(I first published this essay on July 26, 2010. It has been lightly edited to improve the contaxt.)

I borrowed the title of this post, with suitable modification, from St. Gildas, a sixth-century British historian.  His major work, known as the Liber Querulus de Excidio Britanniae. is unknown to the vast majority of Americans. I doubt that one in a thousand persons alive today have ever in their lives even heard of Gildas, much less read his book. It is mainly of interest to dark-age historians or deep Anglophiles. It is generally translated into English as “Complaining Book on the Ruin of Britain,” and referred to as the Liber querulus or “complaining book,” or sometimes just the de Excidio. I have actually read a modern English translation of the de Excidio, and I can agree with those scholars who don’t consider it history—even if I am not a historian nor necessarily a scholar. Some call it a sermon or a homily: that is a pretty fair appraisal. To say that a document is historical or has historical value is of course not the same thing as saying that it is history. I like to read history, and more than that I respect it when it is well done. Sermons—not so much. But what really attracts me to the De Excidio is not its value as history but my personal emotional connection with, and sympathy for, Gildas the man.

It reaches out to me, this picture of the earnest Saint, helplessly witnessing the moral and social deterioration of his home island, and the collapse of its institutions—and finally sitting down for a good, thoroughgoing tirade against the cowards and blockheads who, in his mind, have allowed it to happen. The dark specter of change had already come upon Roman Britain at the time of his composition. Gildas believed he knew why it had come and what it would mean. The enemies he saw were invading Picts and Saxons and Scots. He saw them coming in masses, ignorant uncivilized, and violent: Barbarians.

“No sooner were they gone, than the Picts and Scots, like worms which in the heat of the mid-day come forth from their holes, hastily land again from their canoes, in which they had been carried beyond the Cichican Valley, differing one from another in manners, but inspired with the same avidity for blood, and all more eager to shroud their villainous faces in bushy hair than to cover with decent clothing those parts of their body which required it.”

The invaders displaced the local expression of what had been part of one of the world’s great civilizations. That civilization, Rome, was now remote and powerless. To Gildas, it must have seemed almost impossible. Explainable only because individuals entrusted with the continuation of that Empire and that Civilization had failed in their trust. He couldn’t know that the invaders of Britain would eventually Christianize and become themselves a great British civilization; and had he known he probably would not have cared. Surrounded by wintry darkness, he could not distinguish the seeds of any spring to come, in a future far beyond his time.

It was not just the failure of individuals. Though Gildas named the names of a few leaders who, to his mind, were especially deserving of fault, he believed as well that the whole British nation bore blame for what had happened. Maybe the Saxon invaders, being godless Christ-less wild men, were highest on the hierarchy of blame; maybe the feckless Roman authority, so distant and ineffectual, was part of it too. And certainly the gross venalities and self-absorption of men like Maximus, who siphoned off the island’s defenders to be his army of personal adventure and self-aggrandizement; or the folly of leaders like Vortigern, who actually invited the invaders in and offered land to them—these individuals bore special responsibility as leaders, did exceptional damage, and richly deserved the censure of history.

But nothing in all this absolved the British people of direct responsibility for the horrific outcome. The national failure was two dimensional: first, the nation expected its rescue to come from Rome rather than from itself, so they indulged themselves in a lot of cowardly whining and groaning each time they desired to get the attention of the Roman authorities. Gildas found this offensive and embarrassing. The second and much more important dimension was, they wasted too much of their effort and strength in dissolute and dissipated and licentious pastimes, instead of arming and preparing themselves to become strong and ruthless protectors. They became a nation in which debauchery and substance abuse had special profile.

So, Gildas’s main objective in writing the De Excidio was to teach a moral lesson, since he saw moral failure lying at the root of his nation’s troubles. It was already too late for his advice to be helpful. I hope for his sake he had no illusions to the contrary. The pen is mightier than the sword, we like to pretend—but it was pretty much all swords from Gildas’s time on, through the next four or five hundred years—until Beowulf, perhaps. One has to understand that these were the Dark Ages, to which Gildas was an eyewitness. He was standing at the beginning, at the precipice, looking into the deepening abyss of his time, and he was aware of it, he knew it, and could feel himself and everything around him sliding into it, and he knew that there was no longer anything to be done to stop it. The Dark Ages had been made by dark-minded and ignorant people, and there were just too many of them.

So what is the lesson for us today, and what of Gildas’s wisdom may we apply to our own time and our own situation? Is his life and experience relevant to us? Some people think that twenty-first century America, and the planet in general, are on the verge of a new dark age, whatever that may be. I’m cautious about this myself, but that I think there may be, or ought to be, instances of commonality or at least constructive contrast, between Gildas’s circumstances and our own, is the obvious implication of my personal Liber Querulus. And if our future is not looking so bright, we may thank a hierarchy of persons, from the great and near-great to the ordinary; from the few to the many.

So we embark, with thanks and apologies to Gildas, to explore what seems to be the impending ruin of America.

I think most Americans know, at least in an emotional or instinctive way, that their country is on a downward slope, losing its real wealth, its influence, its ability to solve problems and its capacity to do things well; losing too its culture and traditional values, the things that have made it great and valuable among the world’s nations throughout its past.

America is like a body that has lost its neural self-control and self-integration. Instead of coordinated movements, it thrashes and jerks about, at odds with itself. Its muscles work in contradiction to one another and to its intentions. Its attention wanders, its brain darts from idea to idea, unable to focus. It picks up an issue and then, unsure how or whether to proceed, drops it again. Our country is in a condition of chronic spasmodic paralysis almost all of the time. It lacks the fundamental ability to form an intelligent objective and follow it to its achievement. It is barely able to move coherently from one day to the next.

The Ruin of America has come upon us at a particularly inopportune time—because it is not just the United States of America that is facing a desperate future, but the whole world also; and the country that used to inspire others and that had the moral authority to lead, to set standards, to require and expect right behavior from the world, seems to have given up and let go of those things voluntarily.

So what hope can there be for a world plunging headlong into a new century of crisis, if its leading nation, once its primary moral authority, has abandoned its role?

As a nation, we are incredibly divided. We are more divided now than at any time since the Civil War. We are divided politically, between right and left. There is no middle, no moderation—or if there is, it is the moderating effect of caution, indecision and relaxed morals, rather than the kind of moderation that comes from strength, experience, discipline, adult or seasoned sensibilities—what we used to call being “grown up.” We are also divided financially, between an ever narrower segment of “haves” and an ever larger segment of “have nots”. The “haves” enjoy ever-greater fortunes, while the “have nots” are increasingly less fortunate, and adding constantly to their numbers.

Not all of our divisions are bilateral and bipartisan. Some of them fall between us as individual persons. As our global disaster unfolds and accelerates, many of us see our share of the global economic pie shrinking or our access to it becoming more tenuous. The pie itself, we think, is not growing like it once did; meanwhile there are many more hands reaching out to it, many more mouths to be fed from it. Once we waited patiently in line, confident that the wait would not be too onerous. We were confident of our share, even believing that our share might get larger as we waited. Now we see others emptying the plate, and we conclude: we had better stop waiting, stop reaching out politely, and start grabbing with doubled hands while we still can. We have to be more aggressive and break more rules, because we see others as being aggressive and breaking rules. We are less sure, too, that a fair share (even if we get it) will sustain our need or our desire. We have to get more now, because tomorrow there will be less of it, and more people to elbow aside.

America today is swept by change. Not gradual, not evolutionary, but abrupt, giddy, gusty change. Change rushes upon us from many directions, of which some of the more prominent are the following:

§ Technological change: within my lifetime we have experienced the space program, the birth control pill, the personal computer, and the cellphone. We have discovered the structure of DNA and developed techniques for altering the biological basis of human existence itself. We have developed nanotechnology and given it practical applications.

Cultural and ethnic change: the ethnic character of America has been deeply altered by immigration, expanding some groups and reducing others.

§ Political change: by extending civil rights to segments of society that formerly were discriminated against, we have extended their social impact and their ability to shape events to their will. We have also created new classes of political influence and enabled new groups of partisans.

§ Economic change: economics encompasses changes in livelihood, in the economic sources of our support, in the gap between rich and poor, in compensation, conspicuous consumption, and the rules and rites of employability.

§ Environmental change: after almost two generations of political effort, after the expenditure of untellable billions of dollars, environmentally the nation and the world continue to get worse, not better, and the consequences more immediate and ominous.

These and other changes have all had revolutionary, unexpected consequences. Many of their effects have been good. Some of the change was thoughtfully considered beforehand. Some of it was right and even morally necessary to have done. Some of it was compellingly important and critical to our well-being.

But much of it has been done recklessly, without regard for possible consequences. Much of it has been done strictly for the enrichment of a few individuals, or for the satisfaction of idle wishes and cravings. Some of it stemmed from a host of small, individual decisions that even in hindsight may seem right and sensible to have done, but which, taken together, have now brought us to the threshold of disaster, and have sharpened the slope of our decline.