Dirty Hands, Lead Pipe, Chinese Walls, and the End of Civilizations (Followup to Post on June 9 Below)

As I was saying before I managed to delete my own post last week, in a fascinating but unfortunately out-of-print book, Enemies of Society, British historian Paul Johnson discusses the reasons why civilizations go into decline, and naturally this involves a great deal of discussion regarding Rome.

Of course there is really no one reason for the fall of Rome, but rather many. Some of these are at the material level, a couple of my favorites being the matter of the lead piping and the building of the Great Wall. In their celebrated plumbing systems, the Romans used lead, which they called plumbum--hence the chemical symbol Pb, as well as the words plumbing, plumber, etc. They had no idea, as we do now, that they were poisoning themselves. It has even been suggested that the inordinate propensity for madness among Roman leaders (Caligula and Nero are just the most well-known, but there were many others) may have partially been a result of lead poisoning.

An even more intriguing material cause for the empire's downfall was an event begun hundreds of years earlier and thousands of miles away: the building of the Great Wall of China. Though the Chinese continued building the wall sporadically for some fifteen hundred years, they began its construction in c. 200 B.C. under the leadership of the nation's unifier and first emperor, whose family name became the name of the country as a whole: Ch'in Shih-huang-ti. (Who, by the way, was such a tyrant that Nero and Caligula seem like sweethearts by comparison.) Though the building of the wall involved millions of slave laborers working literally to death under almost unbelievably brutal conditions, the wall itself was successful in its original purpose: to drive out the ferocious Hsiung-Nu people from the northern frontiers. The nomadic Hsiung-Nu gradually moved westward, and by the time they arrived in eastern Europe in about A.D. 300, they had come to be known as the Huns. Notably more aggressive than the other tribal peoples at Rome's doorstep, the Huns pushed the Ostrogoths westward and started a domino movement that marked the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire.

Fascinating as these explanations are, though, they only relate to physical causes for Rome's downfall. Rome had always been surrounded by tribal peoples eager to invade, but for many centuries Roman civilization had been strong enough to push the invaders back. Clearly what really killed Rome was something at the spiritual level, a loss of animation at the heart of the Roman psyche.

Johnson identifies this sickness as the same one that once prevailed over my part of the United States: slavery. Though the Greeks and Romans respectively created the democratic and republican forms of government, their own societies were far from free, and in fact depended completely on slave labor. As Johnson notes memorably, Rome's triumphs were buoyed on "oceans of human sweat." Not only was slavery morally wrong; it was economically inefficient. In such an environment, as in the American South centuries later, there was little incentive to develop labor-saving technology, and when the Roman Empire ceased to expand by conquest, so did its "wealth" in the form of slaves.

But the use of slave labor in Greece and Rome was one (albeit particularly significant) factor in a larger picture that, I think, really explains why the classical world ran out of mental power. Though Johnson rightly notes that the Greeks and Romans created the first middle classes the world has ever known, and that these middle classes helped bring about their societies' greatest cultural and scientific advances, the idea of a middle class went only so far in classical times. In a non-capitalistic economic system (that is, in a system whose principal economic activity is not the production or distribution of goods and services), it is impossible to have a very large middle class. Further, in the absence of economic freedom, ultimately societies devolve to the two poles that seemed at one time to constitute the natural state of humankind: a tiny knot of aristocratic rulers and scholars surrounded by a vast sea of dirt-poor subjects.

Basically, as I hope to discuss in a later post, I believe that what destroyed the ancient world was a combination of an aristocratic mindset--by which I mean a belief that some men are naturally better than others, and that physical labor, practical employment, and generally getting one's hands dirty are demeaning--as well as a devotion to maintaining established conditions in nature and the world. These ideas of mine are heavily influenced by a fascinating essay I first read ages ago, "Why Did the Ancients Not Develop Machinery?" by Halford Haskell of Southwestern University. If you're interested, you can find the essay here. (Or you can read my own far less informed version later.)