What Holds a Civilization Together?

What ancient Rome understood about belonging and why it still matters in the age of AI

Roman aqueduct (Aqua Claudia), Rome, Italy. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Artificial intelligence is widely described as one of the most transformative technologies in history. It promises extraordinary advances while at the same time raising profound concerns about trust, institutional legitimacy, economic disruption, the concentration of power, and ultimately the future of human decision-making.

Both perspectives raise valid questions, but given my early career in local government and civic engagement, I wanted to understand what may be driving that polarization and the breakdown of constructive dialogue.

To answer that, I began with a question, why throughout history, have some civilizations remained remarkably cohesive for centuries while others gradually lost the ability to govern themselves effectively? History offers several useful examples, so let’s begin with Rome.

Rome’s other infrastructure

Rome is usually remembered through the infrastructure it left behind. Roads, aqueducts, amphitheaters, military camps, walls, inscriptions, and legal texts make the empire visible. They are concrete enough to survive and impressive enough to make Roman power easy to imagine. The standard explanation follows naturally. Rome expanded because it built well, governed effectively, moved armies efficiently, and created an administrative system capable of managing distance. [1]

That explanation is not wrong. Roads allowed people, goods, soldiers, and information to move across a vast territory. Law provided a common legal framework, and military power made expansion possible because Rome was an empire, and empires are never built by persuasion alone. But those explanations still leave an important question unanswered. They explain how Rome expanded, but they do not fully explain why Roman rule endured or why so many people eventually came to identify themselves as Roman rather than simply subjects of Roman rule.

I believe the simple act of conferring Roman citizenship helps explain the difference. Citizenship began as a status tied to the city of Rome, but over time it expanded across Italy and eventually across the empire. In 212/213 CE, the Constitutio Antoniniana extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. [2] The quick response is, “Obviously, they needed taxes and one political administration.” That’s true. But digging deeper, I think one can make the argument that Rome had to make the concept of Roman society portable and transferable. In other words, Rome had to create value in what it meant to be Roman.

The population is always going to be larger than the army that governs it. No empire can put a soldier beside every road, court, farm, shop, household, and temple. At some point, rule must become more than coercion. A political system needs buy-in. People do not need to love the system, and many people under Rome surely did not. But enough people had to understand the system, use its categories, seek advantage within it, and recognize that Roman identity, law, and status carried practical value. That is different from simply being conquered.

Roman citizenship created a framework through which people from different regions could understand their relationship with the empire and participate in its success. It did not erase local identity. A person could remain attached to a city, province, family, cult, language, or local tradition while also participating in the wider Roman order.

That layered identity mattered because large political systems rarely survive by demanding that every local difference disappear. They survive by creating a wider frame in which those differences can operate without breaking the system.

Law reinforced that frame. Roman law did not make the empire equal, fair, or gentle by modern standards. It was still hierarchical and often brutal. But law gave the empire a shared structure for obligation, property, authority, punishment, and appeal. It allowed people to think of power as something more than the will of a local official or the violence of a nearby garrison. It helped make Roman authority portable because Roman categories could be carried into places far from Rome itself.

The same was true of material culture. Coins, inscriptions, public buildings, roads, rituals, and urban forms all repeated the idea of Rome across distance. These were not merely decorations of empire. They helped teach people what Roman order looked like. The empire could be encountered in a court, a market, a military settlement, a public bath, or a coin passed hand to hand. Over time, the repetition made Roman society easier to recognize and easier to inhabit.

This does not romanticize Rome. The empire was built with violence, extraction, slavery, and hierarchy. Any account that ignores those realities becomes dishonest. If anything, those realities make the question more important. If Rome relied so heavily on force, why did its political and social order endure for centuries? Force can conquer territory, but force alone struggles to organize daily life across generations. Perhaps Rome endured because it combined force with something we cannot see, perceived value. It created institutions and meanings that gave people a reason to invest in a larger and more stable society.

That is why the expansion of citizenship matters for this discussion. Rome did not simply stretch its roads across space. It stretched a concept of belonging across space. It made a civic identity portable enough to move through law, administration, ritual, architecture, coinage, language, and habit. A portable idea can travel farther than an army. Once it becomes familiar, people no longer experience it only as an argument. They begin to experience it as part of the world they must navigate.

The vocabulary that holds power together

Rome is only one example, but the pattern appears in other historical settings. Other examples include:

• The Peace of Westphalia · in 1648, a series of treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War helped give territorial sovereignty a more recognizable place in European political life. [3]
• The Enlightenment, generally dated from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century, changed the language through which authority, liberty, consent, and rights were debated. [4]
• The post-World War II order, after 1945, organized much of international politics around democracy, human rights, development, and security. [5] [6]

Each period was incomplete, contested, and often hypocritical. But each developed a vocabulary that allowed large numbers of people and institutions to understand authority, legitimacy, and obligation in a more common way.

The details differ, but the recurring problem is similar. Large societies need more than power. They need enough shared understanding for people to recognize institutions, obey procedures, negotiate conflict, and imagine themselves as participants in a common order.

Shared understanding does not eliminate conflict, but it does provide an arena within which conflict can occur without breaking the system. The next question is how that framework becomes durable enough to survive beyond a single generation.

How an idea becomes infrastructure

Shared understanding does not survive by accident. It has to be carried through ordinary life, repeated through institutions, and renewed often enough that each generation inherits more than a set of rules. A rule can tell people what is and is not permitted. It cannot, by itself, explain why the rule deserves respect. That work is done through buy-in, with culture, language, education, law, and governance operating together over time. This is how an idea becomes portable. It is no longer tied to a single place, generation, or political moment. It becomes something that can be inherited, adapted, and carried forward by society itself.

That process appears to depend on several different but connected carriers of shared understanding.

Culture

Culture is often treated as a softer subject than economics, technology, or politics. That is a mistake. Culture is one of the ways societies remember who they are. It preserves stories about courage, betrayal, sacrifice, obligation, family, authority, justice, and belonging. Those stories do not have to be historically perfect to be socially powerful. They give people a sense of what conduct is admirable, what conduct is shameful, what institutions are supposed to protect, and what kind of person society expects them to become.

Language

Language gives those memories a usable form. Words such as citizen, right, duty, freedom, sovereignty, family, security, dignity, and law carry more than dictionary meanings. They carry inherited arguments. They tell people which distinctions matter. When a society changes the meaning of a word, it changes more than vocabulary. It changes what people can demand, defend, criticize, and imagine.

Definitions

This list is not ordered, but definitions deserve special attention because they are where shared understanding begins to take practical form. By way of example, consider citizenship. If citizenship means only residence, one set of expectations follows. If it means legal status, another follows. If it means participation in self-government, the meaning expands again. The same word can organize different societies in different ways because the shared understanding beneath it changes. That is why definitions matter, but only as part of a wider process. A definition is useful because it gives shared understanding a stable form. Remember this, I get back to it later in this article.

Institutions

Institutions then make those meanings practical. A well-functioning society depends on many institutions. Two important examples are education and the courts. Schools teach what a society considers worth remembering, while courts translate shared principles into real decisions that affect everyday life. Together they help carry shared understanding from one generation to the next, giving abstract ideas a durable place within society. None of these institutions is perfect, and all can become self-protective or corrupt. But when they function well, they do more than deliver services. They make common life intelligible.

The Infrastructure we cannot see

For purposes of this article, I will refer to the shared understandings carried through culture, language, definitions, and institutions collectively as the invisible infrastructure. Unlike physical infrastructure, which allows people, goods, energy, and information to move, the invisible infrastructure allows societies to interpret institutions, authority, legitimacy, and obligation through a common framework.

This is why infrastructure is the right word. Physical infrastructure allows movement, exchange, settlement, and defense. The shared understanding of the invisible infrastructure allows law, administration, continuity, and shared interpretation to function inside a common world. Without that interpretive layer, physical infrastructure begins to lose much of its social value. Roads, bridges, schools, utilities, and public buildings can continue to exist, but the willingness to maintain them, invest in them, and organize around them ultimately depends on whether people continue to believe in the institutions and shared understandings that give those systems purpose.

As our nation marks its 250th year, it’s worth remembering that the American founding was itself an exercise in building an invisible infrastructure. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights did more than establish a new government. They articulated a shared vocabulary of principles, rights, responsibilities, and aspirations that allowed millions of people to imagine themselves as participants in a common political project. Like every enduring civilization before it, the United States required more than physical infrastructure. It required a shared understanding of what it was trying to become.

Local government offers a practical way to understand the relationship between physical and invisible infrastructure. Communities are not held together only by streets, utilities, zoning maps, drainage systems, and building codes. Those things matter, and when they fail the consequences are immediate. But a community also depends on shared expectations about fairness, process, notice, participation, neighborhood character, property rights, public safety, and the future shape of the place. A zoning code can regulate land use, but it cannot by itself create trust in the process. That trust comes from whether people believe the system is understandable, open enough, consistent enough, and tied to a public purpose.

Governance works the same way at larger scale. Laws are not self-executing objects. They operate inside an ecology of belief, habit, procedure and legitimacy. People comply with laws for many reasons, including fear of punishment, personal morality, social expectation, convenience, and respect for institutions. A stable society does not rely on only one of those reasons. It builds enough overlap among them that most people can participate without having to reconsider the entire system every day.

That is the strength of a shared understanding. It reduces the number of things a society has to explain from scratch. People do not need to renegotiate the meaning of every institution every morning. They inherit a framework that tells them what a court is, what a school is, what a contract is, what a vote means, why a public hearing matters, why a border matters, and why a promise made by an institution should carry weight. The framework can and should be challenged when it becomes unjust, but if every part of it collapses at once, collective life becomes difficult to organize.

When shared understanding stops holding

The dangerous moment for a society is not the moment people disagree. Disagreement is normal. A society that cannot tolerate disagreement is usually hiding deeper problems. The more serious problem comes when people stop sharing enough background understanding to recognize what the disagreement is about, which institutions have standing to resolve it, or which facts can be trusted while the argument unfolds.

Institutional distrust sits at the center of that problem. If enough people believe those institutions are captured, opaque, factional, or disconnected from the public purpose, their visible form matters less than the loss of confidence beneath it. Once people no longer believe that existing authorities can establish a common understanding of facts, enforce rules fairly, represent the public, or protect the shared order, conflict no longer stays within the ordinary channels of politics or law. The fight spills over and becomes a fight over the channels themselves. Religious conflict, revolutions, civil wars, and modern polarization are often the visible signs of a deeper breakdown in the shared understanding that gives institutions their legitimacy.

Rebuilding that shared understanding is hard because trust cannot be ordered into existence. The process is slow because shared understanding is not a switch. It is an accumulation.

The power of language

Importantly, language, or more specifically communication technologies, have always had an outsized influence on that process because they change the environment in which shared understanding forms. You need to look no further than the changes brought on by the printing press in early modern Europe. [7] Artificial intelligence belongs in that same historical progression. But what makes AI different is not that it replaces earlier forms of communications. Instead, it actively shapes it by producing, interpreting, and distributing language. [8] That is no small matter because language is one of the preeminent ways societies define responsibility, organize institutions, and form judgment.

Our challenge is to first develop a common vocabulary for understanding what these systems are doing, where they belong, what they should not replace, and how they affect the conditions under which people form judgment. Without that vocabulary, no common meaning can be established.

Once common meaning begins to break down, we begin to talk past each other. Public debate breaks into separate disputes over safety, innovation, labor, copyright, bias, etc. Each concern may be legitimate, but without a shared vocabulary they rarely add up to a coherent public conversation. The technology moves faster than the language needed to govern it, and regulation becomes increasingly unwieldy, disjointed, and ill-informed. [9] [10]

The historical lesson is not that society should fear every new communication technology. It is that every transformative communication technology eventually requires effective governance. Effective governance depends upon a shared understanding from which definitions, meaningful measurement, durable governance, and ultimately the invisible infrastructure of civilization emerge. Shared understanding is not a byproduct of civilization. It is one of the conditions that makes civilization possible.

Why definitions matter

Large societies need shared understanding to remain cohesive. If language has an outsized impact on how societies build and preserve shared understanding, then definitions are the bedrock by which societies anchor that shared understanding. Definitions give societies a common vocabulary through which they can preserve what they have already built, measure its erosion, and strengthen the invisible infrastructure that holds society together. Artificial intelligence now becomes part of that process because it increasingly participates in producing, interpreting, and distributing the very language through which shared understanding is formed.

That brings us back to the question that began this article. Why have some civilizations remained remarkably cohesive for centuries while others gradually lost the ability to govern themselves effectively? Military strength, geography, infrastructure, and good government all matter. But history also suggests something else. Societies survive because they create enough shared understanding for millions of people to cooperate, disagree, build institutions, and renew them across generations. Every major communication technology has changed how that shared understanding forms. Artificial intelligence now enters that same arena.

Our conversation, then, needs to shift from a fractured debate to a discussion about what we are trying to preserve. If artificial intelligence is beginning to influence how shared understanding forms, then preserving that shared understanding becomes one of our first responsibilities. That begins with definitions. Definitions give societies a common vocabulary through which they can preserve what they have already built, measure its erosion, and strengthen the invisible infrastructure that holds civilization together.

One of the recurring themes throughout today’s debate over artificial intelligence is the importance of preserving human free will. I agree. But if we want to preserve it, we must first define it. We cannot preserve what we have not first defined. That definition cannot begin with the machine. It has to begin with the human capacities that make judgment, responsibility, and self-government possible. In my opinion, the first definition should be what we call free will, or more specifically, human agency.

Only then can we begin to distinguish human intelligence from machine intelligence, and ultimately preserve both what it means to be human and the invisible infrastructure that holds civilization together.

References

[1] Fasolo, M. (2020). Infrastructure in the Roman world: Roads and aqueducts. In C. Smith (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (pp. 5761–5770). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1458

[2] UNESCO. (n.d.). Constitutio Antoniniana. Memory of the World. Retrieved July 2, 2026, from https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/constitutio-antoniniana

[3] Library of Congress. (2017, October 24). The Peace of Westphalia. In Custodia Legis. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2017/10/the-peace-of-westphalia/

[4] Cartwright, M. (2024, February 29). The Enlightenment. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/The_Enlightenment/

[5] United Nations. (n.d.). United Nations Charter: Full text. Retrieved July 2, 2026, from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text

[6] United Nations. (n.d.). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved July 2, 2026, from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

[7] Eisenstein, E. L. (2013). The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107049963

[8] IBM. (n.d.). What is generative AI? Retrieved July 2, 2026, from https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/generative-ai

[9] UNESCO. (2023). Guidance for generative AI in education and research. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386693

[10] National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile. https://www.nist.gov/publications/artificial-intelligence-risk-management-framework-generative-artificial-intelligence

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