Rome, Italy. 20
March. “The five marks of the decaying
Roman culture: concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; obsession
with sex and perversions of sex; art becomes freakish and sensationalistic
instead of creative and original; increased demand to live off the state”. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a master-piece. It is also a hideously-long, bloody pompous
master-piece, a pomposity was the academic mark of his eighteenth century age.
Of course, there is absolutely no academic pomposity whatsoever in the
twenty-first century world, anywhere. Sitting here on the Aventine Hill close to
where the Temple of Diana once stood my mind is cast back to those carefree
days when I was an Oxford undergraduate studying Modern History. A time of long, greasy hair punctuated by
long, greasy Genesis albums and
occasional bouts of ‘study’ during which I was forced to read the long, greasy
Gibbon. And yet when I now re-read my Gibbon from the lofty heights of perfect
wisdom and maturity I am struck by what insights the man had on the eternal
human political condition and our enduring and not-so-endearing ability to eternally
screw things up.
The EU and its
member-states have become far too focused on displaying affluence rather than
building wealth. Europe’s refusal to
properly prepare its economy for the hyper-competitive twenty-first century
means decline and decay is inevitable. Early
signs of that are all around me here in a Rome that has not been troubled by
economic growth since 1999. However, it is Greece rather than Italy that really
reveals the dangers of perpetual self-delusion.
Athens is still resisting any proper reforms to its economy in spite of
promises to get real. Sadly, Greece is
not alone. Whilst Ireland and Portugal have undertaken serous reforms other
southern European states still hanker after a return to the Mezzogiorno lifestyle that can no longer
be afforded.
Gibbon was a curmudgeon
when it came to matters of sex and art.
However, I am struck by how much the politics of sex dominate discourse
these days. It is my firm belief that
the rights of all minorities should be protected, and I am a firm supporter of
gay marriage. However, be it the
politics of race, gender or sex so many in the European elite seemed to have
forgotten that whilst minority rights must be protected a society can only
flourish if the majority are respected. As a white, fifty-something male I sometimes
get the impression I am the font of all evil and that it is my duty to be
discriminated against ‘positively’ and routinely to ensure ‘equality’, even if
that is at the expense of quality and the promotion of mediocrity.
However, for me Gibbon’s
most striking suggestion was that Rome was lost because people simply came to
believe that living off the state was their right. In Europe ‘living off the state’ takes two
forms. At the European level it
manifests itself in the belief that the taxpayers of eight EU member-states are
expected to pay for the tax and non-taxpayers of the remaining twenty. The transfer of funds from the North and West
of Europe to the South and East of Europe, most evident in the Greek bailouts,
was meant to be a temporary phenomenon to help bring economies up to a level of
mutual enrichment. And yet, as I make my way around Europe I am struck by how
many EU member-states now see such transfers as permanent and theirs by right.
At the popular level
the battle over the welfare state in its various incarnations across socialised
Europe suggests a culture of entitlement that is now so ingrained in Europeans that
they believe their well-being to be somebody else’s problem and at someone else’s
cost. This is not something that the
creators of the Welfare State in the years after World War Two ever envisaged,
nor is it sustainable. Berlin is right
about this; it is not German meanness to suggest that Europeans reform and
prepare to succeed in a competitive world.
Is is simply the harsh, unforgiving reality of a harsh, unforgiving
world. Europeans either modernise
together or fail together.
What makes Gibbon still so funky
is precisely his understanding that what killed Athens and Rome ultimately was that
their desperate desire to protect themselves from change doomed them to change.
As Gibbon wrote, “In the end, more than
freedom, they wanted security. They
wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and
freedom. When the Athenians finally
wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom
they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be
free and was never free again.”
Gibbon also offered
another warning. Rome fell because its
ancient civic virtues were eaten away from within by competing religions to the
point where society and governance collapsed.
Europe?
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