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Late Republic Politics
Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.* – Titus Livius
Civilization is memory, social memory. If each human generation began with no societal memory, there would be no civilization. We would still, maybe, inhabit a small bit of land somewhere on the African savanna. Civilization comprises the knowledge, practices, myths, ethics, and foolishness passed across generations.
Civilization evolves slowly, barely perceptible, though at certain times quickly and radically. Across history, civilization has overwhelmingly been looked at as a conservative force. Most of the time knowledge gained is jealously guarded by a few while the majority cling to long established social traditions.
We have long perceived civilizations as separate, but they all emerged from one species, an excessively chattering hairless ape who learned the power of social memory. Over thousands of years, a once vast planet created innumerous civilizations through geographic separation. In numerous ways these civilizations were distinct, but what history has largely ignored is the vast similarities underlying them all. Civilizational similarities define the species to a far greater degree than the differences. Such things as warfare, militarism, big man rule have all been aspects of civilizations across the planet and across history. Different reasons and different narratives may define any given civilization, but in structure and practice they have overwhelmingly been basically the same.
So it was most amusing this past weekend, – in the darkest humor way when you're considering potential chaos for a nation sitting atop the largest stockpile of nuclear weaponry – when the mercenaries hired by Russia's current big man turned on the regime. I sent a short message to Ames, my favorite Russian expert and military historian, “Geez, sort of rule #1 about mercenaries, they might turn upon the paymaster at anytime.”
Ames replied, “Easier to contain them when you send them to fight wars on the other side of the globe, but arming them to the teeth and having them fight a few miles from your border is pretty fucking stupid.” (Ames’ and Dolan’s excellent podcast analysis on Prigozhin mutiny)
The event is a needed lesson, though more accurately a refreshing memory blast for Blackwater/Constellis America. But, it's difficult to honestly say America has any memory at this point. America is the fountainhead of modernity, a civilization built around, atop, and through technology. This technology largely destroyed the past.
Over the last several centuries with the birth of the Scientific Revolution and the resulting great leap in technological development, civilization increasingly became defined and redefined not by the past, but by a constantly changing, always not quite obtainable future. Venerated traditions, knowledge, and institutions of the past were discarded like pieces of disposable consumer packaging, replaced by the inherent nihilism of development defined exclusively by technology itself.
When historical memory is destroyed, it doesn't automatically remove established processes, structures, or social relations, however it does empty them of original intent and meaning, followed by dysfunction, corruption, and increasing failure. Case and point is the American republic, the roots of which go back to Ancient Rome and Athens. Diminished understanding along with little active memory of the long roots, structures, and processes of republicanism has helped lead to its decline as a governing system, as a culture, and finally as a civilization. Today, America's always future focused, profound technological ingenuity, leaves much to be questioned about any claims to civilization.
America initiated modern republicanism, impacting the shape of the contemporary world to a degree greater than its two thousand year old Roman republican predecessor. Yet, the political diseases and failings of the last century of the Roman republic infest today's American system. In its last decades, the Roman republic's body politic was completely corrupted, a systemic corruption. With every aspect and player corrupt, prosecution for corruption became not a means of justice, but was instead wielded as a potent political weapon, becoming one great cause in the republic's demise, particularly in regards to the actions of Gaius Julius Caesar.
Caesar can be exemplified not simply in his personal politics, but how his political career represented the republic's dysfunction. In the decade before his casting the die and crossing the Rubicon, Caesar was twice given unprecedented, extended five year proconsul control of Gaul. This was in direct contradiction to the republic's centuries old tradition of government magistrates serving for only one year, a tradition no doubt directly borrowed from Athens' democratic practices. Really, there is no greater democratic ethos than confidence in regularly and frequently replacing those in power, directly defying the notions of all big man history.
Having granted Caesar these extraordinary, though increasingly common anti-republican appointments, the Senate sought to strip Caesar of his second proconsulship and bring him back to Rome, where he'd be vulnerable to all sorts of selected prosecution. Among plenty of recent examples, prominent in Caesar's mind was the great Catiline Conspiracy of a dozen years before. Catiline was from a long line of Roman patricians. Having lost an election for Consul, he was accused of conspiracy to seize power. Without trial and in direct contradiction to the centuries republican tradition of property confiscation and exile, Catiline and his fellow conspirators were called to be executed. Ironically, it was Caesar, the republic's soon to be greatest defiler, who called instead for the republican tradition of banishment, while history's supposed great republican defenders, Cicero and Cato, called for Catiline's death.
In Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, he has Cato in a speech to the Senate sum up the republic's increasingly desperate condition,
“Instead of such virtues, we have luxury and avarice; public distress, and private superfluity; we extol wealth, and yield to indolence; no distinction is made between good men and bad; and ambition usurps the honors due to virtue.”
Certainly, two thousand years later, no more accurate description could be provided of the American republic's condition – virtue, the very idea itself, nonexistent.
Thus, a dozen years later, Caesar left with the choice of resigning his position and in the words of one of his opponents then Consul Lentulus, “influenced by the fear of being called to trial,” marched his troops on Rome. Again, Caesar was afflicted by the same maladies of his opponents. In his self-penned account of the Civil War, he states the causes before undertaking one of history's most infamous anti-republican acts, indicting “the wrongs done to him at all times by his enemies,... led astray by envy and a malicious opposition to his glory.”
Only secondly does Caesar complain of “innovation introduced into the republic” in regards to the powers of the office of Tribune. Of course, this is more than a little hypocritical from a guy refusing to give up his second extraordinary five year proconsulship. A century and half later, Plutarch would sum up the selective prosecutorial politics of the republic's last decades as “accusing one of seeking a tyranny and making the other a tyrant.”
Caesar's march into Rome launched an almost two decades civil war. Five years in, Caesar was done in by a flurry of dagger thrusts on the Senate floor. Fifteen years later, his adopted son, Octavius, designated himself Princeps (first), becoming Rome's first emperor. Republicanism was largely lost to Western civilization for another 1500 years, briefly reemerging in Renaissance Italy. Three centuries later with the founding of the US came the ascendancy of modern republicanism.
Catiline and Caesar were not in anyway the only examples of the late Roman republic's prosecutorial politics. The last half-century of the republic's history is littered with them. Prosecution became a means to gain what traditional republican politics could not, all done in the name of protecting the republic which had become thoroughly corrupt. In The Greatness and Decline of Rome, Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero writes of the tactics of the era, now increasingly common to our own,
“It was not mere hypocrisy but a real respect for the old machinery of government which induced all would be usurpers, however they might offend against the spirit of the constitution, to pose as scrupulous observers of it in the letter.”
If there was any republican civilizational memory, America plunging headlong into a late-republican era of prosecutorial politics would be recognized not just as a symptom of republican decline, but the warnings of a larger, very likely terminal disease. Ferrero astutely summarizes Rome's late republican corrupted condition,
“The desperate competition for wealth in which all Italy was engaged had ended, as it seems that such competition always will end, in a gigantic accumulation of vested interests, which it needed nothing less than a revolution, a cataclysm, to break down.”
History offers no cure, but this doesn't mean one cannot be found. To do so requires looking at the entirety of the problem with an essential historical perspective technology has largely left us devoid. Writing at the beginning of the 20th century, Ferrero noted technology's memory destroying role, “There is no doubt that, considered from the point of view of our ancient history, this idea of progress, interpreted in the American-fashion, is a kind of revolutionary dissolving force.”
At the time, Ferrero advise a revitalization of civilization, though noting quite correctly at the time its extreme unlikelihood,
“It would be absolutely essential to create a movement of public opinion through religious, political, or moral means, which should impose upon the world a reasonable limit to its desires. To the age in which we live, it seems impossible to express an idea seemingly more absurd than this.”
The modern idea of progress has largely been associated with gains in scientific knowledge, its resulting technological development, and very confused cultural realignments – a “revolutionary dissolving force.”
It can be argued in two hundred years of industrialization, we have lost as much as we have gained, most especially true if accounting, and we have barely begun, the destruction bestowed upon nature by industrialism, where memory lost becomes not simply that of civilization, but of nature herself.
Humanity needs a restoration of memory, a renaissance of civilization, beginning with the idea civilization, no matter how its been defined in the past or distinctly held over millennia, at its root concerns the relations between Homo sapiens and imperatively our species collective relation to the natural world from which we emerged.
*We can suffer neither our vices nor our remedies.
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