Friday February 12, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, Happy New Year, and welcome to “Spring” Semester here in Northeast Ohio and Case Western Reserve University. I hope all recipients of this newsletter had a healthy and safe holiday season and can stay very well in this worrisome and socially-distanced time.
Social distancing continues on campus and the “Friday Lunch” will remain an online event through the semester. But our discussions seemed to do pretty well during the Fall, and I hope the mostly-completed schedule for the coming term will engage and inform.
We began last week with a look forward at the Biden Administration. This week we will reflect a bit on the administration that just ended – and the schisms and pressures in the American political system that it both revealed and widened. The events of January 6 on Capitol Hill dramatized threats to our republic, but they were already pretty visible. And as the authors of the constitution knew, for a republic to last for very long is quite unusual.
They knew this from history, and especially from Roman history. During the Trump administration there could be a bit of a parlor game, asking which bad Emperor he most resembled. But a better question would be how the dysfunction in U.S. government and politics in the past few decades is prefigured by the Roman Republic’s strife in the decades before Augustus Caesar created the Empire.
Just as there were clear signs in the first century B.C.E. that things were changing forever in the Roman Republic, the events of 6 January strongly suggest that something has been changing in the American Republic. The cliche is that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but more importantly it didn’t fall in a day either. Sulla’s dictatorship, his war with Marius, the triumvirs, the war between Caesar and Pompey, the Ides of March, the war against the conspirators, the civil war between Ocatvian and Marc Anthony — each crisis made one more dent in the Republic. It survived formally even after Octavian became Augustus, but it was more than transformed. If one goes to Rome today, one still sees SPQR on the modern city’s sewer covers: but what do those letters reflect other than a dim memory of a great project?
Both the divisions in each society and some aspects of political dysfunction may look a bit too familiar. Rome had its own separation of powers. The Senate might be checked by the tribunes of the plebs; the executive was divided and consuls could work at cross-purposes; and in the ‘60s B.C.E., Cato the Younger used procedural delays to block the Senate from voting on legislation he did not like for years. Perhaps more fundamentally, as a summary of one recent book puts it, “As the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of ordinary Romans. With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize promises…”
It is a different world in so many ways, yet people do not seem to change all that much. So we ought to be asking ourselves what values from 1776 and 1789 we still honor and cherish today. If we value the rule of law and constitutional government and think that it is worth preserving and developing, then we might learn something from the examples of Roman history.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrdOCgqjguHddAfaTfmoUKTTTF70Zh1xfK
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Timothy Wutrich is the author of the book Prometheus and Faust: The Promethean Revolt in Drama from Classical Antiquity to Goethe. His scholarly interests include all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman drama, Vergil, and the Classical Tradition in literature and the arts.
At CWRU, Dr. Wutrich teaches Greek and Latin language and literature, Greek and Roman drama and theater in translation, Greek and Roman literature surveys, Greek and Roman civilization, and Greek and Latin etymology. He also regularly teaches in the university’s SAGES program.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
February 19: The Limits of Party, and Prospects for the 117th Congress. With Frances E. Lee, Ph.D., Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton University
February 26: Brexit Happened: Now What? With Elliot Posner, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science.
March 5: Effects of the Pandemic on Children’s Resilience and Vulnerability. With Sandra Russ, Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor and Louis D. Beaumont University Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences.
March 12: Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China. With Steven P. Feldman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Business Ethics.
March 19: What’s the Problem With Big Tech? With Anat Alon-Beck, J.D., Assistant Professor of Law.
March 26: TBA
April 2: Student Debt: What Are the Problems? For Whom? And What Could Be Done? With Richard Kazis, Senior Consultant, MDRC, Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and Board Chair of The Institute for College Access and Services.
April 9: Healthcare, Public Health, and Population Health. With Scott Frank, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Public Health Initiatives, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 16: Dropping the Pilot? Assessing Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship. With Kenneth F. Ledford, Ph.D., Chair, Department of History.
April 23: Depression’s Past and Future. With Jonathan Sadowsky, Ph.D., Theodore J. Castele Professor of History.
April 30: The Republican Party and Demographic Change. With Girma Parris, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science.
May 7: Defending Disability Insurance. With Kathy Ruffing, Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. |
