The author's uncle Byron McKeeby (center) and grandmother Evelyn (far right) in 1940 at a family renunion held at the Everett Read Farm. The family met each year at this farm or the more famous Dibble House for which uncle Byron posed was the model for the Grant Wood painting American Gothic.
Why do people mistakenly believe the Roman Empire fell in the in the 400s?
It is because of a basic misunderstanding of history and a long told political lie that leaked into modern education.
By 285 CE the Roman Empire had become to large to manage. Communication channels of the period could not rapidly move information through the empire to allow centralized control. Diocletian surveyed the empire at that time and determined that most of the wealth was now centered on the Eastern, greek speaking regions. To make the empire workable, he split the empire into two parts, moving the capital of the entire Empire to the city of Byzantium, establishing a center of rule in Roman with backup administration in Ravenna, and allowed more freedom and independence to the southern and northern extents.
In 378 CE Emperor Valens, the senior member of the pair that ruled east and west, fought a significant battle against the Goths and lost. Called Adrianople, the loss caused confusion in the east, and Roman forces were withdrawn from most of the extremities of the empire to defend the empire's capital, Constantinople. The western portions were still considered part of the empire, but were cast off to fend for themselves.
In Roman literature there is a continual paean that calls for the recapture of the lost eastern provinces. With the sack of Rome, issues had gone a long way to making that impossible. Part of the issue was that the young Christian church had several branches each claiming supremacy. The Roman church, based in Rome, claimed supremacy based on a theory that Peter was the person who established that church. The Orthodox (read that to me official or genuine) Christian church believed that the church was Rome, and Rome was the church, and since it was based in the Empire, with a headquarters in Constantinople, this was the official church.
Interestingly, in the 500s Emperor Justinian, sensing the time was correct, dispatched the great General Belisarius to the west to recapture as much of what they called the lost territories as could be grabbed. If Justinian had seen the course through, the west would have been recaptured. From 533 to 540 he beat the stuffing out of everyone, deposed the Western Pope Silverus and won much of the old territories. This victory was not sustainable because of Justinian's paranoia, and Belisarius returned to Rome and served as a heroic defender of the capital Constantnople, until his popularity and effectiveness caused him to be tried for corruption.
It is interesting that all of the writings about Belisarius call him the Roman Empire's greatest general, if he served 75 years after the fall of the Empire.
With the failed reconquest by Rome of the west, a thousand year marketing campaign started of people who wanted to claim the mantle of true Rome. Everyone wanted to be the official Christian Church, and politically, this meant everyone wanted to be the Roman Empire without a break from the old empire. The fact that the Roman Empire existed, that millions of peoples called themselves Roman, and that the fall of the city of Rome was not as consequential as it would seem to an empire that had long since moved its riches and capital east, was simply ignore by many.
Not by all though. Pope Leo the III started in the 790s agitating for a recognition of Rome's religious supremacy and the contingency of Rome proper in Italy, but the city of Rome was no longer capable of administrating a street cleaning. Instead he turned to a rising star in the west, Charles, King of the Franks. The Frankish Kingdom was growing at the time around a group of tribes with long Imperial ties, and there was a minor florescence of renaissance as scholars from Romanized regions under control of invaders migrated to this new empire.
With the defeat of the encroaching Caliphate at Poitiers by Martel, the father of Charles, The Frankish kingdoms grew in stature and respect. Further military campaigns, even the relatively unsuccessful ones into Iberia, caused Charles to be hailed by many, including the Roman Emperor Constantine VI, as a hero of Christianity. In 800 there began a strange dance between Leo and Charles. Leo decided to bestow the title Emperor of Rome on Charles. Charles decided to treat the title more like a Christian protector. There was, after-all, a Roman Emperor. Leo then declared the Kingdom of the Franks the Roman Empire and stated that as the most Holy Empire the Roman Pontiff was in essence the leader of the realm, but that he graciously handed this burden to Charles. Charles thanked him and ignored the issue, except that of course his Kingdom was Christian and followed the western practice of faith. And that leads some students on history tests to craziness because the Frankish Kingdom never became the Roman Empire, and the French recognized the Roman Empire in the east as the true bearer of the name.
The title of Holy Roman Empire was too cool to leave laying around. In 962 a German prince, Otto I, concerned that Europeans saw his people as jumped up Barbarians and relatives of the people who invaded the empire, grabbed the title for himself. Voltaire would later quip that the Holy Roman Empire was three lies in one sentence. It was neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire. France never bothered with the idea that the Holy Roman Empire was much more than a weak conglomeration of German states, and even went so far as to allow the papacy during the schism years to house itself in Avignon, In a piece of extreme irony the Holy Roman Empire mostly abandoned Catholicism during reformation, and was given a mercy killing by Napoleon Bonaparte.
So what about the Roman Empire? It continued to chug along, calling itself the Roman Empire, its citizens Romans, and its religion Orthodox Christianity. Eventually though you find scholars with religious background wishing to find some way to make sure that everyone knew the Roman Empire was a Christian empire. They start calling the Roman Empires the Byzantium Emperors as a cluster, to make sure everyone knew they were not the same as the ones who sacrificed to Zeus. At the same time the Empire slowly started to shrink, acting as a bulwark protecting Europe from progressive waves of Central Asian invaders. This was aided by the Christianizing of several powerful tribes, the Kievan Rus, the Greater Slavs, and the Armenians all expanded their ranges and Christianized, and looked to Rome for inspiration. You can see this today in the use of the term Caesar to represent a leader in all of these regions.
The pressure from the East though proved to much for the Roman Empire. Slowly through ethnic cleansing the invaders pushed Greek speaking Romans from much of Anatolia. European efforts to aid the Roman Empire proved counterproductive or futile. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 actually sacked Constantinople, and in 1396 the combined might of a European army had its collective bottom handed to it by the Turks at Nicopolis.
Although a successor state existed for a short while, the historically accurate end of the Roman empire is dated to 29 May, 1453 when the last Emperor of the Roman people, Constantine XI Palaiologos, lead a charge of 7000 soldiers against a Turkish force of 85,000. He was last seen in combat against dozens of Turks and his body was never recovered.
Travel through the regions of the Empire today and you will see the words that means Imperial Rome. Although scholars call them Byzantines for political reasons, they called themselves Romans, and the last emperor died never having heard of the name the Byzantine Empire.
Autism, according to Wikipedia, is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior. They go on to say that, "Parents usually notice signs in the first two years of their child's life. These signs often develop gradually, though some children with autism reach their developmental milestones at a normal pace and then regress. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent in early childhood, typically before age three."
Wikipedia represents a distillation of common knowledge on a subject, and having read deeply about autism myself I can attest that Wikipedia's definition is a pretty good summary of the current state of thinking. The problem, if the reader will allow me a moment to reflect, is that no matter how confident, the scientists are trying to tackle autism as a single unified illness with causation and effect, like smallpox. Autism, except for the socially popular version that allows smart people to explain away misanthropy, simply is not a syndrome with a dualistic definition of existence.
In recent years, there has been recognition of the complexity of autism by creation of the concept of spectrum. Spectrum assumes that on one end you have high functioning autism, which has actually become cool and had names like Aspergers attached to it to make it more interesting to discuss at parties. Aspergers is autism for the me generation, a boutique version of autism that allows people with difficult personalities and social awkwardness to be able to say, "See, I am an asshole because my brain is shaped like an asshole.'However, I am nothing like those autism kids who scream continually. They are on the other end of autism.
The problem with this is that I do not see autism as a disease or syndrome, but as a symptom of an underlying structural design of the brain, and far from being a disability, it is actually a strength, at least when seen from the point of view of the survival of a group. To understand what I mean, it is usually important that I tell people what I do not believe.
The first thing to present my audience is my nearly complete rejection of Dawkin's the Selfish Gene, and Herrnstein, and Murray's the Bell Curve with their attempts to define a person in terms of individual superiority. In my theoretical universe, there is exists little room for individual Übermensch. Let me be clear: Friedrich Nietzsche is an idiot and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a tissue of fantasy. I do not want my audience to mistake my polite and scholarly tones for the willingness to believe any book that gets popular on the tea circuit. In their attempts to place a scientific patina on top of Nietzsche, Dawkins, Hernstien, and Murray each fails in the test of modeling reality with their assumptions. If you are going to discuss autism, lets talk about what it really is.
In the first case, I reject Dawkins because I do not think individual genes as units are associated extensively with species survival in that one gene is an expression of superiority over another. On the micro-scale, some genes are fatal; for example, a gene combination that prevents lungs or a brainstem to form. On the other hand, this sort of fatal before birth genes are actually quite rare. They are edited to the farthest corners of the human genome and do not last for very long. On the other side, Dawkins faces an impossible task in answer the question, if genes are selfish, why are we not a very narrow species, having lost most of our diversity through the cutthroat fight of genes murdering each other in the crib.
The answer is; genes are not selfish. Dawkin's book can be relegated to the parlor reading of the effete.
In the case of Herrnstein and Murray, I reject their thesis on the idea that any group of protohumans would develop in a flawed manner given the wide transfer of genes among the human race. Race as far as I can see, is an ethnographic construct rather than a truly genetic idea, except in the most basic sense and in the most limited scope.
Line up a group of Chimps and a group of Men. Write down what makes a creature better than the other and then test each group. In the end, you have defined your own bias and not the fitness of either species to survive.
Which brings me back to Autism? Autism to me is a pattern of brain growth that can lead to a range of symptoms that can have significant effects on the autistic person's social interactions. If autism were a complete negative, it would be rapidly removed from the species and only present in extremely rare conditions. Sickle-cell disease for example should be self-limiting enough that it would work itself out of the human genome in a dozen generations or so. Sickle-cell though is a natural way in which the human organism protects itself from malaria. Sickle-cell is not perfect in doing so and is a negative when malaria is absent, so natural selection carried out on a village or large community scale leads to a genetic blood disease that lurks in carrier populations. If the malaria threat rises, the resistant part of the population assures that the entire community is not slaughtered by the disease. Thus, the sickle cell genetic bit is only partially selfish, and only on the scale of whole populations. I am sure that we will someday find that genetic diseases that last for hundreds of generations all have some relationship to the extended survival of the species prior to the advent of technology.
Left handedness is a similar proposition. Imagine a group of ancient hunter gatherers. When traveling, they usually form single columns to remain in contact with each other, and to allow easy passage through the country side. Most of the village fighting stock carries a weapon, and if their bones are any indication, they did so in their dominant right hands. If attacked they would prefer to turn right to face the danger, since this presents their dominant hand and weapon into prominence.
10% of the population will be left handed though. This is not a simple genetic trait that can be washed out of a population in a few generations; it is a complicated one that hides in all human populations and would take tens or twenty generations to remove if it were a true negative. Instead, it is a conditional positive. If everyone else in your tribe turns right when faced with danger, and you naturally turn left, you are more likely to save the entire tribe by being able to defend it until the right handed warriors reorient. Being left-handed may not be an advantage to you, as Dawlkins would need to have happen if his theory worked, it need be only an advantage to your genetic community, which would allow it to continue, even if recessive and not immediately visible. To you it could be a negative, and indeed all that would be needed was that when left handers were required that a few would be around to add to the community diversity.
Autism is not a simple condition like left handedness, but instead is a wide series of brain wiring patterns that can result in a wide range of mental effects. The basic wiring conditions may be triggered by a wide range of things, from food and disease in the mother during gestation, to events post birth in the development of the young brain. The end effect though is a brain that exceeds human norms in one of a wide range of ways, although not all those norms being exceeded can be called an advantage to the individual. When that exceeding of norms is an inability to communicate, frustration leading to temper tantrums over restrictions placed on daily actions, repetitive behavior verging on self injury, and fixed cognition styles that are inflexible and unbreakable, then autism indeed looks as though it must be a handicap. It is not though. Each of these strange symptoms increases the diversity of the group which it is born, and can have profound consequences on the ability of that group to survive.
Although with a world stage and society interlocked together into a global community it can be harder to see this, we could identify people who carried any of the classic symptoms of autism, and thus likely had brains whose structure and function were different from their peers. Issac Newton, for example, had the classic signs of inflexibility in some parts of his life that some autistic people develop. If Newton had not landed in the right place and right time, his inflexibility, and focus would have seen him die on the street penniless. Instead, his traits were accepted because his work was so extraordinary. The tribe benefited from the presence of these genes even if Newton himself may have died for possessing them.
So autism, in the theory of the author, is a range of brain conditions that cause a series of similar symptoms. Newton and I may be autistic, but our autisms may be caused by significantly different brain conditions, each of which reoccurs because they are good for the mass of human society, if not good for the individual.
Often, I am asked to help others understand autism, and this is very difficult and leads to another story. A friend of mine has been an open homosexual since I first met him the year after high school ended for me. Closely questioning him allowed me to discover a number of things. He did not become gay, just as I did not become autistic.
He, like me, grew into an awareness of how his minds worked by comparing them to both the actual norm for people around us and the professed norm for people around us. And like me, he had to develop ways to understand people's reactions to him. The one main difference between us was that while I was internally empathic but clueless about what people thought about me, he was adept at reading facial expressions and body language and knew exactly how much contempt his sexual orientation caused among some people.
Of even, more interest to me was an incident that occurred to him and the learning process that surrounded it. In high school, he "hooked up," a euphemism here for having sex, with a member of the football team. The boy and he had several encounters, then he moved on to date a girl in the freshman class. My friend was hurt until he stumbled across this gleaming truth. Gay was not an either / or proposition. Gay was this huge range of hardwired preferences obscured by a patina of social conditioning. His own model of gay was significantly different and just as unalterable as another person's model of gay.
At this point, I should create some sort of summary of my thoughts on autism. Here is two hypotheses that should be tested, and if study fails to reject them and action item to consider when thinking about dealing with the autistic individual.
Hypothesis One: Autism is a complicated series of observable effects in the human brain caused by any underlying causes.
Hypothesis Two: Autistic individuals in a group are a net advantage to the group, even if it can be a net disadvantage to the individual.
Action Item: Thought should be given to the difference between curing autism and creating systems where autistic individuals can maximize their contributions to society.
Hypothesis one is starting to see some light among social scientists. Autism is now often talked about like a spectrum, a single measuring line onto which a person with this condition sits. Often, I get placed into the category of high functioning. I communicate effectively. My repetitive motions and need for order are controlled by a few simple behaviors. I have learned to hide or use drugs to conceal my quirky intelligence where it may cause a witch hunt reaction. However, when I meet others labeled as autism my own autism radar, quite well developed, does not always ring out the same way. Some people who claim the mantel of autism, usually using Aspergers as their self-descriptive, completely fail to be detectable by me as autistic. Many more though register in different ways. They have a fixed way of handling stress that is recognizable by me, even if I do not share the symptom. They have a social anxiety that plays itself out in movement. They say things at odd times, socially inappropriate things that should have been kept behind their teeth but were let to see the light of day with an impulsive explosion.
The question thought returns to how I advise dealing with people who have autism. Accepting my caveat that autism is neither a true disability (in that it is universally a bad thing that must be overcome) or that it is a single diagnosis with a single cure, my first advice for anyone dealing with an autistic person is to look for the damage they have taken. It is the same damage that someone has faced social punishment for being gay, or being small, or being fat, or being otherwise, different has faced. It is the damage that is caused by broken expectations of routes to success.
Consider an autistic person sitting in their first-class. They are fidgeting because they have no idea how to decode the emotions around them. So like many autistics, they begin to participate in a conversion self-therapy. They look at an object closely, or run the wood of their desks, or sort their pencils, or even fold in together.
The kids in the class, being normal kids, sense the weakness and the playground bully will rise up. When the autistic child is busy with his pencils, which are how he has found solace in his lack of social cues, the bully comes and smashes his pencils. "Pencil sorting allows me to concentrate," the child thinks, "but pencil sorting makes me a target." He has to sort, but now he is more nervous about it and conceals it, drawing himself further into a safety zone.
The longer that autistic kids are bullied by peers, the harder it is to break the defensive walls they build. Unlike a "normal" kid, itself a misnomer but used here in the statistical sense, the autistic kid lacks the flexibility of response to quickly recover. They are less plastic than their peers, more rigid, more precise instruments.
The concept of plasticity seems to be one of the few core elements of the autistic cluster of conditions. By building more rigid channels of thought and logic, autistic kids speed up the thinking and learning process. By removing channels of information like the ability to see facial expressions, their thinking processes is further sped up. In my own head, I think of it as my second channel, the thoughts that heterodyne below my main thinking process and allow me to consider a subject logically while doing things like walking and chewing gum.
The "normal" kid, and again I must beg the reader's pardon for using this word as normal is, as I said, a statistical rather than a practical concept, may have limiting factors in their creativity, objective thinking, or information processing, but they are more able to reconfigure their brains to take on new tasks, block out extraneous noise, and develop new modes of social expression. They are of course, constantly awash in social information denied the autistic child, which is both an advantage and a distraction. I often think of the plastic child as being like Ralph the All-Purpose Animal and the autistic child as Mumford Mime from Twice Upon a Time. Each shows advantages, Ralph from being able to change forms and Mumford because of his creativity.
If autism is not a disability but a diversity, then I think we will find OCD, ADD, ADHD, and even PTSD are all functional changes to the human brain to defend it and allow it to function in different difficult situations.
Eventually, I think social scientists will discover creativity is actually a brain process where information is handled in unique way, and that highly creative people have a close relationship to some form of autism. This is why the parlor diagnosis of Aspergers is so compelling for creatives to consider. Instead teachers, bosses, and leaders should generally start to recognize spectrum disorders as just another alternate system of cognition, and that colleges, schools, and nations benefit from this sort of diversity of thought.
I wanted to give a shout out to a very special book, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby.
To understand my fascination with Bone Gap, I have to first reveal a little about myself. I am autistic and significantly lack some aspects of facial recognition that has to do with emoting. In the television and film industry, no one really cared about this, but in publishing and education it is often seen as a defining characteristic. In one discussion with a very honest agent, he said he does not represent writers who are, "Autistic, PTSD, bipolar, incarcerated, or political." I asked why not, and he gave a very honest answer, "There are to many writers out there to get bogged down with one who will take extra work just to get to the book stands."
Before anyone gets angry and demands head-on-a-pike that sort of honesty in the current world where prejudice not only is growing, but may even get you elected to office, is refreshing. Agents have a TOUGH job, and reputable agents are exactly that, reputable, although they may not always be brave. Be honest, how many of us would have published, The Satanic Verses knowing what would happen to the book in advance? Sure, it made an amazing amount of money, but one of us would put our families in danger to get this book to the world? This is just a smaller version of that.
And this brings us to Bone Gap. I am not sure what caused me to buy the book, but I did, and not just in the bargain rack. I took it home, opened it up, and was immediately transported to a simple but compelling universe that reminded me of my own rural upbringing. Finn O'Sullivan, the protagonist of the book, immediately stands out because of the subtle clues that Ms. Ruby leaves us. In five pages, I was already betting Finn was high-functioning autistic with a specific difficulty in facial recognition. By page, fifty I was sure. Yet never did she come out and name Finn with a condition. She just described how people reacted to him and let us fill in the blanks. Even if she did not intend a picture of autism to come out, she painted one I could recognize. If not autism, then a neuro-diversity that created special challenges for the hero.
If this was not enough to endear me to the book, then there was her creation of a community I could understand, which is no easy task. I had tried to do this myself with the original Disrupted Gears, but never with the seamless, natural feeling she has in Bone Gap. Finn visits his neighbor who raises bees, and it is a not contrived story point but a natural relationship. His love for the neighbor, Petey, is a tiny thing, kept alive only by hints and subtle comments, but it is real and natural.
Then comes Roza and the horse, and Ms. Ruby turns the story on its head. Here, I will leave the review off as I hope you buy the nook and read it yourself. I can say though that any lover of magical realism will love this work.
Just to conclude. If you like books that allow women to be both victim and hero, that allow diverse voices their time in the sun, are gentle to read but rewarding, and which leaves you with a warm feeling in your heart as if you just watched the caste of the Magicians sing Under Pressure for the first time, then this is the work for you. If I gave subjective stars, I would throw some out at this book.
A short story of mine, Eleven Steps, is being published in volume 8 of As You Were.
I am very proud of this publication because conflict and service are issues that run through so much of my writing, particularly how this becomes tangible parts of family history. This story also includes my own love of exploring the history of serice as a way of understanding the feelings and thoughts of the people who can no longer tell their own stories.
As I begin to make my stories available to a general audience itis exciting to think that one of my favorite "go to" literary publications was willing to take a shot at my newer work. The oe-hundred year anniversary of the Great War is a particularly good time to see this story published. I hope you drop over to As You Were hosted on Military Experience and the Arts (http://militaryexperience.org) and give Eleven Steps a read. Volume 8 should be published in May.
When my parents died together of cancer, I made a death bed promise to my mother to return full-time to writing. There was no large bequest that would enable me to do so, I would have rather had my parents back in place of any inheritance, but desire is its own currency if you look at it right. My effort to write though turned out to almost be futile. In late 2017 my long standing life experience with epilepsy and autism collided with the reality of modern medicine. During an attempt to switch me from Valproate to Lamotrogine, I contracted Stephens Johnson Syndrome and barely survived. My survival was because of an amazing and dangerous therapy, Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), where the immune elements of thousands of people are fed into the sick patient (Me!) in the hopes that one of those people has the immune secret to defeat an otherwise terminal condition. Despite my survival, the writing was on the wall. My long battle was ending. The question was when would it end, and how much could I write before that time.
One element that may surprise the casual reader is that writers cannot just throw paper into a typewriter and end up with a book. For years I have earned a living as a script doctor, a creative consultant, and through publishing interactive media such as games. My creative output, such as the entire Virdea series, was offered to my readers either free from charge, or as small print run editions that I did not earn money off of despite being sold through Amazon. My historical studies made money under various pen names, but my creative work was a conversation I had with a fan base never more than a few thousand strong. My creative agent has never represented one of my print works.
Now though it is time for the gosling to swim free from the nest, and my first step will be to find an agent. This is probably the hardest step I will take because there are so many artists, many of which write far more mainstream police procedural, romance, or young adult boilerplate. Sure, we know weird sells to the post-millennium crowd, and that there is considerable room for magical realism on the store shelves, but finding an agent who reads and understands this market is tough. It is not like MFA programs are pumping out fantasy-science fiction admirers by the hundreds.
Despite this, I have hope. In years past, before time winnowed m professional contacts, I had several friends who were book agents, most of which I met while working for Better Homes and Gardens in the dim recesses of my oddly divergent career. There was a time when I would get a book, all typed and neat, sent to me by a friend who would ask me for my creative thoughts on the work. The question now is where can a hungry agent who loves to work with iconoclastic authors be found ready to explore a crazy world of literary mayhem? If any of my fans know, please send me an e-mail.
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