Barbarism from within?

Barbarism from within.

The Roman Empire, it is routinely explained was defeated by a barbarism that overcame its borders from outside, by conquest, raid and mass migration. However this, like most of narrative history is a gross simplification of how the Empire really disintegrated, both as a military, economic and political entity. It would have felt very different then, for the inhabitants of Europe, especially those in thrall to, or enslaved in, the machinery of Empire who gradually saw the hegemony and purpose of that Empire slipping away, as it dissolved into new entities. They did not worship the god Emperor or follow the strict duties of familias and service to the ideals of Roman citizenship but saw their world in relation to the natural resources and to their social position, viewing their existence less in an excess of trade and a constant building up of Imperial glory, and more in a return to exchange, subsistence and surfeit. It may have felt that the world was contracting back to its constituent parts, in local rhythms of season and climate, to a simple quotidian routine where daily pleasure and pain alternated across the agricultural year. Of course in hindsight we are led to read this as a disintegration and a dark age, but reuse, renewal and realignment created something different and potential from this apparent collapse into barbarism.

"Culture doesn't put food on the table," Mr Berlusconi's finance minister is reported to have said recently.

 After all we should be more aware and sensitive to the fact, that most of what we admire as Roman, was in fact created by barbarian people who inhabited Italy or the shores of the surrounding Mediterranean. This Roman borrowing, stealing and adapting extends not just from the architectural advances so admired by aficionados of Roman Imperial culture, the aqueducts, sewage systems, public baths and networks of paved road building, but also to literature, clothing, food, civil and religious rituals. All these were advances of culture, made by the foreigner - the Etruscan, Ligurian, or the Phoenician and to a lesser extent the Greek - in the Centuries before Rome became a military power. We are just not aware of it, because Rome in its conquest and military prowess considered total destruction as a central part of its modus operandi. Insubordinate or rebellious cities were routinely razed to the ground, and peoples executed en masse or converted into slaves. Many of the finest Roman sites and monuments that we can still see today are built over the foundations of structures and cultures erased by brutal force.

 In 2007, President Sarkozy berated students in a speech: "You have the right to study classic literature, but the taxpayer is not obliged to pay for your studies in classic literature." Then during a state visit to India he proclaimed: "You can like Céline without being anti-Semitic, just as you can like Proust without being homosexual."

What happened to the Roman Imperial project was a loss of faith, a corrosion of ideal and a lack of political will to continually defend what was essentially indefensible – a system built on exploitation, displaying all the methods and attributes of a Fascist State – finally the Emperor fell, toppled from his Godlike pedestal. Now we are witnessing a similar collapse within the European Empire, external factors are once again the convenient scapegoat. But this is a corrosive and unimaginative prognosis, driven by petty fears. There seems to be a lack of a progressive enlightened politics to defend the rights, tolerance and laws that the common culture of Europe not only deserves, but demands. It is not the banks, and the idiocy of over accumulation, excess consumption and unremitting ‘economic’ growth, but the spirit and values of an enlightened Europe that needs defending from the forces of prejudice, egotistical self-importance and fear. There should be a courageous, unrepentantly just, equal and free politics, which stands up unapologetically for the ideals of Europe’s Revolutionary history. A political will that confronts the fear rather than turning on the traveler, foreigners, the excluded other, the ‘barbarian’, in disgusting bouts of state sponsored violence and explosions of animal fury. Culture is not food but it is the defense, the nourishment for the only truly human response against our return to savagery – to a brutish vision of survival without purpose.

An intoxication, a release.   There's an intoxication, a release, when everything stripped away, left dumb founded by fear, and in the utter certainty of the nothingness, in death, and our insignificance within the universe. The question comes: What is it, why are we here, in the vast eternity of time - here now, on this earth? There is no answer.