Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The Romans established a whole taxonomy of non-Roman cultural traits and stereotypes, few of them flattering. The Greeks, of course, had been admired for their art, their literature, and their philosophy, but admiration can curdle into resentment, and Romans who affected Greek ways, in the manner of Americans who affect Anglicisms after a stint in London, were sometimes derided as “Greeklings.” Other groups fared less well. The indigenous people of Iberia were said to brush their teeth with urine. The northern Gauls were seen as immoderate in their appetites, generally undisciplined, and without stamina in battle—an apparently durable stereotype. Syrians were notoriously dishonest, and in Cicero’s view were “born slaves.” The Egyptians were weak and degenerate, the Parthians dangerous and decadent. Jews were regarded as peculiar, standoffish, exclusive, and of course inferior; it must have been something of a surprise that these people, when they revolted in the first century A.D., would tie down the Romans for four full years and require more troops than the conquest of Britain. The free Germans, the ones living outside Roman reach, were implacably warlike and notoriously unsusceptible to notions of delayed gratification. Tacitus, who could have had a career at The Economist, offered this crisp, back-of-the hand dismissal:

  A German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.

  And so on. But let it not be said that the Romans thought themselves superior only by comparison with the defectives all around. Cicero was quick to point out good qualities in non-Romans, and to suggest that the Romans had risen to the top because they enjoyed the sanction of heaven itself: “Spaniards had the advantage over them in point of numbers, Gauls in physical strength, Carthaginians in sharpness, Greeks in culture, native Latins and Italians in shrewd common sense; yet Rome had conquered them all and acquired her vast empire because in piety, religion, and appreciation of the omnipotence of the gods she was without equal.” Call it the idea of “Roman exceptionalism”—a shining city upon seven hills. You can’t miss an echo in the religious righteousness of our own day—in the words, for instance, of Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, explaining the American capture of a Muslim warlord in Somalia in terms of Christianity’s superiority to Islam: “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

  You hear modern chords not only when the Romans speak about non-Roman peoples, but also when non-Romans speak about Rome. It was not all negative: Rome had plenty of Alistair Cookes. There would always be rebellions—they are as prominent a feature of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the elegant rumble of Gibbon’s jokes—but Rome brought unprecedented peace and stability to the lands it ruled. The advantages of the imperium were undeniable, and in many ways Rome’s yoke was light. Most religions were tolerated, as long as proper sacral obeisance was paid to the emperor (a problem for Jews and Christians). The local ruling class usually remained the local ruling class. Piracy was suppressed, and commerce flourished. Water flowed to areas that had once been dry. Strabo and Plutarch, in the first century A.D., were Greeks who traveled within the highest social circles. Both had visited Rome; Strabo actually lived there for many years. You’ll find plenty of trenchant criticism of Rome and Romans in their writings, but the overall assessment is positive: Strabo and Plutarch bought into the Roman system. So did Appian, another Greek, from Alexandria. In his Roman History he extols the pluckiness of the Romans, marvels at their willingness to lavish wealth on godforsaken places (“on some of these subject nations they spend more than they receive from them”), and sums up two centuries of imperial rule as follows: “In the long reign of peace and security everything has moved toward a lasting prosperity.”

  Since the middle of the twentieth century, America has been seen by many outsiders as playing much the same role—perhaps to their annoyance, but also to their relief. America has done so, like Rome, for reasons of national self-interest; unlike Rome, it has done so without asserting actual sovereignty over the countless multitudes who receive some collateral benefit. America’s advances in communications and medicine have spread everywhere. Its power has shaped the global infrastructure of security, finance, and trade. The world’s 76,000 daily commercial flights navigate through the skies with the aid of American satellites. American fleets keep the sea-lanes safe. The world’s computers operate mainly on American software, and the world’s lingua franca is America’s television and advertising English, not the English of Henry Higgins or Noel Coward. The breakfast buffet at the InterContinental Dubai flies many culinary flags: it offers miso soup and sushi, croissants and baguettes, rashers and kippers, dates and figs, porridge and cereal—an implicit showcase of that city-state’s emergence as a mercantile crossroads, a latter-day Palmyra. But more than that, the breakfast buffet is an edible monument to the international order fostered by the country responsible for the Cheerios and Special K.

  During the past five years, as America has confronted the hostility not only of radical Islam but also of many onetime friends and allies, the question “Why do they hate us?” has been asked and answered again and again. It’s not because they don’t know us: Foreigners seem to know a lot more about Americans than we do about ourselves. Every few years some new national survey laments the basic ignorance of American teenagers about the nation’s past; high school students in Kiev and Kathmandu, it always turns out, are better informed about the Civil War and the New Deal than students in Trenton or Omaha. According to recent studies, Europeans are considerably more likely than Americans to have heard about Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Whether informed or not, the menu of complaint is well known: Americans are insensitive vulgarians—loud and uncultured, God-drunk and materialistic, implacable and self-congratulatory, blind to the needs and views of others—who wield their power with unthinking brutality and childlike clumsiness, largely in the service of oppressive regimes, hegemonic ambitions, and insatiable appetites. Or something along those lines. The novelist Margaret Drabble has admitted that anti-Americanism “rises up in my throat like acid reflux.” Many decades ago, in an age of more artful savagery, the British diarist and diplomat Harold Nicolson told a friend that Europeans were “frightened that the destinies of the world should be in the hands of a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate, the emotions of a spinster, and the brain of a peahen.” He forgot to mention one other trait: an ear of tin, as when Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor, refers publicly to America’s friends and allies as our “vassals and tributaries.”

  Valid criticisms lurk here, and so, of course, does a caricature, which Americans themselves can’t help recognizing. I remember experiencing, as an American teenager living in Dublin and more or less totally assimilated to Irish folkways, a dread of summer, when wagon trains of tour buses would deposit Americans everywhere, with their loud shirts and loud personalities—a dread mixed even then with shame at my pathetic disloyalty. At any moment, I half expected, the cock would crow.

  Anti-American sentiment is by now a permanent part of the ecosystem, turning up in toxic levels almost everywhere. Opinion surveys show America’s positive image in the world to be eroding even among traditional friends—a development so familiar as to barely register as news. The words “Civus Romanus sum”—“I am a Roman citizen”—were once both a boast and a form of protection throughout the known world; during the 2006 World Cup, the American soccer team was the only one whose bus, for security reasons, bore no markings of nationality. Only occasionally does anti-Americanism take a truly startling turn, as when a columnist in our stalwart ally Britain—Athens to our Rome!—contemplated the impending re-election of George W. Bush and offered the comment “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.—where are you now that we need you?”

  The Romans, too, presented a tempting target. To Christian wri
ters, Rome was the Great Whore, just as to Islamists, America is the Great Satan. The Romans talked loudly of liberty—for themselves. The word hardly applied to those who came under Rome’s sway. The Romans made a habit of publicly degrading the captured leaders of vanquished peoples, a practice now turning up unexpectedly in the American repertoire—recall the official video of Saddam Hussein’s medical exam, broadcast worldwide. Roman envoys, serene in their arrogance, spoke contemptuously to foreigners, even to royalty, and in the expectation that all requests would be granted. The story is told of one Roman envoy who, wanting action from a foreign king, uttered no word of threat but with a stick simply drew a circle around the king’s throne, in front of his people and courtiers, and then advised him not to pass outside the circle until he had an answer for the Roman Senate.

  The barbarian tribes were illiterate, and left few direct impressions of their views of the Romans. The Greeks were another story. In Greek eyes, the Romans were cruel (not a personal trait for which ordinary Americans get much criticism) and rapacious, stripping lands of their culture and resources (a little more recognizable). The Greeks openly admired the Romans for some qualities—orderliness, rationalism—but they weren’t endorsing the whole package. Polybius, a Greek who held many aspects of Rome in open esteem, nevertheless in one passage explicitly refers to the Romans as barbarians.

  In the view of foreigners, the Romans could be laughably uncouth. Once, in the 1980s, when the annual Teamsters convention was held at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, the three-hundred-pound Jackie Presser, a candidate for union president, was carried into the convention hall on a gold litter by four men dressed as Roman centurions, to the piped-in chant of “Hail Caesar.” The ancient Romans sometimes came across in much the same way. The story is told of one wealthy Roman who after the sack of Corinth ordered some antique works of art sent home, warning the shipper that if any were damaged he’d have to replace them with new ones. (Charles Foster Kane would have done the same thing.) The Greek philosopher Demonax, grown tired of listening to someone boast about how the emperor had made him a Roman citizen, delivered the Parthian shot: “A pity he did not make you a Greek.”

  The “Sameness” Delusion

  ONE NOTABLE CONSTANT in American history is our lack of awareness of the rest of the world—or, if we’re aware, our indifference to whether we’ve got the world right. This may be the Western Hemisphere’s distinctive form of original sin, committed when Columbus mistook his landfall for India. The indifference is somewhat understandable. The British inhabited a tiny, vulnerable island, and so looked outward and produced the world’s most doughty and observant travelers: people like Sir Richard Burton and Rebecca West. Americans have had an entire continent for distraction, and two oceans for insulation. The consequences are hard to shake. Walter Lippmann would become a distinguished commentator on foreign affairs, but he began as a typical American naif, setting out for what he thought would be a sunny European jaunt in June of 1914, right after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had set World War I into motion. “It was possible for an American in those days,” Lippmann later wrote, “to be totally unconscious of the world he lived in.” It still is. Lynne Cheney, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, wondered aloud less than a month after 9/11 about a Washington Post article suggesting that Americans were failing to learn what they needed to know about other cultures. She brushed the criticism aside impatiently, saying that if there was a failure, it was the failure of Americans to know enough about America.

  For whatever reason, geographic innocence is an ingrained American trait, confirmed with tedious regularity. 2001: A study by the Asia Society finds that a quarter of all high school seniors cannot name the ocean that separates North America from Asia. 2002: A study by the National Geographic Society finds that more than three quarters of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four can’t locate Iran or Iraq on a map. 2003: A report by a blue-ribbon panel assails America’s “stubborn monolingualism” and “ignorance of the world.” 2006: Another National Geographic study finds that a third of all young Americans believe that you’d have to travel north, east, or west to get from Japan to Australia. Only two out of ten of the young Americans surveyed owned a passport.

  All of this is aggravated by a new development, fueled by security concerns: the severe restrictions on foreign students coming to the United States and the harassment by federal agents of foreign students already here. Nearly 600,000 foreign students attend American colleges and universities, but applications have slipped sharply in some recent years—by 28 percent in 2004—and schools in other countries are competing for those ambitious students. One British university administrator explains, “International students say it’s not worth queuing up for two days outside the U.S. consulate in whatever country they’re in to get a visa when they can go to the U.K. so much more easily.”

  It may be that in a busy and sprawling nation of 300 million, with a large and nearly empty territory to command attention, a lack of interest in the outside world among ordinary people should not count as unusual. CBS News, which in all of 2004 devoted only three minutes to the genocide in Darfur, presumably knows its market. But what about those who style themselves the elite, especially those whose job it is to monitor threats from the beyond? “I once asked an American general in Vietnam if he had read anything about the French experience in Indochina,” a veteran foreign correspondent recently wrote, “and he said there was no point because the French had lost and, therefore, had nothing to teach us.” America invests enormous sums in intelligence gathering—the so-called “black budget” runs to upward of $40 billion annually—but somehow doesn’t have much to show for it. The intelligence agencies have been criticized for their lack of attention to the threat from militant Islam, but the underlying problem was hardly new. Three years before 9/11 a former CIA officer with extensive experience in the Middle East recalled that not one of the Iran desk chiefs who served during his eight years of working on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not one of the Near East division chiefs could read or speak Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. He wrote:

  Sterling exceptions aside, the average senior officer rose through the hierarchy without ever learning much about the language, culture, or politics of the countries in which he served. . . . At the Agency’s espionage-training school (“The Farm”) at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, instructors regularly told trainees that cultural distinctions did not matter, that an operation was an operation regardless of the target. Whether Arab, German, Turkish, Brazilian, Persian, Russian, Pakistani, or French, targets were (as Duane Clarridge, a Europe Division and counterterrorism-center chief baldly put it) “all the same.”

  What accounts for such an attitude toward the world—this strange mixture of studied ignorance, intense involvement, and instinctive withdrawal? Is it a form of the “moral barrier” that some say separated insiders and outsiders in Roman eyes—and which also may have constituted an “information barrier”? Is it a sense of superiority? There’s certainly some of each of these things. Like the Romans, Americans as a people habitually derive foreign policy from values rather than interests—a propensity that even facts may not dislodge. “They carried with them,” Susan Mattern writes of the Romans, “an ideology of the foreigner with the authority of literary tradition. This ideology affected how they perceived their neighbors even after firsthand observation.” Place this alongside the worldview of the senior American official who in 2002 mocked what he called the “reality-based community,” which believes that “solutions emerge” from the “judicious study of discernible reality.” And like Rome—“It is your special gift”—America has a driving sense of mission. In his novel The Quiet American, Graham Greene skewers America’s anti-communist activities in Southeast Asia. But he’s clear about the motivations of his main character, Alden Pyle. “He was determined—I learned that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a
country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now, with the whole universe to improve.”

  The idea of American exceptionalism extends powerfully through the national psyche from the founding of the first colonies up to the more recent efforts to somehow force-feed democracy to the Middle East. It begins with the proposition that those who came to America were fleeing the oppressive feudal and religious structures of an ailing Europe. Here, on a vast and virgin continent, new structures took shape, based on sturdy ideas of freedom and equality; and after a relatively mild revolution those values were officially enshrined under a government whose power could be checked in important ways.

  In his defining study, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz identified two basic components of the American stance toward the world that grow out of this sense of exceptionalism. The first of these is a strong isolationist impulse: “the sense that America’s very liberal joy lay in the escape from a decadent Old World that could only infect it with its own diseases.” Thomas Paine was wary of the alliance with France that ultimately brought American victory in the War of Independence. In the late nineteenth century the Anti-Imperialist League tried to keep America from following the path of the European colonial powers. America rejected the League of Nations after World War I. The United Nations is viewed by many Americans with distaste if not contempt.