“Peak Civilization”: The Fall of the Roman Empire (2009)
europe.theoildrum.com
europe.theoildrum.com
> The answer to these crisis and challenges is to build up structures - say, bureaucratic or military - in response. Each time a crisis is faced and solved, society finds itself with an extra layer of complexity. Now, Tainter says, as complexity increases, the benefit of this extra complexity starts going down - he calls it "the marginal benefit of complexity". That is because complexity has a cost - it costs energy to maintain complex systems.
In other words, while on the one hand it is important to eliminate jobs that produce zero or negative value, or even ones that offer value lower than their total economic costs (which includes opportunity costs--ie children who learn more effectively by another teacher, or on their own), on the other hand it is very difficult to tell people they should be losing their job. One way to fix that is perhaps to entitle everyone to basic needs.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A
"Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require. There are fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits... Yet there is a strong case to be made that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.
What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order."
To a limited degree, the collapse of the British Empire, gentle though it was, illustrates the same problem: it's not that the new order is worse than the old, but rather that the process of getting there is so disordered and bad.
Was this generally the outcome of the Roman Empire's collapse? Intuitively, I would expect breakdowns in law and order and the collapse of complex supply chain systems (particularly food delivery) to result in mass human suffering, at least in the short term.
The histories I've read of the early middle ages corroborate much of your intuition. Trade collapsed; many luxury goods became impossible to obtain at any price; illiteracy rose; population declined and many citizens died from famine and plague.
But there's often a trade-off between freedom and convenience, then and now. The Roman empire was built upon large-scale slavery and wealth inequality. If you were a member of the elite, then yes, the collapse was terrible; you lost access to all the privileges of the empire. If you were a slave, you probably ended up somewhat better off, becoming either a peasant or a bandit. Not being able to obtain pottery or steel doesn't matter much if you couldn't afford it to begin with, and dying at 40 from starvation is an improvement on dying at 25 in the arena.
Slavery continued to exist in Western Europe after the fall of Roman empire until at least year 1000 AD.
In other former parts of Roman Empire such as Northern Africa slavery continued to flourish almost until the 19th century.
On what basis are you making this assumption? "The fall of Rome" was not an anti-slavery uprising. It was gradual disappearance of the central authority (and all its benefits such as roads, law and order etc).
About 10% of England's population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves. Compare that with the Roman Empire where slave population (including Rome and all provinces) are estimated at 10-15% of the total.
Now, you could (in the abstract) say that a better, more just, and more responsive society emerged. But for those who went through it, there were a bunch of new ways to die.
It would be very persuasive to see him personally bolting for freedom between warring warlords in present-day Libya, or improving his welfare in lawless mafia-ruled cities of ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s.
But no such chance, so his views may be safely ignored.
I happen to be rereading Gibbon right now. He doesn't focus in on complexity, he contradicts it - pinpointing Constantine's crude-but-effective solution to constant rebellions and civil wars as the cause of the slow collapse: namely stationing perhaps two-thirds of Rome's military permanently in the cities with independent commands (the "palantines".) This prevented the regular barbarian-fighting armies (the "Borderers") and their commanders from rebelling successfully because they were now a relatively small military minority that would have to fight city after city - even in their own area - just to usurp power locally. But, with one hand tied behind its back, Rome's fall was inevitable from that point on. This "prepared the ruin of the Empire" in Gibbon's words. (But it was, arguably necessary, rebellion and civil war were incredibly frequent before that decision was taken.)
Size (and inequality) had undermined solidarity across the empire, not complexity. Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard, and the traditional pagan religion had lost most of its force well before Christianity came along; soldiers were no longer too afraid of the Gods to break a solemn oath in order to join a local rebellion under their particular commander. Most people's religion, particularly in the upper classes, had become much simpler - they really didn't have any.
It's possible to see this inexorable tendency toward rebellion as a result of Augustus' previous simplification long before; when drafting soldiers became too complex and unpopular, he ended conscription. This set up the situation in which soldiers became more loyal to their commanders, and themselves, than to the official emperor in Rome.
Looking at other societies, from other books, local chiefs and individuals slowly learned how to undercut central authority, in particular, slowly starving the center of revenues. Deviousness and a growing culture of tax-cheating and avoidance. It ain't that hard to keep things together if you have the money.
A simple policy can still reflect a highly complex, expensive form of social organization. It's rather hard to argue that stationing massive garrisons throughout an empire is not a massive exercise in social complexity and organization.
> Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard,
It's difficult to argue that late Imperial Rome, with its multiple levels of bureaucracies, military and civilian, a nascent Church, along with large standing garrisons wasn't far more socially and economically complex than the societies of the invading barbarians.
And all that complexity went exactly towards 'keeping large groups together' without the benefit of a unified ethnicity or other identity.
But note that in earlier times, Rome's technological and social complexity was able to pay for itself and then some: it was able to field and man large military organizations, and the complexity brought in a profit by conquest and war booty.
In other words, size was a logical end result to earlier complexity: in order to keep the system running, Rome had to continue to grow.
Unfortunately, Rome ran out of rich easily-conquered lands and its inefficient (and complex) economy could not make the economic transition (unlike the Eastern Empire, which had richer and more densely populated lands).
Your example of stationing two-thirds of a massive standing army just to keep order is an example of just how inefficient the late Western Imperial economy must have been, and why it fell against barbarian groups that had much simpler, flatter social hierarchies based on ethnic kinship and trust.
I'll remind you that the contemporaneous Chinese Han dynasty also evolved into a large militarized, centralized bureaucratic state despite the wide differences in geography and developmental path, and faced very similar problems of replacing conscripts with professional soldiers and then keeping them loyal. What forced them to have similar organization was their sheer size and the organizational pressures this caused.
Re China you give another example of size creating simplicity and standardization. In contrast to your first paragraph.
You're narrowly defining 'complexity' as only 'complexity of procedure' and completely ignoring social complexity and specialization.
How about you justify why only the single measure of 'complexity' is sufficient for our discussion?
A few direct responses to your example:
1. Standardization may save costs overall, but they represent a form of social complexity (you now have specialized bureaucrats and administrators to determine standards and communicate with troops, weapons must move a long way to supply every legion, training is now done in a centralized fashion)
2. This social complexity adds fragility to the system—if your army depends on having standardized gear to function properly, and barbarians capture your centralized workshops, then all of a sudden you lose the ability to equip the troops effectively; barbarians don't have that problem
3. It's not even clear that standardization saves overall costs here; it may save administrative cost at the Imperial level (it's easier to manage and train troops if they are interchangeable) but incur large hidden costs at the local level; in other words standardization may be an externalization of administrative problems onto the provinces. A direct example would be: if you force all the troops to use standard gear, they might fight worse than if they used weapons that were specialized for dealing with local enemies; also now your troops have a huge delay in being equipped from a central armory, and may end up pay out of their own pockets for local wares just to survive.
Anyone who has sat through multiple re-orgs at a large corporation will understand that what is 'simple' for the administrator (let's make the org chart simple and clear!) may actually cause tons of hidden additional complexity at the bottom layers, so that total complexity has risen even though things look 'simpler' at one particular level.
Sure, in a vacuum anything can be seen as 'complexity', but if you actual measure the costs of doing complicated things in late Roman times then it's clear why their system fell apart while the Germans' largely didn't, despite the Romans having more territory and population to start with, and the key is to see that the late Roman system was horribly inefficient, even after taking standardization into account.
I've made a detailed case for my views. Where's yours?
Otherwise you will never come to any real conclusions, since every society will look more complex from a particular perspective, so none can be fruitfully compared to another. Or you would end up with ridiculous conclusions like modern society is simpler than hunter gatherer societies, because we have uniform driving laws and a global data routing protocol while they don't.
I've cited a source, and a specific historical instance, have you?
PS - the German "system" fell apart many times, populations swapped, etc. The area was always a problem, no one empire or monarchy there was a constant problem.
I have a more nuanced position: size was certainly a strong causative factor, but it had an intricate relationship to social, military, other complexities in a strong feedback loop that took place over centuries.
In large, complex systems, it's never one factor that fully causes another, but a complex feedback occurs; sometimes the system tends towards homeostasis, while other times a feedback occurs that utterly transforms the system as a whole.
Let's just talk about Rome in particular. Rome's Empire has often been called the 'accidental' empire in the sense that the Roman Republic and the people did not seek out to create an empire from the get-go, but it sort of fell into their lap. How did this happen?
1. Rome was embroiled with constant conflicts with their neighbors starting with the Etruscans and Samnites and developed the military and social institutions (a certain form of complexity here) that let them eventually triumph
2. To defeat their enemies, Rome eventually built a massive war machine (complexity) and found out that conquest was very profitable (selling slaves back in Rome, pillaging and taxing the conquered territories—tons of social, economic, and military complexity, but here have the beginnings of size as well).
3. However, this 'pillaging economy' only worked as long as Rome was able to keep conquering weaker neighbors and taking its population as slaves. At any point in the process, Rome theoretically could have disbanded (or drastically reduced) the size of its legions and decided 'here is enough', but internal conflicts, the quest for glory, etc. kept the military adventurism, because it was profitable for the generals and troops that lead the conquest (a complex arrangement, leading to 'size')
4. Administering a vast empire was difficult, so simplifying reforms (which, as you say and I completely admit, may reduce complexity) like standardization of coinage, law, military equipment, etc. occurred in the late Empire. However this was still in the context of an overly bloated (size) and overly inefficient (complexity) Empire that was only held together by military force
So I think you're absolutely right if your thesis is that size -> complexity. However, in certain cases (like Rome's), complexity -> size as well, and the combination is key.
And the rise and fall of Rome over the centuries can be seen as a certain path one can take:
initial complexity (the highly profitable, 'accidental' Roman war machine) -> overly fast, unsustainable growth -> forced additional complexity due to size -> failure to reform (and simplify) quickly enough -> collapse
I now begin to think we should perhaps distinguish between size, complexity of design, the number of moving parts, and I might also add redundancy (since it trades off with many of the above.) These can all vary independently. There's a sense in which redundancy (or fail-safe system design) can add parts but reduce overall design complexity, or at least management complexity/too many bad decisions that are too easy to make or implement. So maybe the latter is an additional meaning of complexity that should be considered. "Control Complexity." For example, an aircraft with no dihedral is simpler, but far harder to manage, to keep level.
Note re the above that the number of moving parts (and size) in a physical system doesn't nec reflect Kolmogarov Complexity since the Turing machine simulating that system can loop.
"a degree of professional esteem which remains as strong today as it was then", from:
"In the early 20th century, biographer Sir Leslie Stephen ["Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794)," Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 7, (Oxford, 1921), p. 1134.] summarized The History's reputation as a work of unmatched erudition, a degree of professional esteem which remains as strong today as it was then:
The criticisms upon his book...are nearly unanimous. In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the History is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. ...Whatever its shortcomings, the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period."
What essentially happened from the third century through the seventh century is that the internal instability caused more and more power to be (intentionally or not) devolved to more local elites. After Christianity became the state religion, the administrative backbone of Roman Europe became the Church and not the Empire itself, which also helped to hasten the devolution. At some point, the local rulers and population would realize that they're not getting anything from Rome and they owe nothing to Rome, so why call themselves Roman? The Western Roman Empire effectively dissolved itself into nothingness, and its passing went more or less unnoticed by contemporaneous observers.
Portraying this gradual process as a concrete "fall" is somewhat problematic. There is a striking continuity on many levels. Even the polities end up being fairly stable: the Frankish kingdom eventually ended up inheriting the Western Roman Empire de facto and arguably de jure following the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire. In both cases, the administrative systems had been transformed dramatically from the traditional Roman model. That's not to say that there wasn't a severe shock, but the biggest shock would have been the loss of North Africa (the key granary supplying Rome) that created a vicious cycle of economic decline. The actual date commonly given for the fall (476) was more or less contemporaneously ignored by everybody as yet another change in the local ruler.
Setting aside arguments about what the "fall of an empire" means, a 50% decline in population is much more serious than administrative devolution. I'm sure that anyone in that period who could see a large enough span of time would have felt something major was lost.
Also "As things stands, we seem to be blithely following the same path that the Roman Empire followed. Our leaders are unable to understand complex systems and continue to implement solutions that worsen the problem. As the wise druid was trying to tell to Marcus Aurelius, building walls to keep the barbarians out was a loss of resources that was worse than useless. "
Rome was in a state of near perpetual warfare with the Germans for centuries. Eventually Rome became too weak to defend its northeastern borders and the Germans hollowed out what had become a rotten western empire.
This is a post from 2009. Any analogies to Trump are being done by you.
Some political systems are quite effective, some are not as much. Monarchys are typically less effective since the power transition is not merid-based. Roman empire wasn't quite a monarchy in the medieval sense, but judging by the amount of crises per century, it was pretty close. Wasn't that a factor to be taken into account? Wasn't that the bad emperors who screwed up Roman economy to the extent that even Marcus Aurelius couldn't fix it?
Early Roman republic was on the other hand an outlier in terms of its efficiency. Obviously that was military efficiency, but wasn't it tightly connected with political efficiency? It seems to me that early Roman republic managed to build a system that promoted people based on their merit and that somehow made the entire system an order of magnitude more efficient then their neighbours.
It seems to me that just the fact that we are looking at ancient Roman history is an example of availability bias. Hundreds or thousands of other city-states of that era weren't as militarily or politically effective and therefore lost to Rome and ceased to exist. This is another indicator of high efficiency of early Roman politics, and it kind of implies that as time went by the efficiency slowly or rapidly decreased.
Of course it's hard to argue about how effective is one political system compared to another. It's hard to even define precisely what is efficiency in this case. But I think we shouldn't only focus on economics just because it's easier to talk about. I am waiting for someone smarter than me to write a book about political reasons of why do societies collapse. Or is there such a book already out there?
If you can read or understand German, and you don't know the 19th Century satirical song "Als die Roemer Frech Geworden", you're in for a treat.
Every recorded version seems to have a different choice of stanzas, but a comment to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-z2Nmu4okI seems pretty comprehensive.
I don't think it is accidental that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson read classics in the original Greek for pleasure. Also, while Cicero was a giant of the Roman Republic, he was a great admirer of Aristotle.
There are many Roman legal institutions, however, that have been abandoned; and these are some of the most essential to Roman society. These include:
* The unity of political and military authority.
* The father's power of life and death over the members of his family.
* The deep interconnectedness of religious mystery and the state.
* The careful delineation of different kinds of citizens with different levels of rights, as a matter of statute.
The second class citizens of the US are illegal immigrants. It would be trivial to get rid of them by cracking down on their employers but that would increase labor costs for their employers so the government turns a blind eye unless forced.
It's a difference in degree that makes for a difference in kind. There is no legal status of "slave" or "vassal" in most (any?) common or civil law countries.
The command structure of the empire lives on today in the Catholic church, but of course it's not a continuation.
Intellectually I'd say that history is pretty continuous. The greatest loss was not the "fall" of Rome, but the destruction of Mayan history during the Spanish conquest (they had developed writing separately - along with the Chinese, Phoenicians, and Arabs).
As a non-lawyer and non-European I don't know how significant that is.
>“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries."
I think generally if you look at the above sentence and know some Latin vocabulary you can see what is going on, but I'm having a hard time sorting out the structure given the subjunctives, passives, and participles.
Source: I took Latin for 8 years; had to read-and-translate live for three years from Virgil every other week at 8am in front of the class. Latin is usually more concise than English, except when it's medieval or kitchen Latin.
There is no verb that implies a plural third person, nor is there a word for "gate" here.
What I'm having trouble with is the second part. So the first part is something like, "in the beginning, the knowing may draw together what is the roman authority of the barking around, wherein the nation..." But still I'm not sure. Then in the second part we have what could be multiple nominatives and only one verb.
I.e. they're at the gate.
"tecta" is from "tegere".
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/r-a-lafferty/fall-of-rome...
”Rome's demise was not a simple case of fierce barbarians sacking and subduing a decadent, crumbling city. The author has skillfully balanced the turmoil and illusions of a mighty, dying Empire against the vitality of the aggressive Huns, Vandals, and above all, the Goths. The result is one of the most perceptive and stimulating historical accounts ever written.
This is history told and read for sheer pleasure: exciting, splendid and complex. The Fall of Rome is a story of the men and women who made things happen, who were as awesome, poignant, and in some cases, as savage as the era itself.”
But the Romans just ran out of things to steal. Taking foreign lands meant not just immediate booty but ongoing tribute and advantageous trade and promises of farmland for soldiers. That strategy could only go so far. Then when they lost their great early prize, Carthage, which supplied grain to Rome itself, the empire was finished. Local gangsters took over from the distant gangsters and so they had feudalism.