Despite their lasting ideologies, well-known pantheon, and globally dominating military campaigns, Ancient Rome’s greatest gift (endnote 1) to, and influence upon, the make up of contemporary society, was its architecture.
The Roman’s thought in circles; they gave the world both the arch and the dome. By distributing weight over much greater areas was allowed by the columns of the Greek period, the arch and dome allowed for much larger buildings with less fortification. Both of these forms made their way into the Middle East, where they were heavily employed in the construction of mosques. The penultimate example is the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, which has been both a church and a mosque. Indeed, it was the Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire), imperial Roman Christians who left Italy for Turkey (Constantinople being named for the Emperor Constantine) which in 532 CE began construction on the Hagia Sophia. The arch made it’s way back into Christendom via the crusades. Its reappearance was pivotal; the redistribution of weight via arches – extended into vaults and buttresses – ushered in the Gothic era in medieval architecture. Modern examples of domes can be seen throughout Washington DC, and of course in every major sports venue.
(A) Rome's Pantheon Dome (B) The Hagia Sophia (C) Gothic arches and flying buttresses all over Notre Dame (D) The Capitol Building, Washington D.C.
In a context more deeply rooted in the structure and advancement of contemporary society, we look to Roman civic infrastructure. Their sewers and aqueducts were integral in maintaining society; the sewers kept cities clean and lessened the chance of an epidemic, while the aqueducts provided fresh drinking and bathing water for hundreds of thousands of citizens. Both innovations were made possible by yet another innovation, the invention of cement.
That we live in a world of poured concrete is an unavoidable fact, and yet the ideological advancements of the Roman architectural wizardry are what really matter. What we see in cement is a portable, durable, mass-produced material that can be easily fit into molds to expedite construction and create utilitarian structures, a material and concept without which contemporary cities wouldn’t be possible (endnote 2) . Yet their civic infrastructure is of even greater importance, for in it we see, for the first time in the history of human society, a government providing for, rather than lording over, its people (endnote 3) . This is the very tenet of modernity, the basis on which most prosperous world governments are formed (China of course excluded because…well, China is a beast of its own nature).
(A) Schematics of Roman Cement (B) Roman aqueduct (C) Roman sewer (D) The poured concrete of Mexico City
In examining Roman architecture, we find that the Rome’s greatest gift to the world was its greatest gift to its own citizens: the gift of civic infrastructure and civil engineering .
Endnotes
1. “Gift” being negligible in this context – more on this later.
2. Things start to get a little heavier here, because though concrete and the concept of mass-produced structures were very influential on the modern city, it wasn’t necessarily a good influence. For proof of this we only need look to the industrial slums of a London or Paris, where we see crap housing erected very quickly and poorly for people who were more or less slaves and lived (ironically, given the context and Roman influence, which may or may not have been intentional, though probably wasn’t) in deplorable (forgive the French) shit holes without proper sewage facilities, and died in droves of disease.
3. Interjecting here again for a little discourse on governments providing for v. making people think they’re providing for so that they step in line to the party’s call (this being all very Debordian and post-Marxist and probably a little far out given the context…however…). So what we really have, rather than a society of selfless old boys who wanted to take care of the citizenry, is the beginning of what we can call for now the Orwellian society, wherein the oligarchs hit upon the fact that it might just be easier to appease people than overtly crush them into oppression (though of course the Romans did this, too, what with their slaves and foreign invasions and basic policy of forcing conquered nations into submission…. then hooking them up with water and bath houses and what not – not too far removed from what, say, a certain agglomeration of states may have done in places that may or may not have been called something like Puerto Rico or Hawaii or even said states that used to be part of a country called something like Mexico). So, to review, the Romans gave pretense of some kind of quasi-egalitarian society (at least there was a senate. But of course the Greeks had democracy as well, though theirs was more obviously an iron-fist, it’s-only-the-really wealthy-already-important-and-powerful-dudes-who-have-a-say-in-this democracy) while actually they were just throwing the dog a bone so it wouldn’t attack them.
This is really psychologically interesting, the deeper ramifications of this, basically that Rome was sort of the first USA (read land of plenty and opportunity, of flourishing arts and vibrant hedonism) and the purveyor of 20th century fascism (as in presenting a façade to “the people” that seems as though the government need convince said people that said government or rulers or what have you is/are the way to go but actually using said propaganda to subtly coerce people into believing, thinking, and behaving how said ruling entity desires said people to believe think and behave).
A very important word in previous parenthetical aside is propaganda. The US and Nazi Germany [and places like Japan and Mexico and basically everywhere else in the known world (and I can’t speak for head hunting tribes or Native Americans or Australian sheep farmers)] are joined by their similar use of propaganda, and, it’s probably safe to say, propaganda, even more than concrete or any other such thing, is the touchstone of the modern nation-state because there would be no such thing as the modern nation state were it not for propaganda. By this what we mean to say is that propaganda defines the modern country in two very distinct and important ways: (A) Governing bodies and media entities of the modern nation-state pump out endless reams of information (be it recorded, written, filmed, etc…) that very specifically define what a nation is, re racial demographics, political, religious, & philosophical ideals, social structures, et al. Were it not these presentations, the country would not be a country as much as a collection of people living under a government. Thus, a country is literally described and understood by its propaganda. (B) The people living in said country have no cohering notion beyond the propaganda. Take for instance by way of example the United States. The American Dream, society of tolerance, cornucopia of success and progress: all of these things, propaganda. The propagandist notion that these people are one people, that they form a single unit, is the reason that the country is a country, is a single unit. Were it not for the idea, there would not be the reality. A confusing and circular situation.
Let’s break this down a little bit and look first at Nazi Germany and then at the US (and here of course we need to throw in a little note to the uppities out there who are thinking well shit man you just lost all of my interest cause you’re saying that the good ol’ US of A is the same thing as them damn hate-mongering Natzis. So, we don’t mean to say that there are direct parallels between the policies and war-mongering tendencies of Nazi Germany and the US – in fact, the US is much more sly, and does its dirty business behind closed doors, and has therefore not yet been besieged by the entire Western world in an effort to stop its tide. Rather, we simply mean that the entities employ propaganda in very similar ways) use propaganda to define what they are as states.
Through literature, posters, and of course the propagandically brilliant films of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazis presented the image of a very organized, very thorough, very united, and very powerful German nation. Of course, apart from the members of the military and party and some conservative fringes, most of Germany was nothing like this. It was a hedonistic (looking to you, cabaret), culturally and socially vibrant (the German films of the 20’s and 30’s stand as some of the most artistically, intellectually progressive works of cinema ever created, a reputation the very much deserve) bohemia with a collapsed economy and several very deep wounds left over from the First World War. But the country had been so ravaged by that war, the resultant Treaty of Versailles (which effectively screwed Germany so hard there was no way they would be able to live up to its provisions without a miracle or fighting its way out), and the economic collapse (the famous story of this one being that a woman took an entire wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread and someone stole her wheelbarrow but left the money, it was worth so little), that the Germany the Nazis presented (this being long before anyone was talking about the Holocaust) was a Germany the citizenry very much preferred to its current state of affairs (keep in mind here that the Nazis were actually elected; there was no coup, no brutal militaristic take over; enough of the German people wanted them in office that they won it, fair and square). The Nazis elected their propaganda began to go international, and the citizens of the world (many Germans included) began to believe that Germany was something during those Nazi years that it never was.
(A) Nazi spin doctors turning war into a game that the intellectually superior Germans will win (B) Hitler, leading the unified, organized, bright German citizens of tomorrow (C) People magazine, showing us a suspect vision of America (D) It's a Wonderful Life - false images of the American Dream
The US has been, since its inception, all about promise: the promise of citizenship for all the tired, hungry, and huddled masses (thank god this essay isn’t about broken promises), the promise of success, happiness, and your piece of the pie. Now of course the faulty math of this is: a pie has only so many pieces, so the more people that come snatching at it, the less likely any of them are to have a some. But still, with the right propagandic techniques, the US has been able to convince most people of the viability of this. Of course, early on, it was about actual propaganda, about convincing the citizens that this could quite actually be achieved. Novels, early Hollywood films, countless human interest pieces paraded in newspaper, magazines, and eventually on television, all going great lengths to show Americans that this was true, this could be achieved, it was out there for all to have (except of course black people who had formerly been the slaves who built all this crap we supposedly want and then became the disaffected underpaid lynched working class who had basically no rights, and Native Americans, who were entitled to a free college education, a trailer with a full stock of Jack Daniels in some god-forsaken patch of desert no one else wanted, and the right to build a casino, if so desired). What’s incredibly interesting and somewhat bizarre that we see is that as time goes on, as America becomes more prosperous and African Americans are given the right to vote and become in the public eye the integral part of the American fabric they’ve always been (sorry Natives, it’s still just the shitty trailer for you guys), outright propaganda shoveled by forces who wish to propagate the myth of the American Dream kinda vanishes and what takes its place is private enterprise American Dream shit-shovelers like People and US and all the myriad other similar publications and TV shows and radio programs that people actually buy, as in through capitalism it has been proven that even though the US is essentially nothing like what Hollywood et al present it as and what a lot the world think of us as, people actually want to believe that it is. So the US is very different from Nazi Germany in the respect that the Nazis put it out there and people bought it but when they went away it went away, rather than what we see in the US, where the government kinda lets sleeping dogs like and private enterprise picks the whole thing up and runs with it. And it’s possible that the government let it go precisely because private businesses had begun to pick it up and it was realized that the whole thing had taken on a life of its own, it was so ingrained in the public conscious. It didn’t actually need propagation anymore because it was no longer an image, but a deeply ingrained belief.
Now of course this is all incredibly cynical and a bit of conspiracy-theoryish and implying that some kind of incredibly devious closed-door dealings with evil shriveled men cackling and rubbing their finger nails together saying “Yeeeeeessss”. So let us just state for the record that the authors believe a nation with a unifiedly prosperous and contented populace is perfectly plausible, even in a place with the deep-seeded racial and ethnic tensions of the US, it’s just that there are countless barriers, including ironically the judges, police officers, and lawyers of Irish, Italian, Dutch, persecuted English and sometimes even African descent whose ancestors straggled in without a cent who are now deporting Latinos and Latinas in droves.
Before we continue, to briefly summarize, both Nazi Germany and the US have used propaganda to present fallacious notions of what those states were like to the average citizen, i.e. have presented a false totality that has come through that imagery to define those states through and in various eras. And we’re using these two as just example. You can probably prove this just about anywhere with a healthy image proliferation.
Of course we started this whole thing discoursing on Roman architecture, so how in the good lord’s name did we end up here? Let’s talk Roman political sculptures. Pre-Roman art was very largely art for art’s sake. Art that was not created for purely aesthetic reasons was created to appease gods, praise heroes, or serve some other practical function. Egyptian art is monolithic and timeless, created such to remind its viewers of the everlasting qualities of their gods and rulers. Key word here being remind, not convince. Greek sculpture, particularly that of the Hellenistic period, detailed the exploits of heroes, praised their deeds, and reinforced their beauty. Essentially the art of these epochs, as well as those of the Incans, Olmecs, Mayans, and Persians, if we decide to look elsewhere, was intended to reinforce that which was already known.
The Romans were playing a very different game. Roman officials, much like those of the Greeks, had to be elected. Sculptures were often created of the elected officials, and Emperors of Rome, but here’s the kicker: they were in office when the statues were created. These were guys who hadn’t yet earned the fluid, melodramatic, anguished poses of the Greeks or the carved-right-from-the-mountain grandeur of the Egyptians. In carving these effigies of living, serving civil servants, the Romans hit upon something ingenious that they would go on to exploit in terribly genius ways: by endowing whoever it was whose likeness happened to be served up on a sculpture and placed in the public domain, by endowing that figure with the proper physical characteristics and placement in the city, the artists were able to convince the populace that said elected official was working for the people and doing the right thing and was overall the man for them, and therein lies the lynchpin to a psychologically coercive system that, by convincing the citizenry that what they wish to see is what they’re actually seeing, completely controls damn near all its peoples by tricking them, i.e. Hey guys, what’s up? Well, here’s drinking water and sewers and bathhouse and various other public amenities. We’re working for you. Everything good? Cool. We’re just gonna go…like, over here and feed the Christians to lions and enslave a bunch of people and take your daughters and sons for our orgies and various other things like this. We’re cool? Sweet.
(A) Egyptian Pharaoh, hewn straight from the mountain (B) Olmec head, not really feeling the need to prove anything to anyone (C) Hellenistic Dying Gaul, with nice stache (D) Roman political sculpture, indicating to the future
Here we’ll talk aesthetics and manipulation of viewer by artist and art. If we’re creating a political sculpture of someone before said person has actually done anything of note politically, how do we do it in such a manner that will convince the viewer that the subject is worthy of praise? First off, the very notion of someone having a statue does a great deal of convincing. Put yourself in the mind of the viewer, ho-hum strolling about the Roman public forum coming upon a sculpture.
“Oh. Who’s this guy? A politician. Wow. He’s got his own statue. Must be someone very important or heroic.” Now we look up and see that this guy in phenomenally tall. He’s at least eight feet tall and he’s on a pedestal, so he’s actually something like ten or twelve feet towering over us, casting a shadow. “Wow, look how big he is. Man, he’s epic. He’s like a giant. He must be a really great leader.” Now as we take a closer look we see he’s got a book in one hand while the other is held out toward us, sort of aloft, like he’s in the middle of saying something. “He must be very well-learned. Look how big that book is. It’s huge. And he’s read the whole thing. But even though he likes to read he’s actually kinda looking right at me, holding his hand out much in the manner of an offering, sort of saying, ‘Here I am, great leader, extremely damn tall, with this very long and intellectually discoursy-type book I’d like to get to, but instead I offer myself to you, proud citizen. I orate directly to you. Well, I would be if I weren’t so incredibly vertically epic.’ What a guy.” Now in order to actually see his face, we have to step back. So we step back and he’s got very kind eyes and a mouth that really is about to say something but you can tell by the way his eyebrows are positioned that he’s very concerned for our well-being even though he’s incredibly handsome and young. “This is the kind of guy I’ve always wanted as our leader. And would you look at that, he really is leading us.” We start to walk away and we see all of these other very important buildings, these temples and government halls of power and bathhouses where important things go on and we think that if this guy is sitting amidst all of this he must be a part of all of this, must therefore be someone who was born to lead, no question.
We find some interesting points here, as well. The whole point of an elected government, if I’m not mistaken, is not to lead but to serve its people. And yet, by very carefully convincing the constituency that a certain politician has very strong leadership qualities, said constituents begin to believe what they really need is a leader, not a public servant. For evidence on this one look no further than the Obama/McCain presidential race. John McCain was hell bent on convincing us all of his leadership qualities. He made this whole big stink about his military record, his ability to maintain control and leadership under pressure. The spin machine went great lengths to extol his and Palin’s (and really who the fuck did they think they were kidding about Palin? Oh good, you were in control of a state the size of Brazil that like ten people live in with more fucking bears and caribou than citizens. That’s good Sarah. I hear Legoland is looking for a new mayor) very sound and extensive leadership qualities and records, while trying to take Obama down a peg with pithy comments about his role as a community organizer. But here’s where McCain really screwed the whole thing up (aside from ignoring the fact that mostly only geriatric Christian white people were listening to him): in being a community organizer, Obama served the supreme function that we wish every elected official of fulfill: he worked his ass of for basically no money, taking nearly absurd amounts of initiative to do things for sometimes ungrateful people because he believed it was the right thing to do, because that’s what America and serving your country is about. Of course this whole disdain for Obama’s community organizing on the part of the opposition goes great lengths to show an intense intolerance and condescension regarding the plight of Black Americans, which is (in addition to be a really big top and one for a different essay totally) probably some combination of racism, indifference, selfishness, and unwillingness to accept what America actually looks like and is (a.k.a. struggling brown peoples of various ethnicities and nationalities who are actually striving to achieve some simulacra of the American Dream, unlike the good deal of malevolent white pundits who were born into wealth) and the weird bullshit hackneyed belief that well slavery ended like 150 years ago get with the program.
(A) John McCain, powerful military leader (B) Sarah Palin, strong, tough, aiming for the future (C) Obama, community organizing/conscripting nefarious black children to help him conquer the known universe (D) Palin's constituents
Now, back to the Debordian. As industrial and post-industrial societies developed, they began to throw people bones. Cyclical time became essentially embedded in human DNA. The creation of holidays at perfectly measured intervals so that no matter how much a job or school or life is getting us down, we’ve got that break coming up to take a load off. Hand-in-hand with this the cyclical nature of products; seasonal fashions, film release schedules, concert tours, television events and whatever else in that sector, everything doctored, even things like booking doctors appointments months in advance and planning vacations a year before they happen or applying to college ten months before you’re actually going to go, campaigning two years before an election, or most heinously having a five year plan; (semi-colon definitely needed here cause I’ve gotten so ahead of myself I don’t even know what I’m writing anymore) all of this is a very specifically engineered system that keeps us looking forward so that we don’t stop and look around and take measure of the present and say hey wait a minute. Stuff sucks now. Why don’t we do something about it rather than deferring everything to a future that will never come so the mongers of contemporary suckage can continue purveying said suckage without anyone trying to stop it?
4. Stylistically it makes a good deal of sense to align conclusion and conclusion. What we can see here is that by looking at Roman architecture; or, rather, looking behind Roman Architecture, we can quite plainly see that the basis for all of these very Orwellian post-industrial and contemporarily deranged and conspiratorial things in fact are thousands of years old, are trees grown from seeds planted by the ingenious minds of the Roman propagandists, who realized that it’s actually much easier to control people if you throw them a bone and make them think that what they want to see is actually what they are seeing. The Romans very much thought in circles.
Endnotal Subclause: Theory vs. Reality
Something else that very much needs to be addressed here is theory vs. reality. It’s very easy to sit back and look at society and say Well the government sucks and screws people a lot and it’s been happening since basically the dawn of time and rather than actually improving or becoming more rooted in a sense of servitude to the people it’s actually just become a lot more clever and better at controlling people without people knowing their being controlled. Part of the faultiness of this lies in that the governments of the world become a continuous series of malevolent “its” that must be a sentient series of beings rather than whomever happens to be in control of whatever nation/state/city/empire et al at any given time, or implies that there is some kind of behind-the-curtain society of evil-ass people manipulating the world while laying burning pentagrams of candle on cobble-stone vault floors wearing hoods chanting satanic mantras which, let’s admit to ourselves, is complete horseshit. And even if it’s true, the 6 billion+ people in the world could very easily crush the tar out of these bastards if they so desired.
We also ought consider the very real possibility that capitalism and contentment is not actually some evil giant who come down from the hillside to terrorize the people, but actually an evolution of human nature that is exactly what the majority of people in the world want. Now we can be cynical and high-horsy about this all we want, but that won’t make it go away, so what we need to do instead is work within that framework to forge some kind of continually upwardly mobile situation whereby the haves are always reaching a hand down to the have-nots to hoist them up so that as the standard of living in the upper-echelons improves, so does that of the lower classes and dispossessed, as opposed to what we’ve got now, which is basically the better it gets for the upper and middle classes the worse it gets for the bottom.
Obama must be brought up if only for a minute. Whether or not Obama lives up to his near-messianic promise is irrelevant. The point is that he has inspired in people a belief that we can change the world, that we need not sit around and accept the way things are or wallow in some warped collective self-pity. More than his work as a politician or his beliefs as a man, Obama is the promise of a non-fixed class society personified, and a beacon of hope who, though often borderline rhetorical, represents the very opposite of the psychological enslavement discoursed on previously in this piece: he has, and encourages the rest of us, to smash pre-existing paradigms and build from the fragments a more promising and hopeful future which, let us go on the record as saying, is something we whole-heartedly believe in (though not in our cynical moments when we we’ve just read Brave New World and are listening to Radiohead and drinking tea and being generally foppish and pretentious, but still, we’re all aloud a little pouty time).
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