The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I’m going to be mighty busy today. My esteemed colleague at the Chalcedon Foundation, Andrea Schwartz, has organized a webinar with me as the perfesser–young people from all over the country who want to be writers, who are going to ask me all about writing. The questions will be live, and I won’t get to see them in advance, so who knows what they’ll spring on me?

I’ve got to hustle now and get the decks cleared for this. You know, the one question I never fail to hear–I mean, if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times, literally–is “How long does it take you to write a book?” Well, that depends on whether you’re writing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or something in between.

So, if you’re new to this blog and are looking for something to read, today would be a good day to browse the archives–’cause I don’t know how long the webinar will take. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Consider this quote by Edward Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XV:

“The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy.”

Which, I think, explains why we are so often moved to ask, concerning our own national leaders today, “Are they wrecking the country on purpose?”

As Gibbon summed up the causes that led directly to the fall of Rome, he noted:

*The destruction of the middle class, leaving only a small stratum of the super-rich and a vast population of the intractably poor, most of them on welfare.

*Public entertainment that became a substitute for work and family life.

*Wave after wave of invading barbarians–many of whom had been invited into Italy by the Roman authorities themselves. And why? As our own leaders might have put it, “to do work that Romans won’t do.”

Does any of this sound at all familiar?

If history is sometimes boring, it is also sometimes shocking.