Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A little perspective goes a long way, and the nearly 2000 years of perspective contained in this masterwork have had a profound effect on me.

Without such perspective, it would be a forgivable mistake to think that the modern world is in its death throes.  Trump, Duterte, 박근혜, 김종은, Marie Le Pen, Theresa May, Narendra Modi, Putin, et al ad seemingly infinitum, the allies of reason and humanity seem to be hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered.  And yet I remain strangely unmoved.  My American friends are rallying in great numbers and working themselves into a froth in resistance of the current president.  "We must do something!" say they, but must we?  Well meaning humans have been resisting dictators; working for the benefit of society; and building progressive, productive communities for 2000 years.  And here we are.  We have learned precisely nothing.  Humans have evolved, as far as one can tell from Gibbon, exactly zero in 2000 years, and the forces that conspire to degrade and destroy anything virtuous and noble are the same as they have always been.

But Gibbon's service to the reader is greater than just granting perspective, which gift alone might lead to despair.  His ambitious and painstaking portrait of the period in question seldom takes the liberty of drawing conclusions for the reader, and taken individually there would no doubt be myriad ways to interpret any single account.  But seen as a whole, the patterns in the tapestry are clear even without Gibbon feeling compelled to trace them out for us.  The impulses that corrupt and collapse human societies are repeated over and over again, and they number merely two.

The first is that which Gibbon emphasizes when he says, "In comparing the days of foreign with the ages of domestic hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have been far more ruinous to the city" (1250).  This domestic hostility, which one might characterize as "division" is never far from Gibbon's pages.  From the Arians and Athanasians, to the Greens and Blues, to even the Sunnis and Shias, Gibbon faithfully documents the human impulse to divide itself into arbitrary and petty factions.  What Gibbon does not speculate upon is the source of this instinct, leaving it to the reader:  an offer up on which, I have gleefully taken him.

I cannot speak for others, though the reader may see her or himself in what I observe.  I can merely ask what is at the root of my own desire to define another human as an other human. On the surface, there is no necessity to group people according to us and them, my people and not.  But it is a nearly irresistible urge.  The (often) unconscious instinct is to assess any new person according to familiarity and similarity.  To what extent does she or he resemble me, in terms of experience, appearance, or perspective?  That level of me-ness then either reaches the threshold of comfort, or it does not.  In the former case, they become a member of our set, and in the latter, a member of the set marked "other".  The urge is so instinctive and irresistible, that one assumes a biological/evolutionary root for it, for which idea I'm sure scholarly support could be found.  Insofar as this tirade has already taken a dry turn, I will refrain.

The question is not whether humans do this, or even why.  The question is, in light of its well-documented--in Gibbon and in experience--destructive and outdated nature, whether we are capable of moving past it: learning to recognize the instinct when it is activated, and question it.  For humanity as a whole, I suspect the answer is "Not in the next 500 years."  But Gibbon's narrative suggests that another answer may be possible on the individual level.

Which brings me to the second destructive human instinct he reveals.  He rightly observes that what destroys societies is what we might term "lateral division", the instinct to otherize and divide.  Even those exterior forces which visit destruction on their neighbors--war, crusade, siege--are merely macro versions of the same phenomenon.  But this depressing run through the taffy-puller of history, endlessly pulling apart and recombining gooey pink swaths of humanity, is not the only story Gibbon tells.   He also preserves for our consideration the shining examples of a few who stood above and resisted this pull, those whom we might call virtuous:  Marcus Aurelius, Belisarius, Diocletian, and many others to various degrees.  And it is by contrast of these with their opposites, Theodora, Elagabalus, Phocas, and others just as numerous as their virtuous counterparts, that a force which corrupts the individual, just as lateral division corrupts the group, is revealed.

One factor contributing to Gibbon's enduring reputation is no doubt his objectivity.  He does not spare religious figures from his contempt, and he does not scruple to give those thought of as barbarians in his time--Atilla, Timour, Zingis et al--their due.  And it is in the description of this latter and his successors that Gibbon puts a nice point on what set them apart: "Firmly united for their own and the public interest, the three brothers and their families were content with dependent scepters; and Octai, by general consent, was proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Mongols and Tartars" (1140). This golden standard of virtue stands out more brightly set against the dark fabric of "the returning selfishness of human nature", observed in these pages and our own lives far too frequently for me to recount (265).  This instinct is related, but not identical to that which corrupts society at large; it is not a lateral division, but a vertical one, a raising up of oneself above another.

And this instinct is just as observable in our personal narratives as in Gibbon's historical one.  Not only do we sort the rest of humanity into mine and theirs, but also into better and worse.  Naturally the tendency is to conflate "mine" with "good" and the obverse, but it is not a perfect correspondence.  Even within "mine", the instinct is to stratify the members with respect to our selves, above or below; better or worse.

Like the lateral instinct, this vertical division is ingrained in us so deeply it may as well be biological.  It cannot be eliminated, so far as I can tell, but it can be resisted, questioned, and rejected.  And as glorious as Gibbon's narrative is, he has embroidered a gem into the center of this tapestry that is worth as much or more than the rest put together;  the perspective one gets from reading his book is a mere reflection of the perspective he gained in writing it.  "Whatever is fortified will be attacked;" he observes, "and whatever is attacked may be destroyed" (1250).  Insecurity leads to fear, and the instinct to fortify.  Civically, this means building castles and walls.  But social position has no such visible bulwarks.  We acquire possessions, of course, but these only fortify our social persona to the extent that they mark us as richer, more tasteful, more creative, more stylish, or otherwise better than others.  Hierarchy has no physical manifestation; it is a purely mental construct, and can only be seen in terms of comparison and judgement.  If we resist this urge, if we refuse to believe our instinctive judgements and comparisons, we are actually refusing to fortify.  And to extrapolate from Gibbon's observation, that which is not fortified cannot be attacked.  It endures.  It resists corruption.  And it eventually dies.  But perhaps it gets written down somewhere and remembered.