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Specialization and Decline, by J. R. Nyquist
Years ago, when the West entered onto a path of decadence, it became fashionable
to deny the historical consequences of permissiveness and bad behavior. As
the old standards fell away, new standards of “tolerance” and “acceptance” took
hold. With the fall of colonial empires and the upsurge of student radicalism
in the sixties, the notion of “barbarians at the gates” became
outdated. Heaven forbid that anyone should be described as a “barbarian” or
as “uncivilized.” The idea that some peoples were more advanced,
that some civilizations had more to offer, was no longer an acceptable way
to talk. The fall of the Roman Empire, therefore, had to be billed as a “transition.” The
barbarians were not the bad guys, civilization did not collapse, and the Romans
were hardly degenerate. One should not use words like “decline” or “fall.” Perhaps
such words hit too close to home. Better to deny the very history of decadence.
Consequently, Edward Gibbon’s magisterial History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is no longer entirely
respectable. In James J. O’Donnell’s expertly crafted, politically
corrected version of the fifth and sixth centuries, The Ruin
of the Roman Empire, we find Gibbon’s work described as the “long
shadow of a short, fat man” darkening our understanding of the Roman
world. It is not the fall of Rome that is dark, but Gibbon himself!
The American Heritage Dictionary defines decadence as: “A process, condition,
or period of deterioration or decline, as in morals or art.” The fall
of the Roman Empire involved an across-the-board decline. This included, as
in our own time, a decline in population. Sizeable military defeats shrugged
off by the Roman Republic were crippling to the Roman Empire. In the centuries
between the battles of Cannae and Hadrianopolis there
occurred a loss of vitality. Sophisticated manufactures in the west Roman world
largely disappeared within a period of three lifetimes. Literacy, comfort and
trade also collapsed. This was the greatest economic downturn in the history
of mankind. According to the historian and archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins, “In
the post-Roman west, almost all this material sophistication [created by the
Roman civilization] disappeared. Specialized production … became rare,
unless for luxury goods; and the impressive range and quantity of high-quality
goods, which had characterized the Roman period, vanished, or, at the very
least, were drastically reduced.”
Civilization doesn’t always move in an upward direction. Decline and
fall is more than possible; such has actually happened. Over the last five
hundred years we have come to think of civilization as barreling forward, plowing
the ground for further progress. Nothing can stop the machine-like advance,
the steady rate of accumulation. Today we take civilization’s continuance
for granted. In this regard, the history of Rome is an irksome reminder.
But we’re smarter than the Romans, right?
The Roman economy began to move downhill around the fourth century. There was
widespread enervation, a loss of intellectual acuity within the elite. Effeminacy
had taken hold at a time when warfare was hand-to-hand. Incredible as it seems,
the Roman Empire became vulnerable to a relatively small number of barbarian
tribesmen. After penetrating the empire’s frontier, these tribesmen found
easy pickings within a defenseless interior. When the legions were lost or
decoyed, entire regional economies were plundered and ruined. In the fifth
century, when the western half of the Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians,
the city of Rome lost three quarters of its population. That is to say, Rome
lost 600,000 out of 800,000 inhabitants. Such was the magnitude of the massive
de-urbanization that occurred.
What led to Rome’s weakening? In describing the city of Rome in the middle
of the fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the vanity and materialism
of his contemporaries. Rome became great through virtue, he argued, and virtue
had given way to vice. Decades before the barbarians broke into the empire,
causing the economy to unravel, the Romans were focused on entertainment and
self-gratification. “In this state of things,” wrote Marcellinus, “the
few houses which once had the reputation of being centers of serious culture
are now given over to the trivial pursuits of passive idleness…. Men
put themselves to school to the singer instead of the philosopher, to the theatrical
producer rather than the teacher of oratory. The libraries are like tombs,
permanently shut; men manufacture water-organs and lutes the size of carriages
and flutes and heavy properties for theatrical performances.”
To borrow a phrase from Neil Postman, the Romans were “entertaining themselves
to death.” A great and prosperous civilization was about to disappear.
Who aside from Marcellinus was worried about it? From every indication, the
good citizen, the concerned citizen, was increasingly isolated and irrelevant.
The Roman Empire lost the ability, the willpower and the inner toughness to
confront the shabby little barbarian tribes that collapsed its delicate economic
mechanism. According to Ward-Perkins, “The dismembering of the Roman
state, and the ending of centuries of security, were the crucial factors in
destroying the sophisticated economy of ancient times….”
You do not need atomic bombs to depopulate cities or empires. A foreign enemy,
admitted inside an empire, can disrupt trade and stop the flow of revenue.
Legions cannot be paid, cities cannot be sustained, civilized life disappears.
The resulting economic downturn lasted for centuries. According to Ward-Perkins, “The
economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe
at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or – to
use a term that has already been suggested – an ‘abatement,’ with
an essentially similar economy continuing to work at a reduced pace. Instead
what we see is a remarkable qualitative change, with the disappearance of entire
industries and commercial networks.”
Civilization is fragile. Trade can be interrupted and peaceful industry can
be knocked out of operation. It doesn’t take as much interference as
you think. In his book, The
Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Ward-Perkins describes the
fragility of sophisticated economies: “to understand the full and unexpected
scale of the decline – turning sophisticated regions into underdeveloped
backwaters – we need to appreciate that economic sophistication has a
negative side. If the ancient economy had consisted of a series of simple and
essentially autonomous local units, with little specialization of labor within
them and very little exchange between them, then parts of it would certainly
have survived the troubles of post-Roman times…. However, because the
ancient economy was in fact a complicated and interlocked system, its very
sophistication rendered it fragile and less adaptable to change.”
Our modern economy is more complicated, more interlocked, and more fragile
than the economy of the Roman Empire. Specialization has made our society wealthy.
If the latter-day barbarians can accomplish what the Goths and Vandals accomplished
in the fifth century, the descent into darkness could be rapid and last many
centuries. “Comparison with the contemporary western world is obvious
and important,” noted Ward-Perkins. “We would be quite incapable
of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency. The ancient world had not
come as far down the road of specialization and helplessness as we have….” J.R.
Nyquist Copyright 2008.
