The Decline and Fall of the House of Walmarticus

(A little programming note. I’ve got two books coming out next week and I’m very excited. They’re part of a new and different project for me, something that started out as a giggle and got serious. I meant today’s column to be a simple think piece to give me a bit of extra time to do my pre-launch stuff, but a bit like the books, this also got a bit serious. Oh well. Apologies for next week, when you’re gonna be hearing all about this one weird thing I just did. - JB)

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Civilisations don’t usually crash like a rock dropped from orbit. They rot like a banana left on a dashboard in summer. It’s not always war or fire or aliens with mind-scanning sex hats. Sometimes, it's just... vibes. Bad ones. Civilisations mostly collapse like a drunk clown at an open-casket funeral. It’s slow, undignified, and yet, in its way, still funny if you're broken enough inside. It starts with the first cancer cells blooming in the civilisational marrow and ends when the last citizen willingly trades their vote for a petrol station sausage roll and a TikTok filter that gives them really poppin’ abs.

The Romans understood this back when they thought wearing pants was for barbarians. In the Republic (that golden age before hudreds of years of sequentially stabbing Caesar in the salad aisle), they rocked out on virtus; a word that started off denoting manliness, but evolved into something closer to “the quality of not being a complete dick to everyone.” It was the animating spirit of the state. Think courage, discipline, a fondness for public service, and not murdering Senators in the hot tub because they made goo-goo eyes at your sexy horse.

To be fair, they actually believed in it because it worked for a long time. Cincinnatus was their spirit animal, a dude who saved the Republic and gave up absolute power to go back to his farm. They named their kids after abstract nouns like Honour and Virtue, and those little ruffians would grow up, join a legion and march into the dark German forests to get slaughtered in their hundreds just to have a chance at slaughtering bearded barbarian hordes by their thousands, all for the honour and virtue of Rome.

Insert needle scratch sound effect and jump forward to today. Has our civilisational virtus been hollowed out by vibes and followers, and vibes about followers?

Jonathan V. Last, in his gloomy little overnight essay “American Cthulhu,” doesn’t say “we’re Rome,” but you can hear the gladius rattling in the cutlery drawer. JVL, whose writing I love because it confirms all my priors with maximum prejudice, wonders aloud whether the American public still possesses the moral fortitude to govern itself, or if the US has become the Empire of Shrug: a dying republic powered by algorithmic tribalism and whatever discharge is seeping from Tucker Carlson’s pulsating cloaca today.

After explaining why the idea of some stories ‘breaking through’ to voters is a bullshit idea. “To talk this way is to believe that it’s the story that has to maneuver around and penetrate some shield which prevents voters from perceiving the outside world. The story acts; the people are inert and acted upon,” JVL asks the big question: What if modern American society is simply rotten?

This happens. Just as a matter of history, we have seen societies fall apart, or tear themselves apart, because the people were no longer capable of sustaining them. All empires fall, eventually. Why would American society be impervious to degeneration? Give me that argument?

It gets worse. The citizens of Canada and Australia recently proved that they are capable of self-government. Faced with a Trumpist threat, these modern, advanced democracies repulsed it. Overwhelmingly.

If you want to go crazy, ask yourself: Why is it that stories and information are able to “break through” to Canadians and Australians?

Is it because the stories and information in those countries are more powerful or active?

Or is it that, at present, the character of Canadians and Australians is equal to the demands of self-rule in a way that the character of Americans is not?

The nut of his thesis? Americans just saw a man get handed a $400 million jumbo-jet-shaped bribe by a gross foreign autocracy and said, “Neat. Can it do barrel rolls?”

I like JVL’s thesis because it makes us look all cool and Roman and shit. It’s nice for our Canadian pals, too.

But let’s not wrap ourselves in the toga of awesomeness just yet.

Maybe we’re not as completely exhausted or culturally lobotomised by decades of cable news, Cheez Whizz brain and oligarchic creep. But in the recent past, our collective virtue took a cigarette break long enough to build a series of Pacific gulags and fill them with the wretched of the Earth. If you study the policy template of what Trump is doing with migrants, refugees and pretty much anyone who fails the baseline aesthetic for Fox News hot, it feels very familiar.

Still, we’re not the ones speedrunning Carl Sagan’s 1995 prophecy, yet.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

So what do the rest of us do with that? Is there a point to virtue when Rome is one Kanye candidacy away from being replaced by the Thirst Trap Hunger Games hosted on Twitch?

Perhaps, as JVL suggests, the only bet is to pretend that virtue still matters, because unfortunately, we’re getting our faces mashed into the uncomfortable reality that it does.

History’s darkest joke is that virtue matters most when it seems lost. The Romans didn’t renounce virtus in a single tantrum. They just slowly decided it was for suckers and squishcucks, while the smart money went long on orgy futures. By the time they looked up, they were measuring emperors’ reigns in months, not decades, and the barbarians weren’t at the gates anymore; they were on their third lap of the Forum, playing Weekend at Bernie’s with Julius Caesar’s mummified remains.

Our modern virtus isn’t gonna ask that we don togas or die gloriously in a Germanic mud pit. But it might need us to resist the algorithmic brain-smoothing that turns citizens into dopamine-addled click-slaves. Or that we occasionally look up from the scroll-hole long enough to remember that societies aren’t built on vibes and spectacle, but on boring, painful things like institutional integrity, shared reality, and not electing vaudeville supervillains just because.

It could be that civic virtue is like herd immunity because it needs scale. It can’t work in a zero fucks environment. The worst timeline isn’t the one where virtue fails; it’s the one where nobody notices, or worse, when no one cares.