War, More, Cupcakes and the Fall of Rome

A celebrated cupcake shop in DC was closed for a few days. Some thought it was the End of Times. UPDATED 11/7/2022

The lines outside Georgetown Cupcake in Washington, D.C. were a fixture in the community. Then one day the doors were locked. We wondered. Was this the end of civilization as we know it?

Update: We just wanted to report we recently visited Georgetown Cupcakes and its is back to business as usual.

Back to the long lines at Georgetown Cupcakes this weekend.

Original Post

Georgetown Cupcake achieved fame after being featured on a reality TV show. Thereafter, there was never not a long line out front looking like anxious fans waiting to buy Beyoncé tickets.  Last week, the shop was shutdown for not renewing its business license (there was also made mention of a not very healthy health inspection).

Good news, by the weekend cupcakes were flying out the door again. Still, the panic that gripped the community was something to behold.

On a local Washington, D.C. community app there were posts, comments, rebuttals, and barbs—fast and furious. While most argued over who had the best cupcakes in the district, at one point the debate drifted into equating the closing of Georgetown Cupcake with the fall of Rome, which then evolved into a conversation on Edward Gibbon’s immortal multi-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-not your typical cupcake topic.

Here is a summary of my take on this great controversy and how we can keep the world safe for cupcakes and more.

What is with this Gibbon guy? Gibbon’s work (1776-1789) was a best seller of the day. Think a decade of Top Gun movies, one right after the other.

More interesting than Gibbon’s weighty volumes is why the dry-as-dust books were so damn popular to begin with? Why did the British care about long dead Romans?

Check out the dates. Over the course of Gibbon’s work the British were busy with the outbreak and aftermath of the American Revolution (some may have had this incident brought to their attention when they went to see Hamilton). London was losing the jewel in its Imperial Crown. Many wondered if this was the beginning of the end of their empire. Gibbon’s autopsy of corruption, decline, and loss might be their fate as well.

Civilizational “doom is inevitable” is an endemic feature of Western culture. The End of Times, for instance, is foundational to Christian theology. The Biblical apocalypse is always been just around the corner—just ask Jim Jones, David Keoresh, or Marshall Applewhite.

Let’s be honest. All of us, not just kooks, are always looking for advanced notice of when our comfortable, common place world might come tumbling down.

Historians and scholars have also spent a lot of ink on the theme of downfall. Machavelli obssessed with rise of empires and states through “virtu” and their inevitable fall from “fortuna,” a cyclic view of the past he adopted from studying Greco-Roman historians. Gibbons played with the same playbook, as did Oswald Spangler in The Decline of the West (1926) and more recently, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987).

Who is to say whether the world is following some great script or if we are all just making it up for ourselves as we go along? I have no idea.

Here is what I do know. There is something that cupcake lovers and all the doomsayers have in common—stable, successful, prosperous societies are built on the foundation of a civilization—and like most things that have a foundation, when that crumbles, for one reason or another, things get shaky. 

Today, the term “civilization” gets a bad name, often equated with the imperialism and colonialism of the 19th century or condemned by post-modernists as a construct for some to oppress others.  Samual Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) famously declared civilizations were the cause of conflict in the modern world.  Graham Allison argued in Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (2017) that like the ancient Greek city-states, America and China were headed for a civilizational donnybrook.

Civilizations are the not bad guys (though the people that run them sometimes do bad things). Authentic civilizations empower humanity.

I am not sure whether cupcakes are a true measure of civilizational strength, but there is a case to be made that healthy authentic civilizations are a force for good and ought to be nurtured, not denigrated, abused or taken for granted.

In an article, I wrote a while back I argued, “we should be worried less about them [civilizations] clashing and start thinking more about how the interaction between authentic civilizations can be the glue that binds the human community together.” 

Is the great threat to authentic civilizations from without or within? Both. We have to have a productive discussion on how to grapple with the internal attack on civilization. Secularism and multiculturalism lead a frontal assault on religion and culture. In the U.S., for instance, our current debates about climate, race and gender are not just about different political views or personal preferences, these are part of a foundational struggle over what Western civilization represents.

The great challenge for the West is having reasonable conversations about topics like religion, culture, and popular sovereignty when the public space becomes toxic the minute these words are mentioned. The discourse instantly floods with those attacking civilizations past and present. If you speak of state sovereignty, you are a fascist. If you talk about culture, you are a racist. If you mention religion, you are a bigot.

This is not just an internal discourse. Russia and China know well the sensitivity these issues raise and are perfectly willing to use disinformation and subterfuge to inflame, obfuscate and confuse the conversation.

What to do? The West can't save civilization as a tool as for saving themselves unless there is an honest conversation on how to make Western Civilization stronger and, as well, to promote a productive dialogue with other authentic civilizations (Communist China, Russia, and Iran need not apply).

No one has benefited from Western Civilization more than the United States, and no nation has a greater obligation to the West. No nation has more capacity to contribute to the internal dialogue of revitalizing Western Civilization against its internal criticisms and external critics.

What next? American civil society needs to step up and join the fight at home and abroad. Civil society needs to harness its collective good will and energy to build up what can bring Americans and Europeans and other like-minded nations together and make them stronger. In the end, the best defenders of Western Civilization are its people.

If we roll up our sleeves and have the tough conversations, we will keep America more free, safe, and prosperous—as well as safeguard the right to cupcakes of your choice as well.