Man Self-immolates in National Mall

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That's a very interesting question that people smarter than me have been trying to answer for the last two thousand years...

I think Livy was on the right track:

http://www.mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/livy/livy01.html



The end of the second punic war was huge turning point for Rome. After the war, Roman hegemony over the western world was secured and vast amounts of wealth in the form of money--taxes, tribute, spoils, and trade--and slaves flooded into the city.

Money, increased use of slave labor, and cultural influence of the Greeks combined to undermine the Roman national character. With all that money and free time, like Livy says, many in the moneyed classes adopted the classical equivalent of a 'sex, drugs and rock-n-roll' lifestyle.

Cicero's "Defense of Marcus Caelius Rufus" provides an interesting glimpse of how the young and rich of the late republic lived...

Also, after the war, Rome needed a professional army with professional officers and generals. That undermined an diminished the importance of the traditional Roman course of honor which culminated in the Consulship, military command and the chance for spoils... All that tended to make service to the state less important, and making money via business and investment much more important.

Concerning the Roman economy, [I think] it was a lot more complex than many people think.

In Cicero's speech on Pompey's command, he is basically arguing for Roman intervention in Asia to protect Roman investors...

Sounds pretty 'global' to me...

http://www.en.wikisource.org/wiki/To_th ... 's_command

"Wages in the USA have been stagnant for the last 30 years (while productivity has steadily risen). With 30 year's worth of inflation that's a big pay cut. And, the income of the wealthy classes has exploded in that same time frame. The government is not why people have less money nowadays."

I'm not sure what kind of semantic game you think you are playing, but free trade and immigration policy are both set by the government. To think otherwise is absurd.

"That's due to lobbying by the AMA (American Medical Association). If Exxon lobbies the government to pass a law that says that gas stations have to ration their gas to drive the price up, then the government's not to blame."

Sorry, this is ridiculous. The government is responsible for what it does, as it could say no. Otherwise, you could argue that the German government wasn't responsible for the holocaust. If the government is not responsible for its own actions, it also has no authority, and exercising authority is the very purpose of government.

This denial of agency to certain groups seems to be an article of the Politically Correct faith, such as refusing to hold blacks to the same standards as whites. Perhaps you could explain why. It is bizarre.

Actually, I have a very simple explanation for why the Romans and Americans were hedonists. First, let's define hedonism, which is where personal pleasure is made the highest good. Morality, on the other hand, is that which mediates between selfishness and the common good, thereby making human societies possible.

In the West, traditional morality has been Christianity, which liberals love to tell us induces guilt. They are right, but what liberalism cannot fathom is that the alternative to guilt is sociopathy, which cannot fathom guilt. Guilt is a good thing when it reminds us that we are not the be-all and end-all. In other words, guilt is what our conscience does to us when we behave contrary to accepted morality. No guilt means no morality.

In the case of the modern West, hedonism is part and parcel of all liberalisms, which place the individual above all else. The same thing happened in Rome though liberalism was unknown until the Enlightenment, which began in the 1680's. What was it that made Rome's morality fall apart? Rome had a strong morality during the Republican period, but lost it sometime during the Imperial era.

As far as Rome's economy goes, it was considered simplistic simply because it was based upon slavery rather than capitalistic principles. A slave-based economy is by definition non-capitalistic and pre-modern, meaning non-liberal.

Well, I can certainly agree that free people need moral restraint and that bad things happen in society when powerful people don't have moral restraint.

My favorite Edmund Burke quote sums it up nicely:



Well, like I said before, I think there's a strong case to be made that Rome went morally bankrupt sometime between the end of the second punic war in 201 BC when they became the richest, most powerful nation on earth and 133 BC when they started killing Tribunes...

But, I'm very interested to hear your answer.

Goonsquad, if the definition I gave for morality is an acceptable one, It would dictate that Rome began to fell when people quit believing in its traditional, common morality. I'm not sure that was their religion though, which seems largely amoral.

Having said this, I'm certainly not well versed in the ancients, although I do find them interesting. The question that obsesses me is what is going on right here and now.

I can say what got me interested in what is going on right here and now was my studies of antebellum Southern history. Probably the greatest historian of the South was a fellow named Eugene Genovese, who spent most of his career as a self-admitted Marxist, although he was scrupulously fair. Genovese said he became interested in the antebellum South as the only modern, Western non-bourgeois (read non-liberal, or premodern) society.

One of Genovese's themes is that in order to maintain a coherent worldview--something Southerners were certainly anxious to do--the had to develop a narrative. In order to develop a coherent narrative, Southerners had to deny most of liberalism's tenets.

Since few modern Westerners can begin to fathom anything other than a liberal worldview, the contrast is fascinating. It would also be with studying the ancients, something I hope to do one of these days. But right now, I am studying liberalism.