Note how the decline of the later Romans’ value system and their laziness 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. Ideals shape behavior and behavior determines whether a society will rise or fall. 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 say. (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 that society’s chances of surviving has eluded us for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better if we are to end the madness of war before it ends us.

   

                                                 Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity 

                                                    (artist: Rubens) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

What followed as Rome began to fade was the rise of Christianity. Did Christianity get strong because it offered Romans a way out of the cynical boredom of life in the late Roman Empire, i.e. programmed them to be driven by abstract values again? Or did it just happen to coincide with that cynicism? My position is that changes in values coincide with social changes because values changes lead to new patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive. Neither causes the other. They are both symptoms of deeper changes in a nation’s consciousness, but they are useful indicators of what’s going on in the consciousness of the whole nation. In this century, if we can learn how to plan and implement our own social evolution, we can end the horrors of our species’ past. That is what will happen if reason can defeat greed.

Christianity told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to is not citizenship. It is a state of grace, i.e. peace with God. This was easier to achieve in a monastery or nunnery. Renounce the world in all its tempting forms; focus on eternity. The balance between Christian values and Roman ones was hard to strike. When the Visigoths’ challenge came, too many Romans had let their ideals and behaviors decay for too long. The Christian community, in the meantime, had been taught to shut it all out. People who had integrated the two value sets, who could be passionately loyal to Rome and also to the rigorous moral code of Christianity, were too few to stop the barbarian tide. 

Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the challenge was bound to come. One hundred fifty years is six generations – almost nothing in evolution’s terms. It took another thousand years for Europe to find a way to synthesize the ideals of democratic citizenship and those of Christian spirituality into a single, vigorous, practicable way of thinking and living. I will have more to say in coming chapters on that step in the cultural evolution of the West.