Apathy’s Cause
Examine history, we are told, or else we are doomed to repeat it. We cannot examine history unless we have first learned it. Unfortunately for our own sakes, as a society we have failed to study history or find reason to care for it. In our apathy for our own history, we have begun to walk down the road of repetition.
The decline of the Roman empire was marked by apathy within Roman society. Rome had been a culture that flourished as it sought to establish itself as a republic. It advanced in technology, science, art, and literature. Roman culture began to flourish as it sought self-governance—rule from the people rather than the dictates of a single totalitarian ruler. Though our republic and that of Rome have a few great differences, they spawn from a similar idea: can man rule himself? Both answered in the affirmative. But inside Rome, something happened.
Cultural and religious values play heavily into the makeup of a society. Roman society worshiped human-like gods. These gods were not infinite, but simply amplified versions of human men and women. They exemplified the Romans own greatest traits of strength, power, passion, and love, as well as their weaknesses, temptations, crimes, and treacheries. At the studs of Roman culture existed these gods who, like the Romans, were struggling to get a grip on both the weightiness and the finiteness of their own humanity. In the end, the gods couldn’t pull it off.
Roman society eventually caved in on itself; it’s amoral gods were unable to hold up the weight of a people attempting to rule themselves. As is fact proven by history, an amoral society is fit only to be ruled by a despot. It takes a dictator to bring a form of order, a form of peace where all people hold to one moral: each is right in his own eyes. It is impossible for a society to function such a mindset. With no hope in the gods, society turned its head to man and the emperor became god. When all do what is right in their own eyes, soon all will be forced to do what is right in only one’s eyes. And that is what we call a dictatorship.
But what Rome did not have, the United States of America does have: an infinite Ruler from whom our Law is derived. I do not speak here of a dictator or human ruler, but a Creator. As we pledge ourselves to our own republic, we recognize that America is indeed “one nation, under God,” who indubitably has and gives “liberty and justice for all.” These are not arbitrary ideals decided upon by a group we refer to as our founding fathers. They are rights set out for all humanity by the Creator, God himself.
Our society does not have to crumble from within as Rome did. For within, though our society is given to amorality and decadent indifference, the studs of our republic have been sunk deep into a reality that goes beyond our human selves. The God our principles are founded upon is not one created from our image, but we from his. We must now go back to the sources, in search of meaning that goes deeper than ourselves and that which we may create.
- John B Moore IV, Loveland, Colorado
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