Céard suas, madra?

I apologise for the length of this one - I had a lot to say.

Ever since I've been old enough to speak English, the word 'cool' was one of my favourite exclamations. This is somewhat odd: not only is its literal meaning “not frigid enough to be cold, but too chilly to be lukewarm”, but its slang meaning has never, ever, applied to me. Not once throughout my entire life. So, now we're thinking about it: what is 'cool'?

Today, the concept is largely associated with the United States of America, the king-sized republic, and propagated through the medium of the television. But I think it's something else, not necessarily connected to our Yankee brethren: namely, the ability to recognise a good idea, or what you think is a good idea. I think its history stretches back a lot farther – even, I hypothesise, as far back as the apes. It's a survival skill, really: Machiavelli says there are three types of intelligence. The first kind can invent good ideas; the second kind can recognise good ideas; and the third and worst kind can do neither. In my experience, most people have the second kind of intelligence: that is to say, when the sabre-tooth tiger is breathing down their necks, they have the good sense to listen to the guy who shouts “Run!”. If it hadn't been for this handy little piece of psychological gear, the guys who invented fire and the wheel would probably have ended their days unemployed and caveless.

But is there a flip side to being able to recognise a good idea? I say that it is, basically, the target of propaganda. Any empire that knows what it's about has been able to force its ideology on its subjects by making it a 'good idea' to adopt it. Take the Roman Empire. If there was one thing the Romans were good at – no, it's not roads or aqueducts: it was integration. Roman culture was, really, little more than a fiddled-about version of Hellenism: there was nothing special about it. So how did they manage to swallow up such doughty cultures as Phoenicia and Egypt? This is because the Romans knew what they were about. You see, when they moved into Carthage, Gaul and Egypt, they send Romans in to govern the disgruntled tribesmen/ancient peoples/glorified apes. Official postings were available to anyone in the Roman world – if you had Roman citizenship. This didn't require Roman ethnicity – this required that, in public, you wore a toga, spoke Latin, so on and so forth. Naturally, the disgruntled chiefs/viziers/least pungent glorified apes didn't really want to give up their leadership positions, so they adopted the act to get their old jobs back. And as the generations wore on, the act lost its falsehood. The provincials became more Roman than the Romans themselves and the not-so-proud owners of their bastardised Hellenic culture became, to use a school-yard metaphor, the kid with the expensive toga, the brand hobnailed sandals and the brush on back-to-front that the provincials so ardently desired to emulate. And in so doing, those provincials lost every vestige of their independence. The ancient cultures of Egypt, Syria and Carthage dried up and vanished (in the case of the Egyptians, ending more than three thousand years of high culture). Perhaps worse still, the nascent civilisations of the Celtiberians, Spanish, and Gauls were blotted out before they had a chance to shine. Gaul, in particular, is an excellent example: they were moving towards inventing democracy, philosophy and even national unity when the Romans stuck their gladius in where it wasn't wanted. From Scotland to the Sahara, the world became boring: everyone wore togas, spoke Latin, and knew who Cicero was. Europe's diversity never recovered: the Celts survive only in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands; Spanish, French, Italian, Romance, and Romanian are all but mutually comprehensible. Even when the cool kid left the school in the 470s AD, it was never forgotten: the last claimant to the throne of the Western Roman Empire only gave it up in 1806, and the Sultans of Turkey claimed the title of Eastern Roman Emperor until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The memory of Rome fuelled the greed of some of history's most avaricious conquerors, such as Mehmet II and Suleiman the Magnificent, or, more recently, Mussolini in Italy. It's arguable whether we are still, today, paying for the Romans' greatest achievement.

And it's happening again. The two greatest weapons the Americans possess are not their nukes or armies; they are television and the internet. English is the Latin of today: from Germany to the West Coast to China, a far greater expanse than the Romans tyrannised, people wear jeans, listen to rock and understand English (and, now I think of it, know who Elvis Presley is. But he doesn't compare to Cicero). Why do they do this? Because it's cool. Because the telly said so. Because that little instinct in our brains tells us that everyone else is doing it, it must be a good idea.

Is it? Remember what happened the last time. Where will England, France, and Germany be in a thousand years?