More "News That Stays News" From Gibbon

Speaking of Gibbon (yes, we were), my friend Arthur Maisel followed up with this email:

In the year 251, the Roman emperor Decius took advantage of a brief respite in the defense of the empire from the encroachment of the Goths—a respite that had resulted from his own successful campaign against them and had led to his elevation—to consider why the formerly impregnable empire now found it hard to defend itself from barbarians.

An able and decent man, he came to the conclusion that the major factor was the decline in the former high moral standards among the Romans. So he determined to reestablish the ancient office of censor, which had become a mere shell in the great Augustan absorption of all power to the monarchy.

In the days of the republic, the censor had been, with the consuls, the most powerful person in the government. The censor oversaw not just public decency but behavior in general—in commerce, in the practice of religion—and included the control of political corruption in his mandate. Decius, who would soon lose his life in the next Gothic foray against the northern frontier, appointed Valerian (later to become emperor himself) as censor. But Valerian saw that the job was all but hopeless because, as Gibbon (chapter X) sums it up, “a censor may maintain, he can never restore, the morals of a state. . . .In a period when these principles are annihilated, the censorial jurisdiction must sink into empty pageantry or be converted into a partial instrument of vexatious oppression.”

Gibbon notes with grim humor that “the approaching event of war soon put an end to the prosecution of a project so specious [i.e., having an attractive appearance] but so impracticable; and whilst it preserved Valerian from the danger [of failure], saved the emperor Decius from the disappointment which would most probably have attended it.”

The Republican coalition seems to be in a similar bind. The religious fundamentalists—at least the sincere ones—want to restore what they imagine to have been the former moral standards of the United States. Their allies in the Republican party, however, bear much of the responsibility for the destruction of the standards of behavior in commerce, media, and government (not the realms of behavior, it must be admitted, that the fundamentalists tend to focus their attention on, preferring scrutiny of private matters to public ones).

Our would-be Valerians are as little likely to succeed, though that must be counted as at best cold comfort.

As an aside, I would guess that the usefulness of war as a distraction from failed domestic projects hasn't been lost on our "Decius"--Emperor George II.