As emperor of one of the largest empires that ever existed, Caesar Augustus was one of the most effective leaders in human history. Great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, Augustus gave birth to Rome’s golden age – the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”) – a period of relative stability, expansion, and prosperity that lasted 200 years.
As historian and philosopher Will Durant put it, he was worshipped as a god because after decades of wars, rebellions, and a lack of security that constantly disrupted trade and politics, Augustus had finally “cured the cancer of chaos” in Rome.
But with all his success, he failed miserably in one area: He could not – through law alone – restore Rome’s moral compass.
“The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people,” Durant wrote in Caesar and Christ, Book III of his 11-volume mega-history on The Story of Civilization. “No one wanted to enlist in the army or recognize the periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will, the great race was beginning to die.”
For Roman society, that moral core was known as mos maiorum or, “way of the ancestors” – unwritten social norms that complemented Roman law.
“The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage,” wrote Durant.
Seeing the seeds of decay, Augustus passed a series of Draconian family laws, known to history as the “Julian laws,” that he hoped would “restore morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life.”
It failed miserably.
So much so that Durant said Augustus, in the end, agreed with something Horace wrote that I believe applies to America, today: “Laws are vain when hearts remain unchanged.”
Like Rome, an era of relative peace since the end of World War II has slowly loosened the moral fiber of the American people, accelerating to warp speed from the ‘60s on. For the Romans, it was the mos maiorum. For America, it’s Judeo-Christian values – unwritten social norms that complement our laws. The decay of America’s “ancient faith” is washing away the supernational supports of marriage, patriotism, shared values, and national identity.
Nowhere do the signs scream louder that “the great race is beginning to die” than in troubled black communities. Broken homes have created broken communities that churn out record fatherlessness, joblessness, a celebration of deviancy, black-on-black killings and – when some don’t get their way – burning, looting, rioting, and random violence.
Troubled black communities don’t have problems that government can solve by piling up more laws. They have a moral problem. Fatherlessness, deviancy, burning, looting, hopelessness, and killing are problems of the heart – character issues, not civil rights issues.
Heart issues are why Pastor Corey Brooks, founder of Project H.O.O.D., is on a 100-day rooftop “campout” in 19-degree weather, on the corner of one of the most gang-infested streets in the Chicago suburb of Woodlawn, Ill., the “O-Block.”
“The reason why we call it O-Block is because it's named after a young man named O.D. Perry who was shot and killed [here],” Brooks said on Day 42 of his “Rooftop Revelations” on Saturday. “The gangs picked up his name and started calling it O-Block. We decided we are going to keep the “O” and “Opportunity Block” is what we're gonna call it.”
With a bucket and a baby basin as his bathroom, Brooks is looking to raise $35 million for the 85,000-square-foot Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center where, once built, he said will be used to convert gangsters into productive citizens, provide trauma counseling to victims of violence, fill education gaps, and give vocational training and a safe place for young people after school.
“I tell people all the time that government can make laws,” said Brooks, “but they can’t change hearts. It is God and people who work on the hearts.”
But with the government, it was never for the lack of trying. After landmark civil rights legislation killed statutory Jim Crow in the mid-‘60s, President Lyndon Johnson rolled out his War On Poverty programs and deployed battalions of well-meaning volunteers to “The Other America” to get the “invisible poor” onto the programs. Like Augustus, government failed miserably.
“What very few people realize on the South Side [of Chicago] is that since the 1960s, our government and post-‘60s liberalism has made us an experiment in this pursuit for equality of outcome,” said Brooks. “Our community is literally government-controlled. We have every form of government assistance available from housing to food, to medical care. The outcome after 60 and 70 years of this is that we are all equal on the bottom.”
So Brooks has a fresh idea to fix the entrenched generational problems in trouble black communities:
“We come from a proud people who survived the worst horrors of America,” said Brooks. “We can reverse the conditions in our neighborhoods. The first thing we must accept is that government has no interest or the ability to fix the damage it did to our communities. We must do it ourselves.”
For many, “we must do it ourselves” is common sense, and it’s led Brooks to policy solutions that align with conservatives. But for those in the race industry, “we must do it ourselves” is a threat. When Pastor Brooks endorsed Republican candidate, Bruce Rauner, for governor of Illinois back in 2014, the liberal machine targeted him.
Brooks got death threats, his church was burglarized, his family had to go into hiding, 75 percent of his congregation left, and unions were bussed in to protest his neighborhood daily.
For liberals and hucksters in the race industry, predicably, the problem with troubled black communities is a racist America.
“Race is not the biggest problem that we face in the United States of America, and it’s definitely not the biggest problem that we face in Chicago,” Brooks said. … “It’s easy to say, ‘the white man, the white man’ when in reality we need to take a closer look at ourselves. We’re telling them educationally – you’ve got to get it together. Economically, you’ve got to get it together. Family and spiritually, you have to get it together. And you have to take responsibility.”
“Government has simply failed …” he said.
The fact that so many Americans see exactly what Brooks sees and can’t say it out loud when so many lives are being destroyed, and when the country is literally being turned upside down, is in itself clear evidence of major moral decay.