Posted by John Gray Wallace on 5/1/2008, 2:57 pm, in reply to "Re: Racial wrongs and Wright"
70.162.33.173
Every great Empire, or Nation-State in history has eventually declined. That is true. My beloved and vaunted Athenians of "The Golden Age", or "The Periclean Age", fell. Sparta fell. Ancient Cathay fell. The Sassanian, Achaemenid and Parthian Dynasties of Ancient Persia all fell. The Roman Republic fell. So, too, the Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire. The Carolingian...
The Hittites were the masters of their time and place, the mightiest empire on the planet, for 550 years. They fell.
The Songhay and Mali Empires of Africa, mighty as Rome, fell.
My beloved and vaunted Incas, the Aztecs, Olmecs and Toltecs fell.
The Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt fell.
Napoleon's Empire fell.
The British Empire is no more...
Hitler's "Das Tausend Jahren Reich" lasted little more than 12 years (thankfully)...
It is an unpleasant lesson of history that ALL empires and great nations eventually fall. This is part of one of many discusions I used to have with Mrs. Barbara Oliver, the great social studies teacher at Wilson whom many will remember.
It is sheer hubris for us to think that "our" day of world dominance will never end; history clearly teaches otherwise. Our "day", so far, amounts to about half of the era of world dominance enjoyed in antiquity by the Hittites in THEIR "day".
Our challenge is to be the best we can, for as long as we can, and to leave a legacy of achievement and idealism and benevolence that will ring throughout the annals of time and serve as an example to those who come after us.
The great poet Ezra Pound said somewhere that "the test of a civilization is in the quality of the ruins it leaves behind." He meant the Angor-Wats, the Parthenons, the Colloseums, the ruins of Persepolis, Macchu-Picchu, etc. BUT, Ezra was wrong!
The civilizations which left behind all those admittedly significant and great structures were not great civilizations because they built those structures, but because of the QUALITY of the men and women they produced. Athens produced Pericles, Themistocles, Socrates, and so many others. The African cultures produced men like Tenkamenin. The Classical American cultures produced men like Inca Topa Upanqui, whom the historian Toynbee rated the greatest native-born American man to ever live! Rome gave us Livia, Egypt gave the world Nefertiti and Cleopatra. It is the quality of its people that makes a people a great people.
We look around today and see no one the measure of our past Giants, our Lincolns, our Dr. Kings, our Jeffersons...It is a true measure of our decline...
In the end, for Rome, the Octavians, the Mariuses, the Trajans, the Marcus Aureliuses were "replaced" by the Caligulas and Commodusses.
For Britain, the Disraelis and Churchills were eventually "replaced" by men such as Atlee and Eden and MacMillan; good men, perhaps, but not great men.
We are there. But the process is not, yet, irreversible. We control that for as long as we, as a people, have the will to be in control of that situation.
So the challenge is, for each of us, an individual one. It is not something that "the state" can legislate, mandate, or otherwise control. Only we, ourselves, can do that.
Psychologists speak of something called "the will to live". That is a trait, too, of nations and empires, but it resides in the individual, not the state.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just an old, stout guy with gray hair...
John Gray
Message Thread:
« Back to thread