big hulking guys beating each other bloody for the entertainment of the masses. The only difference is the loser isn't put to death.
 
 
Francine I
23:10 / 22.04.02
I think it's become a relatively classic observation; That the U.S. adheres to the definition of 'empire'. An acceptable definition of empire follows:

"A political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority."

If you consider the States to be territories and the U.S. Government to be the 'supreme authority', you're all set. Of course, it's not all this simple, but the observation still holds some validity.

Of course this means that empires aren't inherently despotic -- it just means they're large and dangerous. It seems to me that the U.S. has some of the qualities of an empire, but that 'empire' is a title ultimately given out by history. Usually after a fall.

I think some of the examples given are certainly a sign of a decadence -- and the Romans were known for their decadence -- but that doesn't mean they're necessarily equivelent. These parallels, for example, do not indicate a destiny for the U.S -- which is the most seductive aspect of such thinking, in my opinion. In the height of it's colonial era, the U.K. certainly qualified as an empire.

There are things worth considering in such illustrations, but it's all got to be taken with a grain of salt. Unless you're Philip K. Dick.
 
 
Harold Washington died for you
03:16 / 23.04.02
Hm, somehow lost the last part of my beautiful sim city metaphor.

Anyways, once the industrial base of the US is completely destroyed, all our factories in Mexico or Micronesia, we will collapse like the Roman Empire. A sad consequence of prosperity is that you get fat and lazy just like our toga'd friends.

'Course it may be a good thing if something better arises from the ashes, but we'll all be dead before it happens.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:30 / 23.04.02
Declaration of interest: this is, to some extent, what my PhD is about. So I'm sure you'll understand if I don't contribute in depth. And if I rip off everybody's responses and publish them in journals. Ahahahahahaha.

You should read Hardt & Negri's Empire for a good discussion of some of these parallels that don't fall into the same old traps of cyclical historical thinking (all empires must follow the same route from foundation to fall).

You should *also* read Lucan's 'The Civil War', a ten-book epic poem about the ways in which incoherence is built into the very concept of Empire, and the impossibility of the relationship urbs/orbis (City/World).

The parallels between the USA and the Roman Empire which seem to me to be very important are:

1. The way in which the Roman Empire reproduced itself virally, by producing little copies of Roman space and architecture in colonies, so that the inhabitants would Romanize *themselves*. This is a sort of ancient branding, spawning little McDonalds and Gaps across the globe. There's a reference to this in Tacitus's Agricola, which Haus might be able to quote or look up, I don't have it on me.

Also, the Roman's *cultural* imperialism, so that "education" globally became "reading the Aeneid" - similar to the Hollywood hegemony?Umberto Eco's written an essay, which is clearly crucial to my work and which, therefore, I haven't read (actually, if anyone knows where I can find it you're doing better than my supervisors) called 'Pax Americana'. I assume by this he's referring to the concept of the Pax Romana - there is world peace *on condition that everyone behave like a Roman*.

2. The Roman word "imperium", from which 'Empire' comes, denotes not a fixed territorial extension, as in the British Empire (colour the world in pink), but means, in spatial terms, roughly "the area in which a Roman commander can give orders and see them carried out". This seems to me to be similar to the ways in which the US deploys power in the contemporary world - always pragmatic, not necessarily overt or concerned with territorial laws & sovereignty.

I'm sure there was another one, but I forget it now. Oh, it was about Lucan's 'civil war', which resonates terrifyingly with The War On Terrorism: it's written in this completely apocalyptic mode. As if the logical-political-philosophical incoherences which result from the concept of Roman Civil War (if you push that concept far enough) could destroy the fabric of the universe - as soon as the universe becomes conscious of its own impossibility it disappears... Ahem. Sorry, that has nothing to do with the US. Anyway, TWAT is all about trying to define a Them as against an Us in ways which go against traditional means of Us-Themming, such as nation-state borders or whatever, and is thus the first global civil war. Or, actually, the second: since Lucan is writing about the first global civil war... which in itself is also the second, making it *exactly the same* as this one....

Now I have to go for a little lie down.
 
 
BioDynamo
10:48 / 23.04.02

A little more inspired by Negri & Hardt:

On the Pax Americana: Pax Romana (as I understand it) was a "peace of eternal war", which doesn't correspond very well with the War on Terrorism, but quite well with the idea of the Global Police that America is. The wars that are waged are no longer wars, they are police actions. There is no declaration of war necessary, because the combatants will never be nations, instead they will be "cops and robbers". It will be a question of actions internal to the Empire.

Note that the Empire is not the United States. The US is the police and, in many ways, the driving force of Empire. But Empire really is a logic, a way of thought that is shared, collectively, by nations, groups and individuals. I recommend you get the newest issue of Wired (April 2002) and read Bruce Sterling's exellent article. He's obviously also read Negri & Hardt, and in a way Sterling says what people tend to feel: "Hey, it could be a lot worse, OK?"
 
 
Cat Chant
14:48 / 23.04.02
I think Hardt & Negri also say that it could be a lot worse, though? Sorry to keep going on about the book, but one of the reasons I do so is because it made me feel so inspired and optimistic: not all doom & gloom by any means.

Thanks for picking me up on my equation of the US with "Empire" - McDonalds is, of course, a transnational company, not the American govt, so the agency behind this kind of imperialism-by-branding is not the American state as was the case in the Roman empire. I'm not even sure that the US is the police force of Empire, especially given the tendency of transnational companies to arm & train their own security forces - it's less centred than that. (One of the things that H&N say differentiates the contemporary state of the globe from the Roman Empire is the fact that "there is no Rome".)

Incidentally, I'm reading Hannah Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' at the moment and she says that one of the characteristics of a totalitarian government is the dominance of "police" over "military" - "those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army."

Sorry. I can't stay on topic today.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:54 / 23.04.02
I did have a longer post, but a lot of it was just griping about the way that not only are the Roman Empire, Imperial Rome and the Roman Republic being conflated into a single entity, but that everything about Rome is being concentrated into a tiny, invisible-from-the-side hunk of hypertime where everything happens at once.

However, on the difference between "empire" and "imperium", I was taken by the thought of "imperium merum". Literally "undiluted authority", imperium merum was IIRC a process where individuals were given the power to impose their authority anywhere and in any way as if they had the unconditional support of the Roman state - somebody with Imperium Merum could therefore commandeer resources from governors, levy troops from local garrisons, and so on. Refusing a command from somebody with Imperium Merum was tantamount to treason, one reason why it was used only in the most absurdly extreme cases (I think Fabius Cunctator may have had it in the Punic War, and there was a campaign to give it to Pompeius Maximus to fight piracy, but I think it was defeated). "merum" was also used of wine, which was always mixed with water by Romans, because unmixed it went too quickly to one's head. This is one of Latin's better gags.

Point being, the US appears to work on this assumption *all the time* - that a refusal to accede to the wishes of the US is at best immoral and at worst an act of aggression. So, the U.S. is like the Roman Empire, but without the checks and balances that usually imposed some measure of accountability on its imperial governors, because the rest of the world is not officially speaking its province.
 
 
Cat Chant
19:25 / 23.04.02
The griping sounds interesting to me, Haus, since my knowledge of Roman history covers about sixty years of the Julio-Claudians and is distinctly patchy even over that period, and I have a tendency to use "Rome" synechdochally (also, I can't spell synecdoche).

I'm interested in a synchronic version of "Rome" as a name for a particular structure of power and nationhood (and I know Rome wasn't a nation) - am less interested in the Diachronic Fallacy (as I have just this second named it) that All Empires will follow the same historical trajectory as Rome. Anyway, if you read Lucan you'll see that time doesn't matter anyway, since the world ended in whenever the battle of Philippi was and we're all trapped in a holographic projection.

Do continue with the griping.
 
 
sleazenation
19:34 / 23.04.02
If the world has already ended and we are traped in the holographic projection of rome then it looks like Philip K dick got it even more right than even he knew...
 
 
Cat Chant
21:22 / 23.04.02
Nearly. Philip K Dick failed to recognize that he was actually Lucan. Apart from that, he was spot-on.
 
  
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