I am honored to give a
lecture named after Russell Kirk, who told us to ponder the
permanent things, such as history and human nature. It is about
human nature and history that I want to speak to you this
afternoon.
We are on patrol today
in Iraq. Men and women of the United States armed forces in armored
vehicles patrol the streets of Baghdad. They pass in the way of so
many who have come before them: the Egyptian charioteers of Ramses
II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman
legionnaires of Caesar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard
the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of
Lawrence of Arabia.
All of these have come
through the Middle East. Many of them have come with the best of
intentions, by their lights, to bring stability, even freedom to
the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the
graveyard of empires.
In the course of
history, we have come to take up that burden. We live in a time as
momentous as that of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the
days after Pearl Harbor. In each of these watersheds in our
history, we have not only taken up the burden, but we have
advanced the cause of freedom.
In the American
Revolution, we saw to it that a nation could be established under
Liberty and law. In the American Civil War, we purged ourselves of
the great evil of slavery so that we could go on and become a model
for the world. In World War II and the Cold War that followed, we
advanced the cause of freedom so that today, more people live in
freedom than at any other time in history. That is the result
of America bearing this burden.
I think that September
11 is just as important a date as Pearl Harbor, and we now advance
into a new and dangerous era. Think of Winston Churchill when he
said how Britain set out across unknown seas, through uncharted
waters towards unknown shores, guided only by the beacon of
freedom. We have another guide, and that is history and the
lessons of history. For the founders of our country,
history was the most important single discipline that every
citizen of a free republic should study.
Historical Information
vs. Historical Thought
I want to talk to you
about historical thought. There is a great deal of historical
knowledge around today. We are awash with books on history, massive
biographies about historical figures. Information on history is
much broader than ever before, but there is very little historical
thought across both spectrums in the political world.
As Lord Acton said,
historical thought is far more important than historical knowledge.
Historical thought is using the lessons of history to
understand the present and to make decisions for the future.
In other words, it was by using history as an analytical tool and
making use of the lessons of history that our founders brought
our constitution into being.
Ponder the miracle of
that Constitution. When it was drafted, we were 13 little republics
struggling along the eastern seaboard. When George Washington
wanted to go somewhere, he went exactly the same way that Cicero
did: He walked, he sailed, he rode a horse. If he wanted to send a
message, it went the same way that Cicero sent one or Caesar sent
one: by horse, by sail, by walking.
That same constitution
gives us Liberty, law, and prosperity, though we are now the
superpower of the world. We could sit down right now, and with your
laptop you could correspond with the Antipodes of Australia. We
live in a world of technology that would have amazed even Benjamin
Franklin.
They were able to
create this constitution because they learned from history, and the
history that was most instructive for them was the history of the
Roman world, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. They crafted
our constitution to reflect the balanced constitution of the Roman
Republic, with the sovereignty of the people guided by the wisdom
of the Senate, with a powerful executive in the form of the
commander in chief, the consul. But they also understood, with the
Romans, that no constitution, however good on paper, would work
unless it was vitalized by civic virtue, by the willingness of each
individual to subordinate his own good to the good of the
community as a whole. To use an old-fashioned word, patriotism
must vitalize every constitution.
The founders hoped
that, in America, we would see these virtues of ancient Rome, and
they knew that under such a constitution the United States would
grow into an empire. They already spoke of a rising empire of
America. They hoped that Rome of the republic would be our enduring
model, but they feared, and rightly so, that one day, perhaps
today, our model would be Rome of the Caesars, Rome of the first
and second centuries A.D. For Rome of the Caesars and the United
States today are the only two absolute superpowers that have
existed in history.
By an absolute
superpower I mean a nation that is dominant militarily,
politically, economically, and culturally. The United States is
absolutely dominant militarily, politically, economically, and we
dominate the world culturally. We may never produce a Beethoven or
a Bach, a Goethe or a Shakespeare. That is not how our culture
dominates. It is our music, our McDonald's, our popular culture
that spreads all over the globe. Look at a terrorist. He will be
holding someone hostage while wearing sneakers, Mickey Mouse
tee-shirt on, listening to terrible music and dreaming of a
McDonald's when this is all over. That is how our culture rules the
world.
The Roman Empire: A
Vast Superpower
The Roman Empire of the
first and second centuries A.D. was just such a superpower. It
stretched from the moors of Scotland out to the Tigris and
Euphrates River valleys of Iraq today, and from the North Seas of
Germany to the sands of the Sahara.
If you were going to
take a trip through the Roman Empire in the second century A.D.,
you would start off in the United Kingdom, cross over to Belgium
and Holland, through Germany and France, on down to Switzerland and
Austria, and to Hungry and Romania and Bulgaria, down through
what was Yugoslavia and to Greece and then on to Turkey, through
Syria, Lebanon, into Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. We would pass on
into Libya, into Tunisia, Algeria, and up into Morocco and then on
up into Spain.
If you were to take
that journey today, even in the day of the euro, you would need to
change your money at least a dozen times, you'd need a dozen visas,
and there would be places you would not want to go. But in those
days, one language-the language of Rome, Latin-carried you anywhere
in that empire. Or it could be Greek, which was equally an official
language of the empire.
With the Greek
language, St. Paul could travel all over the eastern Mediterranean,
preaching and talking himself out of trouble, for there was
also one set of laws that governed that vast empire. When St. Paul
is arrested and the tribune gets ready to give him a beating, Paul
says, "You can't beat me; that is a violation of my civil rights as
a Roman." The tribune says, "Let me see your citizenship papers,"
and Paul shows them to him, and the tribune says, "Where did you
get those? How did you get them? They cost me a huge bribe to get
to be a Roman citizen." Then he's worried that Paul is going to
bring him up on charges of violating his civil rights.
So the law of Rome
protects you all over this vast empire, and there is one currency,
the currency of Rome. There is this vast geographical expanse and
within it a peace and prosperity that many of those areas would not
know again until the 20th century-and some of those areas
still do not know today-under the immense majesty of the Roman
Empire. It was a time so peaceful that the Roman historian Tacitus
in the second century A.D. complained that there were no wars
in his days, and thus he could not write about the glories the way
that his predecessor Livy had been able to.
Presiding over all was
the Roman emperor. He was the commander in chief. The office of
emperor-imperator means nothing but commander in
chief-had evolved out of the executive power of the consul of the
old republic, and the Roman Empire of the first and second century
A.D. brought forth a series of leaders with few equals in
history.
Whenever you're talking
about Rome, you must fight against the nonsense of a movie like
Gladiator. You must fight against the nonsense of this
program called Rome, some degraded spectacle on
HBO.
Julius Caesar;
Augustus; the grim and remorseless Tiberius, who governed the
provinces with fairness and justice; Vespasian; Titus, the darling
of the Roman people; Nerva; Trajan; Hadrian; Antoninus Pius;
and Marcus Aurelius-small wonder that Gibbon, who knew the history
of Rome, wrote that if a person were to pick that one period in the
history of the human race when mankind was happiest, he
would, without hesitation, take that period of the second century
A.D.
In addition, Rome had a
small but efficient civil service that educated its members to this
burden of governing with justice and with individual freedom:
men like Pliny the Elder and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, the
finest kind of civil servant, and a bureaucracy so efficient and so
capable that monstrosities like Caligula and Nero were nothing but
a small blip on the scale of imperial progress and the guarantee of
individual rights.
Three Components of
Freedom
For the Romans
understood that freedom really is an ideal of three components,
which are not all mutually inclusive: national freedom, freedom
from foreign domination; then political freedom, the freedom to
vote and to choose your magistrates; and finally, individual
freedom, the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no
one else.
National freedom was
largely extinguished under the Romans, and many said it was a good
thing, for in the ancient world it had brought nothing but war
and turmoil. Political Liberty was more extended than has sometimes
been thought, because the Romans believed in a decentralized form
of government. The emperor made all the decisions for foreign
policy, but there was a great deal of local self-control. But it
was individual freedom, the freedom to live as you choose,
that had a guarantee and extension under the Roman emperors
that it had never had before under the old free city-states of
Greece and the Roman Republic.
All of this was guarded
by one of the best and one of the most cost-efficient armies in
history-360,000 Roman soldiers guarded this vast frontier. The
empire was connected by a superb network of magnificent Roman
roads that you can still travel over today. In Rome you can see a
bridge built in 63 B.C. that still carries traffic. All over that
empire, every day, pure water was brought through aqueducts that
gave the ordinary Roman a larger supply of fresh pure drinking
water, with all that means for hygiene, than an inhabitant of
Chicago or Paris had in 1920s.
And for all of this the
ordinary Roman worked only two days a year to pay his taxes,
because the emperors understood that with the money left in the
hands of the individuals, it was then invested.
This brought prosperity
under a free market economy and an economic unity that the
Mediterranean world would not see again until our own day.
Cities from London in Britannia, Pergamum in Asia Minor, Alexandria
in Egypt, Cologne in Germany became flourishing centers of
trade. If you were redecorating your house in Rome, you could have
marble cut in Egypt, Thessaly in Greece, and Numidia in North
Africa shipped to your house and installed in a matter of
months.
It was a time of social
mobility. You could begin life as a slave, purchase your freedom,
and go on to become a billionaire by the standards of the day. It
was also an age of cultural diversity. The Roman emperors believed
that it was part of their mission to foster the culture of others.
So Roman emperors built temples to the gods of Gaul, to the gods of
Egypt-in fact, most of the great temples you see today as you go up
the Nile are results of the Roman age in Egypt. The Roman emperor
was worshipped as Pharaoh by the people of Egypt. At the same
time, they believed that every nation, every empire must be bound
together by a common set of cultural values founded in
religion.
Their common set of
cultural values was the heritage of classical Greece, and Rome
became the bearer of the culture and civilization of Greece. The
plays of Euripides and Sophocles were performed in the theatres of
Spain and Pompeii to audiences which could understand them put on
in the original Greek. Thucydides became the model for the
historian Tacitus, even as Herodotus had been the model for the
historian Livy. The sculptures of classical Greece informed
and shaped the sculptures of the Roman Empire, even as the Pantheon
was built to portray new spiritual values but building upon the
great architectural legacy in Greece.
The Romans believed
there must be an imperial divinity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the
supreme god who had given an empire to the Roman people. His temple
decorated the forum of every Roman city throughout that vast
empire. To honor the gods of Rome, by the year 212 A.D., every
freeborn inhabitant of the Roman Empire became a citizen, protected
by the laws of Rome, for it was also an age of creativity and
innovation in which the cultural foundations for the next
thousand years of European civilization were laid.
In architecture, the
Pantheon, designed by the Emperor Hadrian-warrior, administrator,
architect, poet-expressed in concrete the new concept of
monotheism, of one god who governs the entire universe the way one
emperor governs the world. There in the Pantheon, with its use of
space to convey a mystical religious experience, was laid the
foundation for the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe or Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople.
In narrative art, the
column of Trajan, built to celebrate his victories over the Dacians
in 105 and 106, laid the foundation for 1,000 years of
Christian art in which, for those who could not read, the
narrative of divine achievement and of virtue and salvation was
laid out in pictures.
In science, it was the
age of Galen, whose textbooks would still be the basis of
European medical education in the 15th century. It was the age of
Ptolemy, who drew his map of the world as he knew it. Ptolemy's
calculations were slightly off, and he showed that China was closer
to Europe than it really was; and poring over that map,
Christopher Columbus came to the conclusion that he could sail
to the West and come to China.
It was the age of
spirituality in which, from emperor down to peasant in the field,
the soul became the prime concern. It was the age in which
monotheism began to grow and develop and cults of "Savior Gods"
arose and individual salvation became the central concern. It was
the age which would give birth to both, ultimately, Islam and
Christianity.
And it was the age in
which Roman law laid the foundation for the system of jurisprudence
that still governs half the world. Roman law was the creation of an
earlier republic now refined for a world empire. This was the age
of Roman jurists like Ulpian, who founded the law of this
empire on the ideals of natural law, that all men are created
equal and are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights, among which are life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. That was jus naturale, the law of God
based upon absolute right and wrong. It was their job as jurists,
and then as practical judges, to translate that into the jus
gentium, the law of mankind, or into the jus civile, the
law of the individual empire of Rome; but its foundation was
still the ideal: that all men are created equal.
Rome, Germany, and the
Middle East
This was the creativity
of the Roman Empire in this age of individual freedom and
prosperity. For two centuries it achieved its goal, but it would
ultimately decline and fall, and the question is, why?
Historical events come about because of human decisions that are
made, and the Romans failed to solve two critical issues of foreign
policy: the Middle East and Central Europe.
The Romans began their
intervention in the Middle East in the second century B.C.
They came first out of a sense of self-defense: to bring order and
stability to that region. They then became enmeshed in the politics
of the region, and by the first century B.C., they attempted to
establish client states based upon fundamental Roman institutions
including a degree of political liberty. They then found themselves
drawn into military occupation and then into direct rule until, by
the second century A.D., almost the entire Middle East was
under Roman direct annexation.
But there was still the
problem of Iran. That vast empire was basically passive as long as
it was left alone by the Romans, but Julius Caesar had a
solution for Parthia, for the empire of Iran, and it was
conquest. In 44 B.C., he was planning the expedition, first to
conquer Parthia and then to swing back through the Black Sea region
and conquer and annex all the Germanic tribes.
He was assassinated,
and his successor, his adopted son Augustus, perhaps the shrewdest
statesman ever to live, decided that Parthia was too much for the
Romans to absorb. He came up with an exit strategy by which the
Parthians and the Romans would recognize spheres of influence, and
Iran stayed outside of the Roman domination.
But the Middle East
became a quagmire for the Romans-civil war in Judea, trouble in
Egypt- and the Romans poured in more and more of their treasure and
stretched the limits of their army as far as they could be
stretched. It became a constant drain, and, more than that, it
became a drain upon the focus of the emperors. As a result, they
neglected Central Europe. Again, by a decision made by
Augustus, the Romans failed to absorb the Germanic tribes,
divided into numerous ethnic groups but all ferocious warriors and
fiercely independent.
Then the imponderable
happened.
In the third century
A.D., Iran changed from a passive to a powerfully offensive nation
under a revitalized religion, a monotheist religion, the
worship of Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Truth, the religion
that had once been prophesied by Zoroaster. Iran began to sweep
into the frontiers of the Roman Empire, which were too stretched in
terms of its military and other commitments. As a result, the
Persian forces swept right through the fairest provinces of
the Roman East. At the same time, the Germanic tribes formed
new federations and coalitions and swept into the Roman Empire in
the West, including Gaul and Britain.
Rome recovered from
this crisis, but in a form that left it utterly different than
before. It had once rested upon the back of a strong and vigorous
and loyal middle class. Now every aspect of Roman society became
rigid, formalized. The army became ever larger, ever more
inefficient; the bureaucracy became ever larger to collect ever
more taxes; and the very spirit and, ultimately, the loyalty of the
middle class was destroyed. Finally, in the seventh century A.D.
under the banners of Islam, the East swept all the way into Spain.
In Italy, barbarian German chieftains sat in the half-ruined
palaces of the Caesars.
Lessons for Today's
World
If we were to draw
lessons from the Roman experience for today, I would begin by
telling you that, as the founders thought, since human nature never
changes, similar circumstances will always produce similar events.
But I would say at the same time, as Churchill did, that history is
both a guide and an impediment to understanding the
present.
Lesson one would be
that liberal democracies do not make for good neighbors. The
liberal democracies of Greece led to constant war. Ultimately, the
rise of the Roman Empire was the only solution to a
Mediterranean world that had known nothing but warfare,
frequently between competing democratic nation-states. The peace
and prosperity of the Roman Empire was brought about by
subordinating those liberal democracies to an all-encompassing
imperial rule.
The Romans were not
afraid to take up that burden of imperial rule. As the poet
Virgil said, the Greeks will always be our superior in literature
and sculpture, even in science. It is the destiny of the Romans to
wear down the haughty and to raise up the weak. That is how they
saw their mission in bringing peace.
Second, the
institutions of freedom are very difficult to transfer. The
Roman Republic was a nation of Liberty and, under law, a democratic
republic. That could not be transferred to other parts of the
world. The Romans came to understand that freedom is not a
universal value: that people over and over again have chosen
security, which is what the Roman Empire brought, over the awesome
responsibilities of self-government.
Third, the Romans
learned that you cannot govern a world empire with a
constitution designed for a small city-state. That is what Rome was
when it was founded in 753, and when it became a republic in 509
B.C., it was a small republic by the Tiber River. That constitution
could not bear the burden of a world empire, and the military
dictatorship of the Caesars was a result of the decision the Romans
had to make. Did they wish to remain a free republic or be a
superpower? They chose to remain a superpower and to accept the
military dictatorship of Julius Caesar and his
successors.
That was their fourth
lesson: Once you have begun upon the path of being a superpower,
there is no drawing back. Thucydides had already painted that
portrait at the time of the Athenian empire, the democratic Athens
and its great empire. Once you have become a power, you cannot step
back from it; you have aroused too much hatred. You must follow
that path to the end, and the Romans chose to follow it to the
end.
And because they did,
because they assumed that burden, they give us their fifth lesson:
What ultimately matters is the legacy that you leave behind,
for all things human pass away. The Romans called their city the
eternal city, and the emperors evoked the theme of
Aeternitas, but they knew that one day Rome would pass away.
But it left behind a legacy: this legacy of law, this legacy of
architectural, artistic creation, but above all the spiritual
legacy.
For that might be our
final lesson: You are never sure what your legacy is going to be.
If you had come up to Hadrian, or if you had come up to
Tiberius, and asked, "What is your legacy?" they would have
said, "It's Roman law; it's these great buildings." None of
them would have said it was that spiritual force born on the far
frontiers of their empire in the form of a teacher put to death as
a traitor to the Roman order.
So we must ask
ourselves the question: Are we willing to follow that path of
empire? Do we have the reserves of moral courage that the Romans
did to undertake that burden of empire? And what will be our
legacy? For I am quite convinced that of all the people who have
passed through the Middle East, of all the people who have passed
through history, there has been none so generous in spirit, so
determined to leave the world a better place, and so imbued with
the technology and the wealth and the opportunity to leave a legacy
far more enduring and far better than that of the
Romans.
Selected
Questions
Q: One of the final blows
to the declining Roman Empire was the rise and spread of Islam that
started in the seventh century, and the following century
the Roman Empire collapsed. Do you imply some lesson to be learned
by the sole superpower of today?
A: That's a very good
question, and the short answer is "Yes." It goes back to
Thucydides. For Thucydides, Pericles is the model of how to solve
everything by reason and persuasion, and Pericles lays out a very
careful plan by which Athens will become the superpower of
Greece.
You can never deal,
however, with the imponderables. The accident or what you
cannot reckon will happen does happen, and no Roman emperor,
no matter how imbued with foresight, could have imagined that the
peninsula of Arabia would be united under a mighty and great
warrior like Muhammad and that this force would pour out of Arabia
and sweep over the Roman East and all the way across to North
Africa.
I think the lesson is:
Where, in our own day, is that great coalition and energy of force
developing that will one day topple the existing order the same way
the Germans turned into a coalition power, stronger than anything
the Romans could mount? Foresight is the ability to look into the
future, to come up with solutions that are good for the short term
and the long term. Foresight is the most precious quality a
leader can have, and it is the rarest.
Q: You mentioned that
liberal democracies make bad neighbors, and that stands in stark
contrast with our current belief that democracies won't attack one
another and, therefore, all the world should be a democracy. How do
we extrapolate that lesson to today's world?
A: There are two ways of
doing that. One is what most contemporary analysts do when they
refer to the ancient world: define out all other democracies.
They say the democracy of Athens was not a liberal democracy
because individual rights were not guaranteed. That's just
nonsense. The individual Athenian had a core of rights
guaranteed as much as anything we have today, such as the right to
trial by jury, freedom of speech, so it was as much a liberal
democracy as ours is by its own lights. Sparta, too, was a
democracy. Yet Greece was literally destroyed in its greatest age
by the long war between Athens and Sparta. It was essentially
a war over competing ideas of freedom.
Moreover, the most
democratic century in history was the 20th century, and it was
a century of the two greatest wars. Hitler came to power in what
was a democracy, the Weimar Republic. So I think it is a very false
notion that liberal democracies do not go to war with each other.
We're simply pouring that into the old framework of the
nation-state, which has been so unstable in the 20th
century.
Q: It is in a sense ironic
that this lecture is named for Russell Kirk, one of the early
"paleoconservatives" who would, like Pat Buchanan, favor a
republic rather than an empire. What is the fate of those of us who
would prefer our American Republic rather than the imperial
superpower role into which it seems to be segued?
A: The American people
will have to make that decision as to whether we want to be a free
republic or a superpower. That is a crossroads that we will
come to just as the Romans did. They first attempted to govern
their empire with this old constitution, and it simply did not
work. It is, however, possible to adopt a constitution so that you
preserve the essence of political Liberty and, at the same time,
develop the institutions that can govern such an empire and
preserve and expand the position of a superpower that brings peace
and prosperity to the world.
We do not like to call
ourselves an empire, though some of the founders didn't mind using
the term, but it's a fairly neutral term. It is nothing more than
imperium in Latin or what the Greeks called arche. It
is "rule," and it is a neutral term; "imperium" can be used the
same as "good rule."
The other lesson is the
hybris of empire. The great danger of empire is the inability to
see yourself as others see you. The world is filled with
examples of imperial nations, like France, that were convinced they
were bringing liberal ideas to areas that simply did not want them.
That hybris of being so sure that your ideas are right for everyone
is one of the greatest of dangers. That's why Herodotus began his
history with the Trojan War and then went on to the Persian Wars.
For him, that was the great example of an empire that destroyed
itself through hybris, the outrageous arrogance of thinking
you were wise when you are not wise. At least one check upon that
is the lessons of history.
Q: Is it your position
that we have not yet crossed that point such that we have entered
an imperial age and thus lament the fall of the
republic?
A: I would say we're very
much like Rome around 88 B.C. We're still a republic, we still have
our free elections, and we still have a great deal of
opportunity. But in 88 B.C., the full dimension of Rome's
involvement in the Middle East and its role of superpower began to
come home to it. They chose to go down a road of intense partisan
politics, fighting over small issues rather than seeing the big
vision and, for a while, lacking leaders with a kind of foresight.
So you can still enter the imperial age as a free republic and
maintain that free republic.
Q: Your talk raises the
big question in my mind of whether or not there are any historical
examples of potential empires that looked at history and
decided to remain republics or something else, and
successfully so.
A: Yes. The best instance
is that of Sparta. Sparta had a balanced constitution that was much
admired by our founders. Sparta went to war in 431 against the
Athenians to preserve, they believed, the Liberty of Greece, which
was the liberty of these small, independent nation-states.
Having gained that victory, they then tried to govern an
empire and found it impossible and withdrew. They had already
made that decision even more dramatically at the end of the Persian
Wars; in 479, they were in place to become the dominant power in
Greece, and they returned home.
Herodotus ends his
history with a very curious story in which a Persian goes to King
Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire who, for the Greeks, was
the model of prudence and moderation, the very antithesis of
hybris. The Persian says, "We ought to rule the whole world now.
We've got the chance." And Cyrus says, "No. You will end up
becoming slaves of others. Let us stay home and govern ourselves
well."
As the reader of this
history knew, the Persians had not followed that advice and had
fallen drastically. So Sparta would be the best instance of a
nation that looked at the prospects of world empire and stepped
back to be a republic.
J. Rufus Fears,
Ph.D., David Ross Boyd Professor of Classics and G. T. and Libby
Blankenship Chair in the history of Liberty at the University of
Oklahoma, is the author of several books and numerous articles on
ancient history and the lessons of history for our own day. He has
produced for The Teaching Company a series of books on tape,
including A history of Freedom, Famous
Greeks, Famous Romans, Winston Churchill, and
Books That Have Made history.