A Dyke A Broad #96 Empire Edition
Thoughts about the decline and fall of empires, and the futile attack on Salman Rushdie.
Hello from Paris!
Sunday night it thundered and poured buckets from a sky roiling with clouds so dark they were nearly black. I’d almost forgotten it was possible. Shuttered skies. Torrential rain. The furious, window-rattling thunderclaps from Zeus, or perhaps Baal, the Egyptian god, who gets up to the same tricks.
It seemed like a continuation of Friday when Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly to death at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, and I was finishing Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. In the last few chapters, Beard talked a lot about Christianity, and how it transformed from a radical Jewish sect into a global empire. “The only religion the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world.”
I’d already noticed how Christianity spoke with the language of that world—building cathedrals as grand as temples or Senate buildings or baths, using the display of riches and beauty to awe, to prove its power. On Friday, though, what struck me was how and why Christianity broke new and terrifying ground.
Imperial Rome, after all, following an initial bloody conquest, favored facilitators, collaborators, willing obedience, diplomacy and persuasion, even if there was always an “or else” implied. In fact in many ways, the Roman empire was like a massive corporate takeover, in which the Romans merely threw an administrative net over their new territory, allowing many local factotums to remain the same. The local elite remained elite, maybe learned a little Latin, did what they could to get the perks of citizenship, move up the ladder. The mayor shrugged and got on with the same job under a new boss.
Ordinary people, meanwhile, continued to speak their own languages. Worship their own local gods. The fishwife in Naples continued scaling fish. Someone had to. And of course, the small farmer stuck there on a farm in Hispania continued to worry if the rains would come. Or that goat would give milk for another month. If the mice would get into the grain. If that cough meant something. If the two littlest would survive until spring. A poor farmer wouldn’t have cared about the new baths, or the new arena that required at the very least free time, mobility.
When it comes to religions, Beard makes it clear that Romans didn’t respect local gods as a governing tactic, but because it fit into their worldview.
Rome treated foreign gods much as it treated foreign peoples: by incorporation…The basic rule was that as the Roman Empire expanded, so did its pantheon of deities … Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, the Jewish god from Judea.
By contrast, “The Christian god was rootless, claimed to be universal and sought more adherents.” That was the largest difference, the one which had legs. Christians didn’t add their god to the others, bickering with each other like senators in a republic, no, they subtracted, they imposed. Aspired to an empire of the soul—and got it—with Constantine.
Reading that, I wondered if Hannah Arendt got it wrong in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism not seeing its seeds until the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s, and its growth during European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I, before it exploded in Germany and the USSR.
You could just as easily trace the cradle of totalitarianism to Rome’s empire almost a millennium and a half earlier when Christianity decided Jesus was the Son of the One True and Universal God, and embraced a kind of religious absolutism, which compelled the individual not just to believe themselves, but convert all others.
The implacable logic of their model, proselytizing for some universal truth everyone must accept, echoes through the absolutist movements which followed from evangelical Islam to the Spanish Inquisition, Nazism, Communism, the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan’s Taliban, right down to Iran’s Ayatollahs and moralist Americans who outlaw abortion in all cases, send women to jail for miscarrying, or make a virtue of threatening, and physically attacking women who dare insist that sex and its consequences are real because their way is the one true way, which by extension justifies everything no matter how monstrous.
What’s interesting, though, is how this iron hand version of empire carries the seed of its own destruction. This is not a new idea. (Probably none of this is.) But I’ve been trying to digest it from the moment I realized I’d gotten most of my definition of empire from the title of Edward Gibbon’s famous eighteenth century work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which that word fall gives the impression that “empire” is an object, a thing that can be slowly, then all at once destroyed—like a cracked building flattened by a bulldozer, or a chipped glass smashing against the floor.
So afterwards, whenever I’d hear about the fall of an empire, including the probable American one, I’d imagine an empty pile of armor, a red cloak, a standard lying abandoned on the ground while everybody who was once part of the empire suddenly evaporated. Or disappeared in moving vans like they do at 10 Downing Street after the election of a new prime minister.
Of course they don’t. As Beard makes clear. Even in my own day I’ve seen maps redrawn with sisters finding themselves on opposite sides of a border, but they don’t disappear any more than the street does which used to belong to one force and now belongs to another. Rome, too, lingers, in buildings and bodies. In food and roads and plumbing.
If we believe in gods, we can surely believe in the staying power of ideas in general. And for people who aspire to empire and its powers, and who also believe in an absolute fall, what could be more terrifying and inspire more violence, than to know how vulnerable they are. All it takes is a chip or a crack, a book, a word spoken out of turn, for the bulldozer to move in, the glass fall like an angel from the sky, a dreadful nothingness descend.
A review of the News from Twitter
Yeah, all cheery, I know.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,