The new centurions - In showing ignorance of the outside world, America is doing as Rome did

THE ROMAN AND AMERICAN WORLDVIEWS
The new centurions - In showing ignorance of the outside world, America is doing as Rome did
By Cullen Murphy
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published June 10, 2007

The Rome and America comparison is very much in the air these days -- you have only to cock an ear. It's invoked by those who yearn for a worldwide Pax Americana, and also by those who wring their hands about an impending "decline and fall."

In truth, ancient Rome and modern America differ in a thousand ways. But a handful of parallels hold up.

One has to do with the way we view the outside world. Imperial Rome often knew little about the people beyond its frontiers. Disparaging those people, it underestimated their capabilities. America's motives in the world may be more well-meaning than Rome's, but our behavior is handicapped by the same disability. In our ignorance, we don't see what's coming at us -- or what we're hurtling toward.

The idea of American exceptionalism -- the notion that we represent "a shining city on a hill" -- is certainly one reason for lack of interest in the outside world. This indifference is long-standing, and confirmed with tedious regularity. A recent, particularly painful benchmark: A 2002 National Geographic study, which found that three-quarters of Americans age 18 to 24 could not locate Iran or Iraq on a map.

It may be that busy people in a sprawling nation simply have other things on their minds. But what about those you might call the elite? Throughout 2004, CBS News devoted all of three minutes to coverage of the genocide in Darfur. America's intelligence agencies have been criticized for lack of attention to militant Islam, but the underlying problem was hardly new. Three years before 9/11, a former CIA officer recalled that during his years at the agency, not one of the Near East Division chiefs could read or speak Arabic, Persian or Turkish.

"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."

The Romans, like Americans, needed to be aware of the activities of certain outsiders. Yet their "intelligence-gathering" was haphazard -- the result of serendipity rather than design. One historian observes that the Romans based foreign policy more on "a traditional and stereotyped view of foreign peoples than on systematic intelligence about their political, social and cultural institutions."

The information they did possess often arrived with a delegation from here, or with some hostages from there, or on the lips of a trader who had heard something from another trader -- the ancient equivalents, say, of CNN, Ahmad Chalabi and "friends in the oil business."

Poor communications hampered intelligence. The overland trip from Rome to Antioch and back, for instance, took two months. Ironically, in an age of instantaneous communications, American intelligence suffers from time lags just as significant. The FBI office in Phoenix sent a warning to Washington in June 2001, noting that an "inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" were signing up for lessons at American flight schools. The warning might as well have gone by horseback: No one saw it until after 9/11. Bureaucracy may be the new geography.

As Americans do, the Romans tended to see foreigners in terms of broad cultural caricatures. The Greeks were admired for their art, literature and philosophy. But admiration can curdle into resentment, and Romans who affected Greek ways (in the manner of Americans who affect Anglicisms after a semester at Oxford) were sometimes derided as "Greeklings." Syrians were said to be dishonest. Egyptians were thought to be weak and degenerate. The northern Gauls were seen as immoderate in their appetites and without stamina in battle -- a durable stereotype, it would seem.

Cicero once conceded the superior qualities of many non-Roman peoples, but this was a backhanded way of demonstrating that Rome's pre-eminence must be divinely ordained: "In piety, religion and appreciation of the omnipotence of the gods, [Rome] was without equal."

You can't miss the Ciceronian ring in the words of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, explaining the American capture of a Muslim warlord in Somalia a few years ago: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

When it comes to cultural caricature, the shoe (or sandal) is sometimes on the other foot: Outsiders have opinions too. As America has confronted the hostility not only of radical Islam but also of many one-time friends, the question "Why do they hate us?" has been asked again and again. The menu of foreign complaint is well known: Americans are loutish vulgarians -- uncultured and materialistic, God-drunk and power-mad, implacable and self-congratulatory, impervious to the needs and views of others. And on and on.

Novelist Margaret Drabble admitted recently that anti-Americanism "rises up in my throat like acid reflux." 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."

The Romans, too, presented a tempting target. The barbarians were mainly illiterate and left few surviving impressions. The Greeks were another story. In Greek eyes the Romans could be laughably uncouth. The story was told of one wealthy Roman after the sack of Corinth who ordered some antique works of art sent home, warning the shipper that if any were damaged he would have to replace them with new ones.

Misperceptions matter. Failure to understand "the other" is sometimes comic and often inconsequential -- but every so often it is catastrophic. It caused Rome to blunder into trouble in the forests of Germany and the deserts of the Middle East. America's impact on the world may be unprecedented in its scope, but we face a predicament that has a distinctly Roman precedent -- one that globalization will only make more acute.

As with Rome, everything that America touches can potentially touch us back -- often unpredictably, and maybe not for years. This is an inevitable consequence of global power; it cannot be wished away. But ignorance of the world makes the problem worse, by concealing the fact that it's even there. ---------- Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of Vanity Fair and the former managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book, from which this essay is drawn, is "Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America."