NeoCicero

I was a classical history major, and recieved distinction for my thesis, "Roman Agrarian Legislation in the Republic of Cicero." I keep many blogs on policy and statecraft, including BreakingThought and the newest, Quantum History.

My specialty is the study of Cicero. In my thesis review, my adviser wrote, "Her use of Cicero's rhetoric places the project in the top rung, better even than the current modern literature on the topic." Cicero seems to go in and out of popularity with the republic, and seems to be misunderstood, but he remains the greatest statesman and orator of all time, and although many of his works have become fragmented, everything we know about Rome comes from his letters and speeches. I believe he tried to preserve Rome because he realized her evolutionary importance. He tried to preserve Rome in his Republic, but the book was lost until the 19th century, and we were forced to re-evolve this system, without the guiding wisdom of Cicero's works.

We have since had to reeolve republics. According to Wilber's Integral Theory of Consciousness, after the agrarian nation-state, we evolve to the industrial state, and then the global information age. However, international politics is a macrocosm of domestic politics, modeled on many of the same principles, as Cicero and Thucydides could tell you, and in order to advance into the next age we must, as Hannah Arendt says, learn from the last. Likewise, the industrial age is still as state of affairs for our modern age, just as the Roman Republic faced a state of affairs that led to it's fall. Just as slaves replaced Romans, and corruption took over their system, when they began to sell off the land as "just gold," black gold has corrupted the American system, just as it has also corrupted the Department of Forests, and nearly every other department, putting profit before the people. As Cicero says, a republic that is not just is not a republic. We know a republic not by the people, for the people, is not a republic.

Therefore Cicero has a very important role to play in the writing of history: not just all of the writing he did, but the writing we must do today. He selflessly has offered to stand in for an evolutionary checkpoint for the evolution of human consciousness. But if we cannot come together on a global level, (and to do this, we must learn the lessons he left for us, to become equal as states, and apply principles of social justice and social welfare on an international level), then we will not pass this evolutionary checkpoint, but will destroy ourselves.

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