The Ariovistus bit sounds like the legend of Vortigern in post-Roman Britain, or indeed how the Normans first came to Ireland- one Celt seeks allies from abroad against his neighbours and they decide they like the place.

It’s pretty fair to say that survival of much or any Celtic legacy at all in fringe western Europe owes a fair bit to the Roman conquest. And not much at that.

Though I gather that Vulgar Latin that came down to Western Europe in the late Empire and after included a few Gaulish words in strategic places- caballus for horse, instead of equus, being the key example. Can’t say why. Of course, both words left many derivative, parallel forms.

Celtic peoples were being pushed westward from former strongholds in central and eastern Europe, primarily by Germani. The Helveti, whose decision to migrate from their original homeland in Switzerland gave Caesar the excuse he needed to intervene in Gaul, was done under pressure of Germani encroachment. In a foreshadowing of later Roman practice, Ariovistus, a Germani warlord, had been hired by one Gaulish tribe to intervene against another Gaulish tribe. Out of contempt for the Gauls, he’d come to the conclusion that he wanted to acquire political control on the far side of the Rhine. Caesar’s troops, even though they’d been spooked by accounts of the Germani from their Gaulish allies, persuaded Ariovistus that he really should stay on the Germani side of the Rhine. Caesar’s German cavalry could usually route their Gallic opponents just by showing up.

While the line between Germani and Gaul was probably blurrier than Caesar or other Roman observers cared to comment upon, it seems clear that Gallic military prowess was in long-term decline by the time of Caesar’s conquest. Whatever the Germani were doing, it was better than what the Gauls were doing. Giving the provincials of Gaul more military spine would have been a useful check against the fall of the Western empire. However, basing it on pre-conquest Gallic valor seems like betting on an already weakened horse.

Charlemagne et. al. sought to model themselves on the Emperors of old. The Classics (capital C), was the basis of elite education. The legacy remained, and the lost bits were missed and mourned.

I went to Stockholm a few years ago and visited the Vasa Museum (HIGHLY recommended, by the way), and what struck me, was the decoration of the ship included two main themes, old Roman Emperors and Saints. Gustav Adolph’s whole military revolution, was an attempt to go back to a more technocratic, rational and standardized system, that had been how the Romans did it, but that how Europe had declined enough that it could not be done a gain for hundreds of years after they had gone.

Especially about the dependence on the centralized military power of Rome. I have been in the past fascinated by the collapse of the warfighting potential of the Celtic peoples under Rome. Britain especially. Maybe they were never quite up to it against the Germans, but if they’d maintained [and further developed] more of a military culture, and married that to the technical and organizational skills many had clearly learned from Rome, and been able to organize them at progressively lower levels, perhaps more explicit, larger scale, culturally specific survivals would have existed.

I think my earlier contention could be summed up two ways, and consistent with your points more or less.

1. Those lower level things really are more survivable, often do survive, and in the case of Rome actually did survive in hugely significant ways. On that I agree but I emphasize the idea that they did survive precisely because when we speak of Rome falling because it didn’t have enough of those, what I am saying is that they had a lot of them and they did survive. Rome didn’t fall at that level. Went on for centuries and produced a later Europe, to a large degree. That’s what this smaller-scale civilizational survival will likely continue to look like.

2. I still like the higher order organization version of civilization- it has produced huge gains in organization, infrastructure, spread of peoples and cultures and institutions [in whatever way one is into that kind of thing; I'm always torn, unless it's my people, culture and institutions]. We just have to accept that those levels will periodically experience a correction, and will fall. We are indeed, as you say, well served to have a continuity strategy that emphasizes the smaller scales that have a chance to go on or project something forward in time.

We won’t have a strategy that perennially prevents any kind of ‘fall’, though. Those will likely keep happening.

You have to watch with the Romans and their self-interest though. The empire went from being ‘empire’ as the power projection of Romans and their Italian confederates into ruled provinces to being a body in which everybody had the citizenship, thought of himself at least in part as a Roman, and had a chance one of his own could get in the senate or the palace. Power ceased to reside much at Rome itself, and the direct connection of the elites with Rome, or to some extent event Italy, started to fade pretty hard.

I recall some theorist discussing different definitions of the word empire in English, including as “the extention of the nationalism of one nation” [like the recent colonial empires], or as “the universal state at the end of the international system” including of a relatively isolated civilizational region. Rome went from being the projection of the power of the city and its Italian federation into subject territories, to being the amalgamation of the Mediterranean world into one huge polity. Except for the one great enemy, Parthia/Persia, which had comparable aspirations for the Central Asian and Mesopotamian worlds and clashed with Rome where those worlds met, there was hardly anything worth discussing outside Rome at its height.

All of which is a roundabout way of emphasising that if there were good reasons men in some areas shed Roman identity relatively fast, there were good reasons that identity clung to them for centuries after, as well. They had had a stake in it.

And the eastern half lasted another thousand years, and wasn’t obviously on its last legs for about 600 of those at least. They did, of course, also have the Hellenistic legacy to go with, but it hadn’t been notable for either durable imperial unity or for local self-actualization. I would argue the fact the eastern empire survived so long was Hellenistic culture and Roman institutions.

On two other points- agree entirely on Europe in later times. the relative autonomy of so many places, even if quite large states of themselves, was a good testing ground and although the thesis is old fashioned, probably was a driver for Europe’s success. Arguably, backsliding imperial civilizations of that time like India and China, had also had their best days when divided into competing entities. It’s a strong argument.

I’m not entirely convinced that the Celtic peoples or the Germans would have build all that infrastructure. But you never know. The Celts could build wooden towns and fortifications of some scale, plus they had robust metalworking, so they were dunces. The potential might have been there. Though probably only if they had seen the need, which probably would have meant organizing commerce, government and defence on a larger than tribal scale. That treasure chest and trap is waiting for many cultures that never actually get to try.

What I’m getting at is the military structure in Europe, with regards to the Romans. When they came in and took over control, the various Gaulish and Celtic tribes were chaotically organized, and in military terms, not too much different than the Native American tribes were–Every tribe had its warbands, conducted warfare against one another as seen to be necessary, and thus were self-sufficient. That didn’t help against the unified might of the Romans, in the short term, so they eventually became reliant on the Romans and did the usual specialization thing that civilization brings with it.

Which, over the long haul, proved disastrous for actual military potential in Europe. Since the Romans essentially pre-empted all military activity, the formerly fractious Gauls and Celts became complacent and unable to really mount effective military operations.

Parallels between the Pax Romana and the Pax Americana are there for the reader to work out…

Because of this pre-emption, the “Fall of the Roman Empire” was a lot more damaging than it should have been, because the Romans had established a virtual monopoly on military power, and the use of it. The formerly self-reliant peoples of Europe became so many sheep, unable to defend themselves against their still-barbaric cousins.

There’s something to be said for unity and the mass of things enabled by large-scale organization; the problem is how you achieve such large-scale entities. When you create something that monopolizes and chokes out other options, you’ve got a problem–And, that’s just what the Roman Empire’s military and trade systems did. There was no depth, no robustness to their organizational schemes, and since they were all centered on Rome itself, well… Rome fell, and everything went with it.

Had things been done differently, more organically? Yeah, those Roman roads would still have been built, but they’d have been built by the locals, maintained by the locals, and when the idiots in Rome finally succumbed to corruption, the fact they weren’t around anymore would have been barely noticeable. Unfortunately, the Romans weren’t interested in “civilization” as such, merely how they could benefit from it for themselves, by imposing it on others.

There’s a huge difference between an empire for empire’s sake, and the sort of organic scaling that takes place when everyone does their own thing their own way. Contrast the robustness of Europe under the Roman Empire with that of the late Middle Ages–You had hundreds, if not thousands of little polities who were exploring ways to operate and do things, which grew into larger cooperatives that became nations. The wars in Germany did not affect lives in France; when the French went nuts and went after the Cathars or the Huguenots, that didn’t affect things in the Netherlands. Robustness through variety created a situation where Europe’s fractious growth benefited the world.

Similar observations can be made about Greece vs. Persia, although Greece vs. Rome sort of argues against it all–Sometimes, you have to have unity and scale, for things to work. But, I will point out that Rome took a tremendous amount of their culture from Greece, with Greece being arguably more influential over the long haul than Rome. In some respects…

You want a long-lasting social structure, it needs to be cellular and flexible. You also have to be cold-blooded enough to let failures happen, and not give in to the temptation to prop up cells whose performance isn’t making it, because when the crisis comes, they’ll drag you down.

“Not all of those represent small social units, sometimes they are ideas or methods. But in every case peoples survived huge changes with some significant element of cultural continuity”…

I think a lot of that has to do with speed of change. Post Roman Britain did not do as well as Post Roman Gaul, and I suspect there is something in the speed. Roman Britain was suddenly essentially evacuated, and left to its own devices, and declined (if you will), faster.

I also think scale has much to do with it as well, and that there is an optimum or at least minimum size. If not enough engineers stayed, and/or passed on their knowledge, the the minimum number of engineers drops below a certain “critical mass”, then suddenly we can’t make concrete anymore, or replace domes or broken aqueducts.

One of my favourite book series are the Osprey Men-at-Arms series. Each gives a detailled description of soldiers from a particular time and place, so for example, The Southern African Bush War, would have full colour plates of a typical South African soldier, a Recce, an Angolan Soldier, Cuban “Advisor” and so on, with detailed descriptions of their uniforms and kit.

The late Roman Empire one was very interesting. The late period legionary looked similar to his late Republic/Early Imperial counterpart, but there were definite differences and a definite, but subtle, decline.

He still had a uniform, armour, sword, standard pattern shield, organization, structure, discipline, and all the rest, but it was diluted. The sword was more like the barbarian pattern, so was the shield. The armour was cheaper, whole regular units were foreign, not just the auxiliaries.

I doubt that his officers felt that they were inferior to their ancestors, or that they were nearing the end of a long decline, because it was slow and subtle. We can only notice it because we have the book to show us the difference between the older and newer.

The Empire hadn’t fallen, but it was in decline, and I’m not sure that the average citizen would have even been aware of it. Much like you said, village life would not change much at the margins. The Empire didn’t fall overnight, it took centuries, and I sometimes wonder, where we are on the curve. Has our civilization peaked? If so, when? And how far along the decline curve are we right now?

I saw the same thing at work a few years ago. We had a boss who was, literally Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss, almost down to the hair, and equally dysfunctional. People started putting Dilbert cartoons up on the bulletin board, and I actually saw him read one, and comment on how funny it was, and what an idiot pointy haired boss was, and then go back to his office and put out another of his crazy policy memos.

I think that the problem has to do with scale and Dunbar’s Number. It seems to me that the larger the organization, the worse the problem. A crap Lt can be worked around, and everyone below him KNOWS he’s crap, and the rest of the Company can go on just fine, but a toxic LtCol can wreck a whole unit for a very long time.

I also suspect that Dunbar’s number and our evolutionary psychology is why Socialism still has appeal. Back in our hunter/gatherer days, resources really were a zero sum game, and we ran around in small clan based groups, “From each according…” probably worked. Also, if the chief was crap, everybody knew it, and he could be replaced, or even killed if needed.

I think that a lot of our problems come from our ancestral optimal organization not being scale-able, and us continuing to try to do so, because it is what we have evolved to do, and what we know, and what seems to work in practice a lot of the time.

You see this in business all the time. The small business/startup is successful as all hell, but flops and fails once it gets to big or gets swallowed up by a bigger fish.

I don’t think he necessarily was meant to shoot his predecessor and take the job that way- otherwise internal party discipline could collapse. I think they rather assumed that if the claims were true, the man could dominate a cell meeting and be acclaimed. Fuhrerprinzip in action at the working level.

I realize it is tendentious in many ways, but I have long thought this aspect of National Socialism strangely Randian. Or vice versa. It is not entirely unlike what Harry Jones seemed to be saying.

Of course, once you add on fuhrerprinzip’s other core ideas [absolute responsibility of each leader for his domain, great or small; accountability only upward to the next senior leader; not to mention whatever ideology the system is married to] you move quickly out of it sounding like election by a town meeting, or for that matter a relatively benign feudal system, into some other territory altogether.

Institutions, ideas and personalities did their best to survive evolving circumstances and project themselves into the very heart of new arrangements. In some places more successfully than others. In Britain, poorly. Pre-Roman Brit structures were largely in place and lightly Romanized, but for reasons I’ve never fully assimilated were not that robust. Some theories posited a major demographic collapse as a factor. Otherwise I can only say their politics were unusually dysfunctional and the decline of British military capacity shameful. That last at least might be laid at the feet of being under legion protection too long, but then Britons served in them.

OTOH, in Gaul and even heartland Italy, Roman institutions, customs, practices, and social networks survived quite well and formed the basis of civilization in those countries for many centuries and for the evolution of what exists there now.

What fell was precisely the centralized imperial superstructure.

If you want to talk of civilizations “never falling” because they are robust at the smaller scales, this is what it looks like. It can indeed work. But then we can’t complain that it fell.

Probably the Fertile Crescent provides many earlier examples. The Sumerians ultimately proved most robust in their language and religious ideology. The short lived Akkadians bequeathed a form of political organization, social structures, city forms, and language to the Assyrians and Babylonians for nearly 2000 years. Persian civilization is consistent enough at a variety of levels to claim millennia of history.

Not all of those represent small social units, sometimes they are ideas or methods. But in every case peoples survived huge changes with some significant element of cultural continuity. Small scale social structures of farm, town, village probably didn’t change much either, come to thing, until recently. The peoples as such were subject to demographic churn, but some almost always fed into the descent of conquerors, some absorbed them, some lingered on through ages of tiny conquering overcastes who are gone.

What I’m getting at is that I think Kirk’s point has huge merit, and it has actually been demonstrated in the past. But I like that cultures also develop higher level stuff, grand civilizations, empires, huge infrastructures and so on. We just have to accept that those will have a temporary, even cyclical element to them and, at that level, civilizations will fall. That is not in and of itself a flaw in the mechanism. Nobody said any civilization could be eternal, at least not in a fixed form. Ours won’t be either, if we aren’t already seeing that.

But we can try to build for robustness at the lower levels. They do last longer. Undermining them is probably our greatest failing.

Johnson had some similar things to say:

. . . “Why, Sir, if the fellow does not think as he speaks, he is lying; and I see not what honour he can propose to himself from having the character of a liar. But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons.”