Decline and Fall: Thoughts on the meaning of progress

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Decline and Fall | Anthony Esolen | Catholic World Report

It is a common trope of literary history, that of decrying the degeneracy of the times, and looking back with nostalgia upon the virtues of one's forefathers. "O tempora, O mores!" cries Cicero, fulminating before his fellow senators as he delineates the crimes of Catiline, who sought to stir up a civil insurrection to place himself in power. In The Acharnians and Lysistrata, Aristophanes glances at the virtue of those Spartans and Athenians of two generations past who joined forces to fight the common foe, Persia, at Thermopylae and Marathon, rather than fighting one another and cozying up to that same enemy. William Faulkner sees in the American South a transition from a society whose principal virtue was honor, to one in which money is the only thing that talks; a movement from a world that the thoughtful Quentin Compson could both critique and love, to a world ruled by people like his grasping brother Jason, who even when he was a boy kept his hands in his pockets.

In part such criticism bespeaks a willingness, sometimes laudable and pious, sometimes merely obtuse, to overlook the failings of one's predecessors. The Senate that heard Cicero's orations against Catiline had long failed to act for the common good of all Romans. It had ignored the pleas of the Gracchi brothers for land reform. Rome had seized much land in Italy and elsewhere from rebellious peoples after her victories in war. That land, in the late second century, was held by wealthy senators. The Gracchi, seeing the impoverishment of Rome's veterans, and wishing to return wage-earners from the city to the country, tried to compel the Senate to give up some of those lands. They were assassinated for their pains; and the Senate, rich and unwilling to govern, would consign their own authority more and more to warlords like Marius and Sulla, and to ambitious populists like Julius Caesar. The world that Cicero pretended to save had for a long time not existed. Something similar might be said about the generation of Greeks who fought the Persians. It was not true that the Greeks were united; many a Greek polis sided with Persia, for the city-states had long been fighting with one another, and the fighting would not cease until the very institution of the free polis was destroyed by Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander. As for the antebellum South, it was built upon the back of slave labor, as Faulkner well knew, nor would he allow his reader to forget it.

But in part the focus upon cultural decline is warranted, for the simple reason that cultural decline, in one respect or another, is the most common thing in the world. It is an easily noted fact.

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