Sleepwalking Into an American Empire

I know just enough about history and economics to be dangerous and what I know leads me to the dangerous thought that a sufficiently large political entity with a centralized government will tend strongly to evolve into an empire, no matter its pretences to being a republic. It may have initial periods of freedom, but the power and wealth at the centers will be too much a prize for ambitious souls, whether they be virtuous pagans or toads. If no Caesar or Genghis Khan shows up, the prize will still draw the attention of those smaller, toad-like men who will forge a political machine. In either case, the sinister version of the invisible hand of Adam Smith will be moving and it will be organizing the efforts of some sort of ambitious men to the purpose of controlling that power and wealth and further concentrating it.

As is my wont, I’ll digress (seemingly) to point out a way in which the United States in post-Lincoln era is similar to the late Roman Republic:

Large-scale wars and long periods of preparatory periods for war, along with the economic advantages of victory, perverted the economy into a highly liquid form, creating great wealth of a certain, morally destructive sort. Agricultural land and other productive assets were turned into commodities to be bought and sold by speculators. Human beings became commodities not much later than the farm-land. (I actually believe we began the process of becoming an empire with the Louisiana Purchase and the rarely-told betrayal of the American Indians which was part of that Purchase. But that’s too complex a story for this blog entry.)

There are more chattel slaves in the world than there ever were, though it’s true that the vast majority for now are held in Islamic countries. But we in the West seem well-advanced in our efforts to turn the defenseless into commodities, even to the point where we are harvesting cells and organs from embryos bred for that purpose. More broadly, we value comfort and presumptive security to an unhealthy extent, ignoring the warnings of Benjamen Franklin and others that such attitudes will lose us our freedom.

As events are working out, those who die soon will probably die with some substantial freedom of a formal sort. Beyond that short time-frame, the freedom — even in the most formalistic sense — of the average American citizen is pretty much lost, absent a couragous choice I mention later. But most Americans will be little concerned with a loss of their freedom. They will be much more concerned with loss of luxury goods, and we have guaranteed that loss — for most Americans — by selling off our productive capacity to gain spending cash in the short-term.

In fact, there is a strong connection between the conversion of productive assets into commodities and the conversion of human beings into commodities. Human beings are not autonomous agents who float freely between different ways of living and different ways of making a living. Nor is farm-land simply two feet of good soil in a certain location. It is literally the ground upon which particular families will form specific ways of life and will unite to form larger communities, political communities and communities of worship. When farm-land becomes a commodity, so do specific ways of life.

In general, when productive assets become commodities, stable ways of life are destroyed. Moral structures are destroyed. And those defenders of corporate capitalism who claim to be moral conservatives will wonder why people with shattered families and communities do not adjust to being well-behaved hotel maintenence workers or competent nuclear engineers or whatever. Those defenders of corporate capitalism who claim to be moral conservatives seem to miss the fact that human beings do not readily take to being treated as commodity items. And the essence of corporate capitalism is the conversion of many aspects of human life into commodities.

A population of farmers who lose their land to speculators will not be magically transformed into a mobile force of generic workers. They will be a population of human beings no longer inhabiting the environments in which they were formed, for which they were formed. They will be so many Atlases separated from the ground which gives them their strength. Their children will tend to be ill-disciplined and socially maladjusted. Even the adults will be demoralized creatures who will seem to have lost their moral focus, their social habits, even their ability to function well in practical endeavors. They will be melting down into a proletariat mass just as the Roman plebians did when they lost their farms and their shops to the speculators and industrialists of their days.

We have no excuse for not seeing these terrible possibilities. A knowledge of ancient history is not necessary for this insight. We saw the destruction of an already damaged people when large numbers of Southern Blacks left their impoverished but morally structured communities in Alabama and Mississippi. They streamed north to become commodities of a sort in Detroit and Philadelphia. They left the outer regions of Hell to enter the fires of the depths of Hell in the inner-city ghettos. Middle-class youth from the nicest suburbs are taking to the depraved and exploitive culture of the inner-cities with an ease that should frighten us. Have they skipped many of the stages of destruction to move right to the state of illiterate and morally disordered barbarism? I fear so.

Let me make my main point, one which will pull many of these seemingly disjointed thoughts together: A liquid economy and a powerful government will draw ambitious men towards that government where they, and the political machines they form, will tax heavily and build up welfare systems, including programs such as Social Security. They will tend strongly to make the disenfranchished masses dependent upon the central government.

Our relationships of dependency form our true loyalties. Power-seekers act as if they know this, but we’ve collaborated with them in making us dependent upon central powers. It’s remarkable that Christians supposedly conversant with the letters of St. Paul could have so willingly and enthusiastically made themselves and their children dependents and beneficiaries of the principalities and powers of this world. It’s remarkable that followers of a God who accepted crucifixion for their sake could so easily sell their souls and their children’s souls to escape the ordinary difficulties of the world, however harsh those difficulties sometimes are.

A powerful government with lots of liquid wealth to tax will also build large armies and navies. At that point, an empire is well advanced in its formation, though the actual process is complex and very few of the servants of the embryonic empire will even realize they are such. They may even imagine themselves to be defenders of traditional values or freedom or something else they don’t understand.

Soon, we Americans will face the choice Hannah Arendt predicted for us several decades ago, even before we began selling our children’s futures to the up and coming Asian countries: we can sink into poverty or we can complete our evolution into an empire and use our military power to steal what we need to maintain our living standards. Then again we could accept an honorable poverty and begin the difficult and demanding task of building this country into one we could proudly leave to our children and grandchildren. I’m not betting we’ll have the courage or integrity to make this last choice. I’m not even sure our current political systems would allow us such a choice.