Learning from Caracalla

 I don’t think any of us will ever forgot the bone-chilling sight of hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-right types, and neo-Confederates marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not “replace us.” I was so naïve back then that I actually didn’t understand the actual meaning of those words, which I took to mean that the marchers believed that some sort of plot was underway to replace white-skinned Christians with Jewish people. Indeed, it was only later on that I learned that the chant referenced not the notion that Jews were plotting to replace Christian Americans personally, but that they—we—are working to bring non-white, non-Christian immigrants to these shores in such gigantic numbers that they would eventually constitute a majority of the population and thus be in a position to vote into office candidates who looked and felt about things as they themselves did. (To revisit my thoughts about Charlottesville at the time, click here; for my own revisit of the story a year later, click here.)

I haven’t written about Charlottesville in a while, but my thoughts returned to that series of dark days in August when I came across an essay published in the Washington Post this last week (click here) in which the author, Jennifer Rubin, reflects on the results of a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that self-defines as a think tank devoted to “conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.” In that poll, in which about 40,000 different people were questioned and the results of which were published just last week, the percentage of Americans who self-identified as non-Hispanic white people of Christian faith stood at 42% of the population. Just a decade and a half ago, when Barack Obama came to office, the number was 54%, a majority of Americans. Six years later, the number was 47%--less than half the citizenry. And now the percentage has dropped to 42%, somewhere between a third of all Americans and half of them.

If you narrow the scope of inquiry to features solely white evangelical Protestants, the news

is even worse. In 2006, they constituted 23% of the population. By 2016, the number was down to under 17%. Today, the number stands at 13.6% of Americans.

The idea that Jews are working tirelessly to replace white people with immigrants of color who will eventually take over once their numbers are high enough to vote in the candidates of their masters’ choice is lunacy. But, it suddenly strikes me, the fear that these next decades will see a true sea change in the profile of our American population is not that exaggerated. It’s already begun. Dark-skinned immigrants are not being smuggled in to tip the balance. (That truly is craziness.) But the balance is indeed being tipped.

Rubin’s very worthy essay got me thinking, for some obscure reason, about Caracalla, an emperor of Rome even whose name, let alone whose work, has been largely forgotten by most. Let me explain why he suddenly came to mind.

Born in Lugdunum, which town would eventually morph into the French city of Lyons, in 188 CE, the man did not even live to see his own thirtieth birthday. (He reigned from 198 until his untimely death in 217.) He lived a short life. And yet he did several remarkable things, almost all of them terrible. (The key word here is “almost.” See below.) He was violent and vicious, the instigator of many murders and massacres. He was almost definitely guilty of the murder of his own brother (with whom he shared the throne until he decided he had had enough), his father-in-law, and his wife (whom he loathed, apparently, even before being forced to marry her). On the other hand, he appears to have invented—or at least popularized—the hoodie. (The Latin word caracalla references the kind of hooded jacket the emperor favored and which he wore so constantly that his real name, Lucius Septimus Bassianus, was dropped in favor of his nickname based on his favorite article of clothing.) And he did manage to construct a public bathhouse of such gargantuan proportions, called (what else?) The Baths of Caracalla, that it remained in operation for more than three hundred years. (I suppose they must have replaced the towels every so often.) For a reasonably balanced, very accessible, and interesting biography of the man, I recommend Finnish scholar Ilkka Syvänne’s Caracalla: A Military Biography, published by Pen & Sword Military Press in 2017 and available on amazon and other on-line sites.

But the reason that Jennifer Rubin’s essay brought Caracalla to mind has nothing to do with fratricide, hoodies or bathhouses, because Caracalla was also able to rise up over his own horribleness to do one exceptional thing. And that thing is what I want to write about today.

In Caracalla’s day, the Romans had a huge problem: they were vastly outnumbered in their own nation by non-Romans. How that had happened is easy enough to understand: before Caracalla acted, the sole citizens of Rome were ethnic Romans who lived in Italy plus the descendants of citizens who had settled in the provinces. Some local nobles were granted citizenship too, as were the inhabitants of some few great cities not in Italy. But the bottom line was that only a small minority of the population were citizens. Why Caracalla saw that as a problem is open to debate. Some scholars think it had to do solely with money: only citizens paid taxes so having very few citizens meant bringing in much less money than would otherwise have been the case. (This was the opinion, among others, of the great Roman historian Dio Cassius.) Another possible reason to regret having so few citizens would have had to do with the number of men eligible to serve in the Roman Legion, the national army, because only citizens were permitted to serve. A third motive had to do with the practicalities of the justice system: there were effectively two different court systems in place, one for citizens and one for non-citizens, but this was proving increasingly awkward as the world of commerce increasingly involved citizens and non-citizens in the same undertakings. And so in 212 CE Caracalla issued the decree known now as the Edict of Caracalla in which he formally granted citizenship to all residents of the Empire with only a few excepted categories.

All the theories mentioned above for this move have some cogency. But I’d like to imagine that Caracalla acted because he somehow understood that the Empire could only thrive if a large majority of its residents were personally invested in its future, in the propagation of its culture, and in its expansion north into Europe, east into Asia, and even possibly south into Africa. In other words, Rome could not function—or, to say the very least, could not function well—as a state in which only the smallest percentage of residents were personally invested in the nation’s future. (Before Caracalla, there were something like 75 million people living in the Roman Empire, of whom only about 14 million lived in Italy itself.) And it is precisely in that way that the situation in Caracalla’s Rome mirrors the situation in our nation as we enter the third decade of his strange century.

The Charlottesville chant was pure anti-Semitic craziness: the nation’s Jews are not involved in some nefarious plot to replace white Americans with immigrants, legal and otherwise, of color. But the fear underlying that lunacy is not without foundation. Things are shifting almost before our eyes. Demographically speaking, the nation of the 2060s will be totally unlike the America of the 1960s.

There are two ways to respond to this new reality. One would be to rage at the failing light. This was on full display in Charlottesville. But the other would be to take a cue from Caracalla and to face the new reality not by being enraged or feeling persecuted, but by accepting the challenge demography has placed at our feet. Yes, the Founders were flawed, complicated individuals—the kind who wrote movingly about equality under the law but who also owned slaves. But when they were through being children of their time, they also invented something remarkable on these shores, a nation that was completely different in its day from every other one on earth. That kind of patriotism rooted in that sense of American exceptionalism was once something that grew naturally from the education children received throughout the nation. Nowadays, not so much.

We can, however, learn from the past. Caracalla looked around and saw a huge demographic nightmare about to envelop his nation. By decreeing that, henceforth, almost all residents were to be granted citizenship, he was opening a door and inviting the up-to-that-point-totally-disenfranchised to step over the threshold, to become part of the polity, to exert themselves to become worthy of the citizenship now bestowed upon them. The situations aren’t entirely parallel. But the challenge of a shifting reality is much the same. If I were a young person today trying to decide whether to respond to the new demographical reality by exploding with rage or by extending a hand to those whom I fear the most, I hope I would make the right decision. Whatever his “real” motives, Caracalla made the move that brought in the disenfranchised and challenged them to create their own nation’s destiny. The response to shifting demographics should be thoughtfully to consider how to address a new reality in a way that keeps faith with the past and looks forward to a shared, potentially glorious, future.