Chapter 11           Part B 

          Therefore, in Western history, the next important world view is the Roman one. Operating under it, people became even more practical, more focused on physical power, and less interested in, or even aware of, ideas considered for their own sake. This feeling expressed itself among many of the early Romans simply and directly in an out-and-out hatred for the ways of the Greeks; the truth was that the Romans borrowed much from the Greeks, especially in theoretical knowledge, but they loathed having to admit it. 

Roman coliseum around 80 A.D. (Note the staged sea battle.)

          The Romans in their heyday no longer feared the gods in the way that the ancient Greeks and the Romans’ own ancestors once had. As the Republic faded and the Empire took over, the Romans went so far from that way of thinking that they lost much of the Greek, especially the Athenian, capacity for the things called “abstract” – wonder, idealism, pure intellectual speculation, and flights of imagination. The Roman built their state to a large degree on Athenian-style, democratic principles, values, and behaviors, but they also, more like the Spartans, loved results and power, not speculation.

Pont du Gard: Roman aqueduct (in present day France) 

          It is tempting here to see in the Romans a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and the ways of the Spartans. This would be an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic. One way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way.  The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life of its own. 

         The people who are born into the new way are not aware of using some elements from one philosophy and some from the other. The new way is simply their way, and the supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling up toward greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

               

        It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model and with a little stretching it can be made to at least seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is, to put the matter bluntly, simply too simple. The Roman way of thinking and way of life did contain some of the Athenian ideas and morés and some of the Spartan ones, but there was too much else going on in the thinking and living of the Romans for us to be satisfied with Hegel’s model. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to look at each society and see what its world view, values, morés, and behavior patterns were like and how they coordinated in the lives of the people who operated under them to produce a whole culture and way of life that met the survival demands of the time.

               

          The point is that the model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model is because the process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit that model. Rather, the real process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution by genetic variation and natural selection that underlies the rest of the much larger, non-human, living world.

    Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions in the non-living world like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down or opened up opportunities. Then, life forms, usually but not always, moved in opportunistically. In addition, odd combinations of genes sometimes then came together in ways that most models of evolution would only have given a very low probability of occurring. Life spreads forward across time and space not like a chain or a road or a ladder, but like a bush branching and bifurcating over and over onward from that primal trunk started from a few cells long ago.

          The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and it is in the realm of the living that human culture must exist. The model that we are going to explore here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are, for us to then be able to build a moral code, and that is all we need. But let’s return to our main line of thought.

       The Romans put more practicality, discipline and efficiency into the Athenian values and morés. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication, by employing mathematical principles that they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and the Romans' own neighbors, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). Similarly, in other areas, such as war, law, medicine, and agriculture, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their times.

Tuscan Wrestlers (from a painting in a tomb in Tarquinia, Italy)  

       In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were like family. They knew that they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially unique, gifted, and destined. The Aeneid said so. Thus, the Roman worldview, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. Their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty and capriciousness. Instead, the Romans, for generations, were very sure of where they stood: the gods (and later, God) loved Rome.

Ancient Rome (as depicted by T. Cole, American artist) 

    This worldview produced a patriotism that had an Athenian kind of character to it because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights and duties to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these folk were used to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. How could you not love such a country? What would you not endure for her? 

   The slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, but the Romans thought that this situation was just part of the natural order.  This view, by the way, that the superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals did not originate with the Romans. It was Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons very similar to the reasons that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people just knew without thinking about it that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered, patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors, made them so superior that they deserved to be the masters of others from inferior cultures.

        A society built on slaves and materialism, and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In other words, the cultural code was bankrupt. (“We have all we and our forbears ever dreamed of. What do we do now?”)By the time that they realized Rome really could fall, it was too late. 

late Roman decadence (as conceived by artist T. Couture) 

        Note how the decline of the Romans' values system, the laziness of the later Romans about ideals of citizenship and honesty, presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles that values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of the state that they are citizens of. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, we say, the collapse of their state became inevitable. (This idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still the most famous and respected of all time.) (3.)   

        But values and their consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society's moral values and its survival has eluded analysis for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better.

Notes 

3. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.htm