Romulan Virtues for a World Thirsty for Virtue

First today's breaking story.  There was another mass shooting and this one is in Roseburg Oregon at a community college.  Ten students are dead and twenty people are injured.  FOX news reports that before he shot each person he asked them if they were Christians.  Now the shooter is dead.  But I haven’t heard any more details than that despite the fact Norman Goldman talked about it for an hour.  Sean Hannity made a brief reference to it.

Juaquin is a category four hurricane headed up the east coast.  Other than drenching people with rain they aren’t sure when or if it will make landfall along the Carolinas or wherever.  Meanwhile we have continued markedly above normal for weeks.  The other day it was 89 degrees and the normal high this time of year is 81.  The cool down will start this weekend if not Monday.

Alaskan oil production is only about a quarter of what it was in the late eighties, which I was very surprised by.  These lower oil prices have killed the economy there.  This would seem to refute claims of Sean Hannity that all you have to do is either go to a high oil producing area such as North Dakota or Alaska and get a good paying starter job for $75.000 a year and be "set for life in a good carrier.  These days many Alaskan oil fields are being referred to as "mature", which is a damning adjitive for both an oil field and for women. 

Russia started bombing jihadi bases in Syria today.  Clearly Vladimir Putin and President Obama view this situation radically differently.  Russia sees their mission as to "restore the status quo" and quelch ISIS.  The US has other ideas - - but I'm not entirely sure what they are.  Here's more.

Given that the the U.S. and its allies are largely responsible for creating ISIS, and that U.S., Turkey and Israel have all been acting as ISIS’ air force – they are not taking too kindly to Russia’s actions.

This Wall Street Journal headline sums up the absurdity of the situation:  “Russian Airstrike in Syria Targeted CIA-Backed Rebels, U.S. Officials Say.”

We noted years ago that a proxy war is raging in Syria … but things are getting even more over-heated.

Political risk expert Ian Bremmer sums up the situation:

Russian forces will be striking Assad enemies, some of whom are directly supported by the US and its allies. That’s not a proxy war. It’s one step closer.  Actually it could be the opening Chapter of the next World War.

What could possibly go wrong?

There is a tie in between "virtue" and "masculinity" or energy in the sense of when the Bible reports "Jesus felt that virtue had gone forth from him after the woman touched the hem of his garment.   In the Romulan the words green and truth and morality are from the same root word.  Please allow me to play the cosmic card here.  "Vertical" is something all men strive for but it gets tougher to achieve with age.  Like the Romulans - - serving your country and dying for an altruistic goal is a superior sought trait rather than just "body building" and individual achievement.  American Society today certainly lacks "Virtue".  We too retreat to "myths of the past" which no longer suit today's realities, but are too much the moral cowards to face this about ourselves.

I’ve previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

A lengthier book by Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower addresses the same issues from a slightly different perspective.

Glenn Stehle, commenting on 9/16/15 on a thread in the excellent website peakoilbarrel.com (operated by the estimable Ron Patterson) made a number of excellent points that I am taking the liberty of excerpting: (with thanks to correspondent Paul S.)

The set of values developed by the early Romans called mos maiorum, Peter Turchin explains in War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, was gradually replaced by one of personal greed and pursuit of self-interest.

“Probably the most important value was virtus (virtue), which derived from the word vir (man) and embodied all the qualities of a true man as a member of society,” explains Turchin.

“Virtus included the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to act in ways that promoted good, and especially the common good. Unlike Greeks, Romans did not stress individual prowess, as exhibited by Homeric heroes or Olympic champions. The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril,” Turchin adds.

And as Turchin goes on to explain:

“Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen….

The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll….

The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen.”

Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity when

“an average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no “middle class” comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor.”