When slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, the Romans viewed this situation as just part of the natural order. 

This view, by the way, that superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to those that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people were convinced, 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 superior. The Romans believed they deserved to be the masters of 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 short, the cultural code of Rome gradually ceased to evolve and so fell more and more out of touch with the reality in which it was immersed. 

Nevertheless, it was used doggedly by its carriers, the Roman citizens, until it became dangerously out of touch with the larger forces in its environment, many of which had been produced by the Romans’ own success. For example, neighboring tribes learned better ways of making war from the Romans themselves. 

And the problems of victory can be worse than those of defeat: people with too much wealth and time on their hands slip more and more easily into envy, plotting, corruption, vice, and greed. A cultural code, like a computer operating system’s code, needs constant updates to stay in synchronization with the reality that it must interface with every day. Code that does not stay updated causes whole programs to become obsolete as more efficient routines are devised by competing software companies. The consequences for societies whose code falls out of touch with reality, however, are a bit more catastrophic.

By the time the Romans realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late.

   

                  Late Roman decadence (artist: Thomas Couture) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

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

But values and their material 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 if we are to end the misery that we call "war" before it ends us.