š¤ History-minded Up Wingers: Ancient Rome versus Victorian Britain. Pick your fighter.
ā¤“ā¤µ Up Wing/Down Wing #16: A curated selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the week that was
Pax Romana is often cited as a model for Pax Americana, both emerging after periods of war to guarantee security and order. But as Pax Americana wanes, at least in the view of Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Israeli foreign minister, speculation about America's "fall" grows, echoing 18th-century writings on Rome's decline by Edward Gibbon and Montesquieu. America must learn from Rome's mistakes, Ben-Ami writes in a recent essay, particularly avoiding what Gibbon called "the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatnessā and hubris that characterized its post-Cold War hegemony.
This view echoes debates from the late 1980s, sparked by Yale University historian Paul Kennedy's influential book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy's concept of "imperial overstretch" resonated with critics of the Reagan and Bush administrations, who argued that excessive military spending and inadequate economic investment were symptoms of America's overreach, mirroring past hegemons' decline.
Yet Ben-Ami cautions that historical comparisons, while insightful, aren't definitive. The "Thucydides Trap" of conflict between established and rising powers, like America and China, isn't inevitable, particularly given modern warfare's steep costs. And just about a decade after Kennedyās book was published, the US technology-driven economy was booming, the national debt was fast disappearing, and Americaās great Cold War foe was no more.
Again, historical comparisons, while insightful, aren't definitive. As Ben-Amiās concludes:
This brings us to a key difference between the West today and Rome in its heyday: whereas the Romans expected the future to be a repeat of past glories, faith in progress and renewal is fundamental to the post-Enlightenment Western worldview. Armed with that faith, we can still apply historyās lessons and hope to avoid our forebearsā gravest mistakes
That ādifferenceā between America and Rome, the modern and ancient words, is a key theme of my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. The ancients saw the accumulated wisdom of previous generations as the key to understanding present challenges and anticipating future events. This reverence for past wisdom explains why classical scholarship in fields like astronomy, medicine, and physics remained largely unchallenged for centuries.
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