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Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

friedkielbasa.substack.com

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#51
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.

Isn't that just because a large portion of the early English colonialists moved to the USA precisely because they weren't Anglicans? See for example the Mayflower: they left England due to prosecution, moved to The Netherlands, then left for the USA because there was too much freedom for them and they wanted to impose stricter rules. There's of course the obvious heritage in the sense that the Reformation started in…

Well, considering that Puritans actually managed to push through the prohibition on Christmas (and Easter) celebrations, it's no wonder they got so wildly unpopular that they had to emigrate.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure why you got down voted Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.

I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840

I bookmarked that thread for future reference. There's a lot of gems in there.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give any examples of societies that went to the brink and reversed course? I can't think of any, but I'd be fascinated to learn more about examples who have.

Rome, multiple times before the western empire actually fell. I’m not an expert, but roughly there was a major civil war about once a century (or more), a transition from a republic to an empire, the experiment with the tetrarchy, and a major change in state religion. They didn’t entirely “reverse course”, the society changed and evolved at each point, but it remained recognizably Roman. And that’s just the western e…

Yep. The Crisis of the Third Century, especially.

But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.

And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.

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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.

It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.

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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.

But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840

I bookmarked that thread for future reference. There's a lot of gems in there.

Good ones by csallen which makes sense as he runs Indie Hackers and literally sees people daily getting rich or at least making enough money to support themselves, all from online businesses.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#55
post #4

This makes an important point, and is important to think about, but I'm also interested in how societies go to that brink and come back. I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization. The essay also points to something els…

Can you give any examples of societies that went to the brink and reversed course? I can't think of any, but I'd be fascinated to learn more about examples who have.

Other people answered better than I could, although some of their examples were what I had in mind (China, much of Europe over the last 150 years or so, maybe the US during the 19th century).

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK > Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany. This underestimates how Germanic, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic America is. For example - Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, e…

Disney? > Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe in general, after the World Wars. Ditto Japan. The thing is, though, they had help recovering, and help stepping back from the brink. Help won't be coming this time. Just as there are no George Marshalls in today's Republican party, and no room for any, there is no one outside the US who will come to our own rescue.

The Marshall Plan merely accelerated the recovery, serving as seed money for a lot of investment (among other goals). Even without such help, the conditions for recovery were there. (I also like to think that the same conditions are still present nowadays, and the help you mention won't not play an essential role for anything. But, in case I'm wrong, i.e. if the conditions may not be there any more, then I very much…

yeah the seeds were there for sure -- they countries that were rebuilt were already the major empires.

you're not creating a new society from whole cloth, you're taking already battered Big Dogs and getting them back to being Big again (minus the, you know, Nazis and bad actors).

but they were already societies that had cutting edge tech and made serious end-runs at taking over the world.

South Korea would be the only real example of where you took the poor agrarian area and eventually grew it into an asian tiger.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.

I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.

that's a stretch. it's hard to argue it's a continuity when there were two (2) direct wars where the US aggressively rejected British domination -- and then set about creating a entirely separate form of government.

in concert there was the Great Revival and a whole new emergence of new world evangelicalism, a far cry from the Church of England.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.

I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.

Reminds me of an anime titled Code Geass, whose alt-historical setting is where Benjamin Franklin betrays the American colonies to the British, who win the Revolutionary War.

Then Napoleon proceeds to kick them out of Europe, and the British re-establish themselves in North America and emerge as the pre-eminent superpower.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

#60

One of the engines of collapse of Rome was the corrupt financial elite extending to the government that designed rules to extract maximum wealth for the elites, ignoring the long-term health of the economy. By the end, the government was essentially squeezing a dry sponge. Seems like civilisation has learned nothing.

You'd think that an army full of oppressed Roman citizens would've overthrown them right.

Yes, you'd think that. There are historical precedents of high-civilisation collapse (in South America) and Europe (French Revolution). Sometimes people rise up and something better arises from it. Sometimes they don't, but the tainted civilisation will still collapse one way or another under it's own corruption.
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