This post was inspired by a
recent article about coal mining in India by David Rose in the Guardian about coal mining. In India,
people are dying in the streets because of excessive heat caused by global warming, but Rose reports that “
…across a broad range of Delhi politicians and policymakers there is near unanimity. There is, they say, simply no possibility that at this stage in its development India will agree to any form of emissions cap, let alone a cut.” In other words, coal mining must continue in the name of economic growth, no matter what the human costs.
I think it is hard to see a more evident example of the senility of the world’s elites. It is, unfortunately, not something that pertains only to India. Elites all over the world seem to be nearly totally blind to the desperate situation in which we all are.
On this matter, I have a post written on my “Chimeras” blog that describes how the blindness of the elites is not just typical of our times, but was the same at the time of the Roman Empire. It is a discussion of how one of the members of the Roman elite, Rutilius Namatianus, completely misunderstood the situation of the last years of the Empire. It is our plea of human being that we don’t understand collapse, not even when we live it.
The return home of Rutilius Namatianus
The 5th century saw the last gasps of the Western Roman Empire. Of those troubled times, we have only a few documents and images. Above, we can see one of the few surviving portraits of someone who lived in those times; Emperor Honorius, ruler of what was left of the Western Roman Empire from 395 to 423. His expression seems to be one of surprise, as if startled at seeing the disasters taking place during his reign.
At some moment during the first decades of the 5th century C.E., probably in 416, Rutilius Namatianus, a Roman patrician, left Rome – by then a shadow of its former glory – to take refuge in his possessions in Southern France. He left to us a report of his travel titled “De Reditu suo“, meaning “of his return” that we can still read today, almost complete.
Fifteen centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we have in this document a precious source of information about a world that was ceasing to exist and that left so little to us. It is a report that can only make us wonder at how could it be that Namatianus got everything so badly wrong about what was happening to him and to the Roman Empire.
