Why do we insist on treating the end of a brutal regime as a bad thing?

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed the history of Ancient Rome. His starting point is the podcast History of Rome put out by Mike Duncan. It examines Ancient Rome rather thoroughly in 179 episodes (I didn’t check low long each one is, but if they’re just 10 minutes, which I doubt, we’re still talking 30 hours). That prompted him to go back to SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (which I didn’t realize was multiple volumes and written between 1780 and 1794 – towards the height of the British Empire). Reading the old books prompted Sumner to ask:

Why do we insist on reading history backwards, and treating the end of a hideous, brutal regime as if it were a bad thing?

On to the discussion:

The idea was that Rome, like many other societies, expanded and had both political and military success so long as it held to a set of “virtues” that included things like marital fidelity, restraint from gluttony, and (of course) sexual modesty among women. As long as Rome was populated by a collection of tough old guys in rough homespun, attended by their supportive spouses as they split their time between being yeoman farmers and military tacticians, all was well. But the moment someone put on a fancy robe, started getting too interested in art, and forgot their “Roman virtues,” the slide was greased for that inevitable fall.

Add into that race: too much “oriental” influence from the Middle East, and religion: abandoning their pantheon of gods for Christianity.

However, it’s not surprising that Gibbon, writing from within a European empire, should treat the end of such an empire as a bad thing. It’s a bit more distressing at how much of that attitude, the fondness for Rome and Roman virtues, got folded into the U.S. ... Rome wasn’t the exemplar of some lost age. It certainly wasn’t holding back the seas of barbarism. Instead, the Western Roman Empire was a stumbling block to human progress that persisted for centuries. Its final destruction shouldn’t be mourned. It should be celebrated.

There was a lot of political assassination, slave labor, destruction, and an expansionist military fighting wars for glory. About the only thing to admire was their cultural plagiarism. They incorporated ideas from everybody. As for the Dark Ages – “dark” only because little documentation exists – that began well before Rome fell. So why did Rome fall? Taxes. Not that they were too high, but didn’t tax the right people.

Rome funded its government principally through two systems: pillaging enemies and high taxes on the poor and middle class. After the reign of Trajan ended in 117 CE, that pillaging part pretty much dried up. So Rome replaced it with crushingly high taxes on the poor and middle class; a poor and middle class that had to compete with an essentially untaxed wealthy class that employed armies of slaves. And it wasn’t enough. Over the next two centuries, the size and the quality of the army declined steeply.

The rich were allowed to accumulate more wealth. Yeah, they were taxed...

Because increasingly shaky emperors needed those wealthy folks on their side, and not out there bribing either crowds or the nearest legion to turn against the emperor, paying those taxes was generally treated as a joke. To underline that idea, every few years the emperors would announce that all outstanding debts were forgiven. Every time they did, the equivalent of trillions in taxes owed to the state disappeared. Emperors were scared of their own legions, because those legions were easily bribed into putting someone else in the seat. They were scared of the wealthy, because those wealthy were capable of of bribing the legions. So every year, the empire promised to pay soldiers more, handed out more free passes to the wealthy, and exacted a higher and higher toll on the poor and shrinking middle class that was already having to compete against the literal slave wages that were funding their competition. Which meant that the empire often didn’t have the funds it promised to pay the soldiers, much less anything else. Gee. Why didn’t that work out? The miracle—and tragedy—of Rome is that it didn’t fall apart sooner.

Rome does not represent an age of enlightenment. The empire is not something to be admired. It did not fall over imagined “virtues.”

And we’re still acting like the fall of slave-holding, militaristic, brutal empires is something to be mourned. That’s not just bad history, that’s bad present.