PART II
Sorrows of Empire
Every empire we know of in human history has succumbed to this idolatry of power.1
Cornel West
By the accounts of Empire’s historians, civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great Empires. Much is made of the glorious accomplishments and heroic battles of the rise and fall of subsequent imperial civilizations. Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, and the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, pillage, and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished. These are among the sorrows of Empire.
Many of the proudest and most enduring of human intellectual and cultural achievements came before Empire, when societies were more egalitarian and women had important leadership roles; during brief respites from the despotic violence and oppression that defined the imperial era; or during the most recent two hundred years of democratic reform. The deeper human truth is that Empire marked a destructive and self-limiting detour from the path to realizing the possibilities of our human nature.
To liberate ourselves from Empire’s self-limiting patterns of domination we must understand their dynamics, acknowledge their destructive consequences, and embrace the truth of the human possibilities that Empire has long denied. We must also recognize the limitations of the contemporary human experiment in democracy and the process by which the institutions of imperial states have morphed into the institutions of imperial corporations to present a more benign appearance while leaving the underlying structures of domination in place.
A brief historical survey is in order to remind ourselves of how brutally destructive Empire has been for all but the favored elites who rule from their perches high in the clouds and to deepen our understanding of the nature, dilemmas, and possibilities of the mature democracies of Earth Community. This review is also a useful reminder of how difficult it is to break free from Empire once its play-or-die dynamic is established.