Skip to main content

The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero

Excellent, readable short history of the battle of Adrianople, setting it in context of the final decades of the Western Roman Empire. Worth reading in particular for valuable historical context for the various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies the USA has embraced over the past few generations.

At a certain point in Rome's historical arc, its leaders discovered that it could use barbarians as low cost labor and low cost military manpower. Further, both immigration and a type of what we might call "loose fiscal policy" could be powerful tools Roman elites could use to retain power and maintain the status quo that so enriched them at the expense of the peasantry.

As the saying goes, history never repeats, but it sure rhymes. And it is incredibly disturbing to see policy decisions in 300-400 AD Rome--right before its collapse--that "rhyme" so well with various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies in place here and now in the USA. Striking. 

Finally, one thing that this book drives home is how overconfident every civilization is in its ability to endure. Yet history has never shown us a mutli-ethnic or multicultural empire that endured beyond a few centuries--most barely lasted a few decades. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, The former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the Ottoman Empire, even 1930s-1940s Japan and its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" can all join the late Roman empire as short-lived, failed experiments in massive, elite-enforced multiculturalism. 

Roman elites in the late stages of the empire had to use more and more immigration to sustain their labor markets and their military, and they placed extreme confidence that because "the Roman Empire already was a mutli-ethnic crucible of languages, races and religions, and it was perfectly capable of absorbing massive immigration without becoming destabilized." Except that it wasn't perfectly capable, in fact it was not capable at all, and the Roman Empire quickly collapsed, triggered by the military and diplomatic disaster at Adrianople.

So where, on a timeline of decline and fall, might the United States "empire" be?

More Posts

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life  into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres
Read more

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals  I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the  thoughts  of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La
Read more

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a  lot  that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min
Read more