Theories of civilisational ‘collapse’ grow less convincing when scrutinised
aeon.co
aeon.co
Yes, the actual causes of civilisational collapse are complex and varied, and do not exist to satisfy any particular narrative. And yes, these stories (most notably Easter Island) have been distorted and by modern polemical desires. And yes, with a few exceptions, "collapse" doesn't mean the total obliteration of a culture or their way of life.
But to twist this into "Do civilisations collapse?", with the answer being "no", is wrong. If you were living in Rome in 477, then your civilisation was collapsing. The fact that Latin would still be the language of the elite for more than a thousand years, or that Corinthian capitals would never cease to be carved, or even that there were people in Constantinople, thousands of miles away, still contentedly calling themselves "Romans", would provide very little succour, or otherwise argue against the fact that the civilisation you grew up in and depended upon was comprehensively fucked.
The same goes for the Maya, the Mycenaeans, the Harappa, and innumerable other civilisations. Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing. Arguments to the contrary -- on the basis that it's unevenly distributed, or that there will be elements of cultural continuity -- are academic. Experiential reality is that civilisations DO collapse.
Sure is. In the parts of the world where I'm living (EasternEurope - Northern Balkans) the retreat of the Romans and the subsequent waves of migratory peoples sure as hell looked like a civilisational collapse, even archaeologically. When the Romans were here they had indoor bathrooms and heating, they had writing, they had amphitheaters, but after they left (or were wiped out, no-one knows for sure), which happened roughly between 250 CE and 300 CE, then another 600-700 years would pass until writing would make its archaeological presence felt again (around year 1000), ~1400-1500 years until regular theater shows would be held again (in the late 1700s) and even now half of the country doesn't have indoor bathrooms like the Romans did (my parents don't, for example).
It takes a single small war for destroying what is already constructed, and then the population realizes they can't build those anymore because the know-how is dispersed, and many key people aren't around anymore.
However, having indoor plumbing in an area that freezes is a complex issue that requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance. Outside of novelty factor the gains seem minimal relative to the costs.
Now, indoor plumbing has larger benifits for city's, but again I suspect it was considered not worth the cost instead of simply being 'lost'.
Rome allowed for an incredible amount of wealth transfer, but the total economic output of Europe at say 500CE was not significantly lower than the total economic output of Eurpoe at say 200CE.
Watermills were developed by the Romans, but continued to improve though the middle ages. Iron smelting has a long history, but was improved though the middle ages. You can look at a huge range of productivity increases throughout the middle ages as yields improved due to constant innovation.
A few individual technologies progressed through the middle ages (but noticably not during the dark ages in the west), but social organization to build large scale projects is also technology, and that technology was utterly lost for a thousand years.
Rome had what we would recognize as Adam-Smith-like industry, a market economy, long distance trade, and mass production. It was a surprisingly modern world, and it collapsed. We're basically the second modern world, and we can collapse too.
Flying buttress are an example of a significant and complex innovation in architecture developed soon after the fall of the Rome. Though it took a while to really develop. So, evidence for 'loss of knowledge' with building large structures is rather simplified. Loss of political and economic structures to build large scale projects is far more clear.
Rome at it's peak had ~70 million people across Europe, the middle east, and North Africa. Adding up all the individual peaces after it's fall presents a different story than looking at just Europe while ignoring the huge influx of goods and slaves from other territories.
Yes, this is the "civilization has so far been binary-only, not open source" problem I observed when I started looking into reproducing civilization on a space habitat, for an eventual transition into a generation ship. It turns out a heck of a lot of civilizational artifacts are "write many times, read once" across generations: lots of iterative tinkering, used until the next "git commit"-like widespread adoption, then quickly receding from memory.
It was once known that longbowmen could shoot arrows curving around an obstacle. Scantly recorded, then the actual skill was forgotten until an archer geek who knew about the obscure written references worked out how to do it again from scratch. So we have that skill in our civilization now, yay. Except: he hasn't published his experiences, fleshed out into lessons for newcomers, etc. If he passes away before doing that, then we're likely to lose that skill again.
Piles and piles of human experiential information like this is simply not efficiently recorded, much less transmitted even in our "advanced" civilization today. I'm keen on learning machining and tool making. The more I look into it, the more I realize what is written down barely scratches the surface. Lots of master machinists talk about a feel for doing the job right the first time such that only about 10% of machinists are really good, 20% can follow explicit directions, and the rest should find another line of work.
This is I believe the foundation of why civilizations are so brittle and fragile, and so damnably difficult and time-consuming to build back up aspects that are lost. What worries me these days: the elites do not grasp this; if they did, they'd be a fuck ton more scared of war than they are. They'd also be way less sanguine about globalization and losing vast swathes of this binary-only technological know-how. The Shenzhen ecosystem is starting to show that even the "we'll out-innovate them, and they'll 'just' always manufacture our ideas" canard is wearing mighty thin over time.
If this feels overwhelming, then it gets worse: just tackle a scaled-down problem space, "prepping" or "self sufficiency", and you quickly realize that at an individual level, the challenges are magnified. You have to wind back the technological level (and quality of life) quite a few centuries before you can reasonably do everything yourself...nearly.
The really major discoveries of our history are things like a positional number system aka zero. That's the kind of thing that's likely to survive because it's both really useful, easy to teach, and really common. Germ theory might not stick around, but it's really widespread and also both useful and the kind of thing we can pick up again.
The jump from an 8080 including an understanding of Quantum Mechanics getting to a modern multi billion transistor i7 is 100's of billions in research. But, going from an 8080's took us less than 100 years and we could do it again assuming a large relatively stable global economy.
Fast, bi-directional mass communications seems to be key to discoverability. Lose that, and all sorts of losses apparently accumulate quickly.
Of more immediate concern to me is the economic effects of classifying certain economic verticals as "low margin" and then deprecating them, as if some kind of central planning committee decreed that the industry shall forevermore never cross-pollinate or value-add any other industries. I'm not convinced it is that straightforward nor predictable. Somewhere in China at this moment, some college kid studying materials science has parents who work at a "low margin" garment factory, who through osmosis over the decades taught her about the ins and outs of industrial-scale, high-precision thread-manufacturing and tight weaving, and she's noodling about adapting that tech to manufacture say, glass foam insulation at 1/1000th the current cost, and revolutionize the global insulation industry forever.
It certainly is economically efficient in our local maxima to arrange our "developed-world's" industrial policy in this manner, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not it is sustainable; final arbitration will be history in a hundred years, but my bet is on China, who seems to have no qualms absorbing the industries "developed nations" no longer want, and doesn't seem as eager to divest as much or as fast to "lower tier" economies.
> ...and we could do it again assuming a large relatively stable global economy.
Here is where I have concerns "there be dragons". I've yet to read of many losses of industries (much less civilizational collapse) where there was sufficient stability to quickly recover; usually the recovery process, even when successful, was arduous and time-consuming. As rapidly as the global economy changes now, and with the global economy's new normal turbulence, I'm not convinced that recovery is any easier today than in earlier eras.
I am thankful for people who publish information like "From NAND to Tetris".
Going from 1 billion to 7.5+ billion people world wide allowed for a huge increase in specialization and the sharing of knowledge. The benefit of building just one part of just one thing per day end up being huge.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest#The_Meth...
Flexible glass was likely a tall tale instead of an actual thing with a several versions of the story existing, but no actual use of the substance.
Concrete was in continuous but limited use for the period your referring to. The limitation was transportation networks not knowledge.
We are much better at preventing knowledge loss than we were even a generation ago. We are still pretty much horrible at it, but we did improve a lot.
In Europe, soldiering moved on to muskets, and fencing became an aristocratic pastime, preserving only epee and foil--weapons that could still be used effectively by people that were not professional soldiers. The techniques of two-handed sword fighting were recorded on a handful of pages, which are now the sole historical basis for academic reconstructions of typical combats. The remainder was reconstructed by history academics and medieval combat geeks.
Nobody thought it was important to preserve the state of the art of two-handed sword combat once you could stand back and punch holes in a big, armored man with a thicket of pikes, or a swarm of bullets, darts, arrows, or bolts. War evolved, and the formerly effective techniques were forgotten. The last surviving military blades were variations on the cavalry saber and naval cutlass, and were rarely used outside of ceremonial occasions. They just don't work very well against a guy with a machine gun. But the (dueling) saber was shoehorned back into the sport of fencing as its third blade, and other sabers have been fixed in various military traditions, being the last swords considered to be militarily useful.
That same disregard for historical preservation seems very common, especially considering technological obsolescence.
But in that case, do we really need it? That knowledge is mostly dead-end knowledge, useful only at the apex of a local maximum that has since been bypassed. The 70% that the master machinists believe should leave the field are the perfect candidates to improve CNC machines and 3D printers. Certainly, they would be useless if someone bombed all the chip fabs and murdered the lithographic mask designers, but then so would the bomb-droppers, who also rely on electronics packages to hit their targets.
It might actually be more effective to record all the things that became obsolete, and only keep details if they can be used as a stepping stone to the next thing. Then you only need to build vacuum tubes until you can build discrete transistors again, and you only need to build discrete transistors until recovering integrated circuits. In a civilization-preserving bunker or space habitat, nobody needs the expert-level knowledge on those stepping stones. The basics will do, until next month when the 3000 nm 8088-like chip fab comes online, and then that can leapfrog to an 800 nm MIPS chip fab, and those are only needed to control the machines making the 100 nm chips, and those run the machines that manufacture the universal hardware controller systems-on-a-chip that everyone needs to run the water purifiers, aeroponics tube farms, elevators, smart power inverters, and everything else. You don't need to remember the ox-drawn plow if you can jump straight to a small tractor, and you don't need to remember the tractor if you already know how to farm with PVC pipe, PEX plumbing, and a chem lab, instead of dirt.
Though it took civilization thousands of years to get where we are now, rebuilding from stone age to modern age could be done in a century or less, provided that someone is still around to remember the critical path to it. The scary part is that some of those critical sections may only be remembered by a few people, and they might be concentrated enough to all be killed by the same bomb. In that case, you're back to waiting through those thousands of years again.
I'm not sure if it's a good example of technical knowledge being lost, but I think this video from Lars Andersen a couple weeks ago is the one being referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc_z4a00cCQ
Or maybe this one from a couple years ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lNUXoOoCU0
I think I've seen one Lamborghini in the last 20 years. That's a different statement than "there are no running Lamborghinis in existence."
Revolution and other types of civilizational collapse essentially never lead to a reduction in suffering or misery, as the 20th century attests. Inequality may be reduced, but that's just because every one is poorer.
But it's a moot point because slavery didn't end in 477.
Then your civilisation was in a constant state of flux beginning at least in the 230s with the advent of the "barracks emperors". The "fall from grace" of the roman civilisation was a lengthy process with several changes not only to roman society but also to the tribes surrounding Rome (better organization due to trade- and military links to Rome; introduction of advanced metalurgy; christianity).
I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor.
In retrospect though, this date can be seen as a definitive turning point with no way back to the days of the past. But only due to the fact that a title (Emperor of the West) was abolished. If anything, the West was 'comprehensively fucked' long before that date.
In fact lots have changed, except if you constrain the consideration only to rural places. The life of a citizen in Rome before and after the collapse would have been very different (that said, the collapse indeed took centuries to be completed).
Even that was not a major factor at the time. Several emperors had already been of Germanic origins, plus many others were of non-Latin origin and had been from quite early on. Also not all emperors were former Roman aristocrats.
At the time it was probably much less of an event than one of the two recent sacks of Rome.
..at any time, your lifespan wasn't enough to experience the whole collapse - only local ups and downs. If you were living in 477, you only had distant stories and chronicles about Pax Romana. The tectonic change was too slow for any particular person to experience.
I agree with this and actually think the article does a decent job of arguing this case against the alarmist approach "X killed civilization A; let's put a lot our efforts in combating X now", which seems to be getting more and more common today.
> Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing.
It seems to me that you are switching definitions somewhat. I understood the article's "civilizational" collapse to mean a level of decline that, once the society crosses some Rubicon, is irreversible within a generation or two. If I understand your argument you are using collapse from personal perspective: enough people see their lives collapse or decline enough.
To me, that second definition is a lot less severe. If you look at Eastern Europe during the second world war (Cambodia of Pol Pot's times, etc. etc.) those events are likely to be viewed as a collapse by many people suffering through them, the civilization is not lost and society bounces back within at most a couple of generations once the stimuli are reset.
This was not the case for most of human history. Once you lost people knowing, e.g. how to forge metal, that knowledge had to be rediscovered mostly from scratch. Trade has been extremely slow, so rebuilding infrastructure was much more difficult.
Luckily we haven't seen a globalized collapse and a dark age in quite some time.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
Still, the structure of the city was fairly well preserved. It wasn't until the Gothic Wars in a few decades until Rome was utterly wrecked and depopulated. The city changed hands five or six times, and armies frequently cut the aqueducts, never to be repaired. The last recorded act of the Senate was in 603.
Then, around 900, a few earthquakes caused the final collapse of long neglected buildings. Nobody cared to fix them, but they did use the rubble for other construction over the next few hundred years.
(Not that there was that much new construction: Rome's population crashed from over a million to 30,000.)
Did the collapse happen while the life of ordinary Britains improved greatly? Yes.
Did the USSR collapse? Yes. Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Yes.
Holy Roman Empire, Greek civilisation, Roman empire: Same story
Maybe today it is better, but that didn't help the millions of Russians who drank themselves to an early grave since the 90s:
http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/
> Russia witnessed 6.6 million more deaths in this fifteen-year period than would have occurred if the country had merely sustained the mortality schedules from two decades before.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/
> By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.
Sadly, the poor, rural, white parts of America are going through a similar demographic crisis right now, while the rest of the country is busy vilifying them as racists.
Systems collapses have very negative consequences for those who depended on the old system.
The USSR and British "collapse" were the loss of empires, not a collapse of civilization. The systems of society were shuffled but not destroyed.
It's a perfect example of the fall of an empire and civilization without any collapse.
When the USSR collapsed, people in the Eastern Bloc didn't stop writing stuff down.
It's this mental impulses that drives us to utter drivel like "Rome never fell".
I strongly suggest Greg Ward-Perkins' books on the subject.
The only commonality, as I understand it, is that between 1400 and 900 BCE, all of that trade and most of the "higher" civilization in those areas disappeared, to eventually be replaced by something different.
Yes, the Greeks are the descendants of the Mycenaeans, but Minoans were a totally different civilization. Different language, different people.
For what we can read, and archeologic findings, the Minoans civilization collapsed and disappeared
The Minoan civilization disappeared (possibly being partially incorporated into the Mycenaeans') about 300 years before the disappearance of Mycenaean culture along with the other late Bronze age hullaballoo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
The BBC claims there were trees and the population was relatively happy when the first ship arrived. But this changed dramatically after that.
Diamond claims that the 1722 expedition saw no trees over 10ft tall, and says that effectively the deforestation was 'complete' by then.
Personally I believe the BBC version of events. Disease + Slavery + 70,000 sheep vs a population that had survived for 1,000 years on a tiny island. Even Diamond agrees that he doesn't understand why the islanders would cut all their own trees down when they were clearly intelligent.
Edit: Here's the actual quote from the Jacob Roggeveen's journal [1]:
> Nor can the aforementioned land be termed sandy, because we found it not only not sandy but on the contrary exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas, potatoes, sugar-cane of remarkable thickness and many other kinds of fruits of the earth; although destitute of large trees and domestic animals except poultry
[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03srmm6
[1]: https://archive.org/stream/voyagecaptaindo00unkngoog#page/n1...
The BBC has their own narrative (the rest of the world was living in peace and harmony before white Europeans spoiled everything) so I would take their opinion with a large pinch of salt.
Irrespective of the BBC bias I still think that disease + slavery + 70,000 sheep was more likely cause for collapse.
Samuel Johnson, 1773: "From the bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present century. Now and then about a gentleman’s house stands a small plantation, which in Scotch is called a policy, but of these there are few, and those few all very young. The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cowpar, I passed for a few yards between two hedges. A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice."
Scotland was also to be transformed by sheep farming.
I don't think humans will disappear either. But a possible future in which we escape the surface's radiation by moving underground and live on cave moss burgers could be seen as a "collapse".
"To Agitius, thrice consul: [...] The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned."
my quote was an example how people were quite acutely aware of the collapse around them. wiki link just a reference for the quote.
It's it is not, however, a desperate letter talking about the collapse of a civilization. You would be able to find similar letters begging for Romes intervention during Romes reign.
It's not proof of anything even close to awareness of the collapse of civilization.
which ones specifically then?
and more importantly, its not just this letter, as i mentioned above the whole gildas’ de excidio goes explaining in quite detail the sudden and devastating effect of the collapse of roman authority in britain.
do you have any evidence to back up your insistence that majority of the population went on like business as usual?
And no I don't have any examples handy that I can point to right now, but I am sure there are plenty if you dig a little.
Rome was the capital but it wasn't the civilization.
People experienced war all the time back then. The idea that most had any idea what was going on in any deeper lever flies in the face of at least how I understand history.
Denying a historical phenomenon for political gain is as bad as selectively citing a two century old book to justify xenophobia. It is revealing that the author mentions Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies", and then dismisses it's meticulous definition of collapse as "jargon". Before coming up with this definition Tainter spent a whole chapter describing many, many examples of social collapse including the ones mentioned in the article. The definition arises from these examples and absolutely covers the collapse of Rome, Bronze Age and others.
As for how we define and study the social collapse without arbitrarily designating some cultures as superior to others - a good example would be collapse of ecosystems. In this case you can have a sensible definition of complexity and energy intake and the collapse would be a sharp decline in both. There is a whole framework for similar studies in social collapse - see this talk.
Civilization means cohesion to a greater level than a mere culture.
Contemporary anthropologists tend to shy away from even using "culture" these days because of it's mis-use by laypeople (or other social sciences, for that matter). These days anthropologists tend to think of it simply as referring to a vaguely distinctive system of meanings and practices, with emphasis on the practice portion (Pierre Bourdieu ftw!).
"Civilization" historically refers to what we Westerners consider social systems that resemble our own: centralized, hierarchical states with explicit labor specialization. The term is often used punitively against non-Western societies (portrayed as "uncivilized"), hence why anthropologists try to avoid it like plutonium.
Responding to your comment, on these terms culture is absolutely necessary for civilization to exist, as culture is necessary to even be human. It's culture that allows us to conceive of a need for public works, and form labor groups to construct them. It's culture that provides language, which in turn provides written scripts. It's culture that creates a set of shared meanings and practices that provides a sense of collective identity in order for social groups to cohere in the first place. None of these things, in fact, necessarily even need a strong, centralized government (i.e., "civilization") to occur.
Now, whether or not a culture produces what we would consider "civilization" is entirely subjective and bound up with what we see as particular markers of complexity. Heck, there are a lot of archaeologists that scoffed until very recently at the notion that the Classic Period Maya constituted a state-level "civilization" simply because Maya cities were much more dispersed over the landscape in comparison to Aztec urban centers (which were much more similar in form to Western cities, if much larger).
These views would make me unemployable in academia.
Labelling a community as "barbaric," however, has been a handy excuse for taking land and killing people for millenia. White settlers came to view Native Americans as barbaric, and that was reason enough for attempted genocide. A case could be made that trying to systemically eliminate an entire population might perhaps count as barbaric. "Barbarism," like "civilization," is in the eye of the beholder.
Being natives within a large-scale, organized, literate society, it's only natural to assume this is the best of all possible worlds, but one could make a counter-argument that this society leaves its members weak, alienated, and anomic. There's also the matter of poverty, large-scale warfare, oppression, and pollution that contemporary societies contribute. I must say, my digital watch is pretty neat, though.
As a scientist myself, I certainly place a great deal of value in science as a process of inquiry and understanding. However, science is just a tool, and like a hammer it can be used to cause harm as well as create. It all depends on the person wielding it.
Sometimes when a transformation is faster than usual, for example because of an imported illness or conquests by technologically more advanced groups, we may call this a 'collapse'. In case of the Mayan culture this is probably justified, but that's not the normal case. The normal case is a continuous mixing with other cultures from which new political unions, languages and identities evolve.
Not necessarily. The bronze age collapse happened in a few decades. It's not one civilization but several. Trade, agriculture, writing... all that nearly disappeared in less than a human lifetime.
I'm not sure how much weight I would put into it, but one story I've heard seems pretty solid: The Philistines (of biblical fame) were Mycenaean Greeks who attempted to attack and settle in Egypt, and who were in turn resettled on or near the Egyptian border with the Levant.
yes they very much were -- read the history of Gothic wars or Totila's sack of Rome. Even more the sack by Alaric in 410, despite the lack of damage done, was a truly shocking event for contemporary writers and external observers.
The city still exists and was never completely abandoned but having its population drop from 1 million to less than 50000 is a significant change. I guess, if you consider this change a "collapse" depends if you think it dropped fast enough.
How much the fall of the (western) Roman Empire was due to or was accelerated by environmental factors is still up to debate. Was the migration period caused by climate changes? Or what role did the deforestation of the Italian peninsula play?
His distinguishing states from civilization here is also instructive. We can further analytically carve "civilization" into different histories - industrial, arts, literary, architecture, agriculture, etc. - that divide our timelines into different overlapping periods of sin waving ascent, descent, advance or retreat.
"Not with a bang, but a whimper." - T.S. Eliot.