Do as the Romans

American "bookchat land" (Gore Vidal's term) babbles like a brook with comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire, and from time to time, the banks are flooded, usually for good reason: we need to be paying attention. Currently we have Cullen Murphy's book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and Chalmers Johnson's history, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

In addition to similarities between America and Rome seen in foreign and military affairs, there might also be noted the increasing supernaturalism and Christian religiosity on the rise in America--possibly a parallel of the embracing of mystery cults and things "Oriental" in the days of Roman empire. (Previously, I've touched on this, a sort of Orientalism, in light of the Religious Right.)

Our New Agers have their crystals and pyramids, our Christians--buying 100,000's of copies of the Left Behind series--have had for decades their notions of demonic and angelic forces at work in our daily lives and foreign and domestic affairs. Christianized Rome turned her back on Greek skeptical rationalism only after mystical Orientalism began to chip away first at the influence of ancient thinkers like Epicurus and Democritus, and the earlier Roman republic's own Lucretius. In our own age, fairly stoic-like rationalists from Gore Vidal to Sam Harris point out the danger of the irrational belief that supernatural forces favor America's special world status, while our nation wallows in reckless pre-emptive wars, obsessive watching of the likes of American Idol, tabloid news in lieu of substantive journalism, "documentaries" concerning things like alien abductions, crypto-Creationism taught in public schools, and quixotic, fear-based, irrational legislation like gay marriage bans to put one in mind of the later Christianized Roman Emperor, Justinian, who stated that homosexuality was the cause of earthquakes.

Comments

[Mary]

I am starting to fear the "rationals" may end up being as intolerant as the far right. They leave no room for anything they personally consider "irrational", seeming to turn us into a world of Mr. Spocks (if an old Start Trek reference isn't based on too much irrationality to post here.)

I hope everyone opposed to a theocracy doesn't end up lumping harmless, personal thoughts and beliefs into the same basket as religious zealotry. If so, we could become a very unfree people from the opposide sort of opression as the religious right poses now. Many ideas once considered totally irrational later proved to be correct, things like the Earth orbiting the sun for instance, or quantum physics.

Please, lets not throw the baby out with the bath water and outlaw thought and imagination and personal belief in order to end the cancer that is the growing push for theocracies across the globe. There has to be another way.