(This is an email from a friend of mine, Lisa Bright, of Earth Sangha, an eco-buddhist group, that I wanted to share with the Daily Kos community (with her permission).)
I recently read Anthony Everitt's book on the life of Cicero--a great poet, scholar, lawyer, statesman at the end of the Roman Republic just before it became the Empire--who sparred against mighty and brilliant Caesar. Unlike his contemporaries, all of whom had great military powers and backgrounds, Cicero was a civilian by heart and practice. His great influence and genius lay in his intellectual and persuasive power through the vast volume of his speeches and writings.
He devoted his life to his ideal of how the Republic of Rome should be organized and governed: democratic and consensual, in the form of a balanced constitution. But the Rome at that time was in the middle of endless civil wars and territorial expansion. The ruling oligarchy of the Republic had their immediate and urgent interests in their own survival against ever-changing political landscapes.
Alliances of convenience were constantly being made and broken and then new alliances made and broken again. While the handful of citizens of Rome enjoyed all the privileges tax-free, the majority of people outside of Rome remained unemployed thanks to the free and robust system of exploiting slaves in all aspects of labor and commerce.
Rome at that time had no civil servants, no postal services, no public library, no permanent public infrastructure. The interests of ordinary people were not effectively represented in government, just those of the Roman citizens, who were basically the families and friends of the ruling oligarchy, and the merchants who served them. Citizenship was a birthright confined only to Rome itself, although the Republic controlled vast territories including the whole Italy, Sicily, Spain, Gaul (modern France), Turkey, the Arabic region, and Egypt.
The Roman senators in Cicero's time were endlessly filibustering legislation, walking out, circulating wicked rumors, rigging the calendars, exposing one another's sexual scandals. The endless checks and balances that they created effectively prevented government from functioning. Anyone in power could veto any legislations at any time. It was a highly dysfunctional. The citizens and the rest of people in Italy didn't behave any better. Their moods and opinions were freakish and easily manipulative and changeable. When they wanted something, they wanted it to happen immediately. Otherwise, violent unrest erupted. The public did not care much about Rome's diplomatic forays in dealing with outer kingdoms. They wanted military victories which brought material riches to themselves. Often they acted against their own interests.
The author shows that Cicero's effort was destined to fail because his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. Cicero, like so many of his contemporaries, regarded politics in personal rather than in structural terms. For Cicero, like his contemporaries, it was up to better men to run the government and better laws to keep them in order. Cicero's principles were applied onto a wrong premise. A great admirer of Greek philosophy and culture, Cicero thought that people would naturally respond to reason, lawfulness, and the ideal of freedom and democracy and that they would be persuaded to express civility when pressed. At least, that was what he preached.
Caesar, however, had a deeper and darker insight into human nature and saw that a solution lay in a completely new system of government. Caesar had the insight to realize where the problems lay and tried to shake up the structure of government and was assassinated as a result. It seemed no small irony that Caesar was the one who wanted to install policies to protect, and give voice to, the working poor and saw that he could pass his policies through the filibustering Senate unless he himself had the power akin to a monarch. Collectively, the senate was at once cowardly and self-righteous. In the hope of preserving the democratic Republic, they assassinated Caesar.
Cicero and his contemporaries thought that the removal of Caesar would guarantee the return of the Republic as a functioning government. Of course, it didn't. Only more civil wars and more turmoil ensued, until Augustus came into power and patiently and subtly changed the system into a monarchy. It was interesting to read that the general public, unhappy with the grain supply system, were fearful that the Senate could not do anything right and violently demanded that Augustus alone should have a total governing power! Augustus wasn't a fool to accept that kind of dangerous demand. But he achieved the power through careful calculations. Now I've moved on to reading Everitt's next book on the life of Augustus who became essentially the first emperor of Roman Empire after the death of Caesar.
Why am I telling you this lengthy story of the stormy period of ancient Rome? What struck me most painfully is the knowledge that although technically and materially the human civilization has changed so much since ancient Rome (here, we are talking about a period between 70 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the human psychology has not. The thoughts and behaviors and the tactics of the Roman senate were not different from what our own governments conduct themselves. The nature of public -- its fickleness, its ignorance, its impatience, its indifference to the general welfare for others -- hasn't changed either.
Yet, collectively our civilization has progressed. Slowly, mind you. Except for excitable minorities, we generally think that the diplomacy is preferable to outright wars. We've been experimenting and kept revising various government forms to provide the welfare to the citizens. We've established the international ethical codes that we cannot invade other countries for the sake of obtaining fuel and food. We've learned enough lessons to help other countrymen when disasters strike them. And now it began to dawn onto us that there are no territorial boundaries when it comes to climate changes and infectious disease.
All these positive changes, however, didn't occur because we have become wiser or better in person. If we got wiser at anything, we learned from painful and repeated mistakes and finally were able to create the right framework to rein in our own fickle psyche. Producing the right governing tools to protect ourselves from our own fickle nature requires a consensus. But it has taken a long time to build such a consensus. For certain issues, we have no hope of finding consensus anytime soon, not just consensus on a solution, mind you, but on the very nature of the problems!
So, human progress comes about at painfully slow pace and at high price. Our history shows that real changes do not come through revolution. There are always counter-revolution, and more blood shed as a result. All permanent changes came about through evolution when we collectively had the self knowledge as to exactly where our weaknesses lie.
We have to be aware of our own illogical and unpredictable nature of our own mind before finding ways to deal with them. That is the form of self awareness. If we are aware of our own vulnerability, shiftiness, and freakishness, it's so much easier to find solutions to a lot of our problems that are essentially self-inflicted. Once we become aware of how the mind works, it's easier to transform our mind into something more positive. Well, that is another long story yet to be written!
The entire human history is a long, painful journey of collective self awareness.
Lisa Bright
Earth Sangha
www.earthsangha.org
Selected by the Catalogue for Philanthropy as
"one of the best small charities in the Washington, DC, region."