Essay: Do We Live In A Golden Age?

Do we today live in a golden age?

I choose to start this essay in reverse, looking at the present first, in the context of the past, because it is after all the present that is better known to us.

I believe there is a general consensus our golden age began with our victory in the Second World War. America found itself not only with enormous military power, but also economic and cultural dominance. We enjoyed what few nations have ever enjoyed in the history of the world – prestige. We were not only mighty, we were not only feared, we were respected by other nations, for not merely our power, but our integrity and way of life. Nixon himself said, “…in the final analysis, America is great not because it is strong, not because it is rich, but because this is a good country.”

Nixon said this in his third State of the Union address, in 1973.

I once asked my parents when they felt the decline of our great nation began. Their answer was an interesting one and perhaps true. They said they felt the single event that marked the beginning of the decline of America was the assassination of JFK in 1963, a decade earlier. My parents believed the fall of America was fundamentally moral in nature, that our decline began with the loss of innocence represented in this public display of violence, the whispers and accusations that his death was due to conspiracy, and that forever after, American presidents would not mingle amongst the people, but be secreted from place to place by black armored limousines.

Today, it would be generally agreed, we live in an era of decline and decay. Some sage souls – and I count myself amongst them – saw it coming before the Iraq War and the current economic crisis that we will probably never truly recover from.

How do we define this perceived decline? To what is it owed? No doubt we are still wealthy, the largest economy in the world with the highest per capita income. No doubt we are still powerful, our armies without peer. No doubt we are still influential, the leaders of the free world asked by others to get involved in conflicts that do not directly concern us, because despite all else we are yet respected.

    Perhaps all that is truly gone is that feeling of “greatness”, doubts about America’s morality, both as a community of individuals who share a culture and as a nation with a mission in the world.

    To what do we attribute that? Let us look to another fallen empire, one that fell slowly, to internal decay, for parallels and lessons. Let us look to Rome.

    Rome, like America, won its place as first amongst nations after winning the last of a series of wars against a long-term antagonist. The Second and Third Punic Wars left Rome master of the Mediterranean, and just as America won its prestige in the world – and with it the responsibilities of a superpower, Rome initially got involved in Greek internal affairs, eventually absorbing the nation wholesale into its “imperium”, by the Greeks’ own request, to once again stand against the Macedonians – and that they were not content with the extent of Roman largesse.

    At this point, a series of internal changes occurred in Rome proper and its culture, part of a long term developmental cycle that mirrors our own. Rome, by its own account as related in the works of Livy, was populated by the dregs of other Italian societies, a bunch of energetic young men who were united by a shared sense of order, law, duty and loyalty much like the unique American sort of nationalism which is tied to neither land nor race nor law but something more. This mirrored the cultural development of America, and what happened after the Punic Wars mirrored our own progress.

    Rome took as part of its victory the grain-producing lands of Sicily, which would later be supplemented by Anatolia and Egypt. At the same time, many working-class people, farmers, were put out of work by large-scale production which was more efficient and had lower labor costs – slave-worked latifundae, large scale farms. Hence, Rome was faced by the seeming paradox of national wealth and power without popular livelihood.

    They reacted much as America did – many people took jobs in non-productive service jobs aimed at enriching the lives of the well-connected. Rome became a land that did not produce, but imported what it needed, and devoted itself to administration and “popular culture”. There were also “bread and circuses” aimed at assuaging the needs of the lower class.

    Roman cultural development followed the path of the United States – it became more populist, and eventually more crass and violent. By the time of Augustus, more marriages failed than succeeded, just as in America today, and there was a general social sentiment of “confusion” and “moral decay”.

    These terms are very abstract, and it is hard to connect how greatness and moral decay are linked. Roman and American alike would agree the country was morally superior when it was humble and working, prior to its greatness, and that just as Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” relates, this “best of times, worst of times” paradox betrays a moral imbalance perhaps fundamental to the equation, one that makes the scenario unstable and self-destructive.

    That power itself is cruel and unjust has been a common theme to those who have stood in opposition to empires – to Jesus, to Gandhi, to Nietzsche (who though he thought highly of the Roman Empire, loathed the small and power-hungry men and their wars of his own time), to our own de Villepin and his notorious book, “The Shark and the Seagull.”

    Empires are bought and maintained through power, and perhaps like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars being physically destroyed by his use of dark magic, or the Japanese samurai who turns into a demon after slaying a score, bathing in their blood, or Faust paying for his use of a demon’s aid through damnation, the exercise of power is self-destructive.

Indeed, when the naysayers, honored in their own times yet even now generally viewed with disdain in our own, even those not of our era, were confronted with the evidence of power and change, they criticized the “new and strange ways”, the “new men” and “foreign things”. Such men were often illiberal and perhaps all too much for their own good – or that of their nations – crossed the line from averting a dark future to maintaining an imperfect and unsustainable past that may have already disappeared beyond recovery.

Think of Cato, and his fear of the Grecian statues brought into Rome, or xenophobes like Pat Buchanan. Clearly, neither man was right on, and there’s not a little to find loathsome in both. Nonetheless societies that have remained humble – observe the Canadians, the Swiss, or to take it to the extreme, the Amish, have remained “great” as men.

The question this essay was addressed at – is greatness real? At what cost is it maintained? My response, as supported by the above historical analogy, is this: Greatness is real, but it is not political; greatness is in the minds and souls of individuals. Political greatness maintained by past great works and not present state of being great will inevitably have a moral cost, and it is that moral decay that leads to the end of every evanescent golden age.

A truly great society will mature beyond political greatness, and stand for eternity. Even in today’s world, we can see some evidence that this will be the next stage of human political development, and just as every cycle of human history is not a repeat but a rhyme, this pattern that we ourselves continue of two steps forward, one step back; mediocrity to greatness to decay, followed by a greater future inspired by past civilizations, so too in the future will our own progress towards these ends – America’s pursuit of peace and justice, in turn inspired by past powers – reach their highest incarnation at the hands of a future civilization in an era to come.