Studying the demise of historic civilisations

Rome definitely did have an expansion imperative. Land grants and the slave trade were to legions what exits are to tech startups.

Most ancient (and into modernity) armies did self fund by looting though. Even looting fallen enemies for weapons was a substantial motivator. Even in the Roman period, owning a helmet, shield and such equated to moving up a social class.

Gas, oil, fresh air, ...

Nietzsche also delves into some of these ideas when he describes the rise and fall of civilizations as a by product of decadence. This decadence is not just the simplistic notion of "consumption", but rather a weak moral system that arises as a result of decadence. It is not consumption, but rather the morality of consumption: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/5avje6/what_...

Looting machines (like companies) required skill, fearlessness, and capital to build.

'Looting' is the plundering of goods from others, usually by conquest.

Many civilizations were stable for long periods without expansion. In fact, Arnold Toynbee made the argument that imperial expansion was a symptom of decline.

If by loot you mean - as you say - the use of raw materials, labour and the environment, I don't think the word has any analytic meaning whatsoever.

They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity.

Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.

Under this definition, the British Empire and the USA are totally different civilizations.

You are talking about a cultural entity for which we do not really have a word.

There has been such blocks in the past "Christianity", the "Hellenestic world" which share common values but are separated into entities that may even wage war between them.

Civilization or polity don't really have discrete meanings or beginning/end dates. Did Cyrus' civilization really end when Alexander beat the Persian imperial armies? Most of the political structures endured and then evolved under Hellenism. Did Hellenism end when Rome conquered the "world?" Well... Greek language and culture continued to dominate politically for another 1000 years.

Emotionally your Civilization is where you would feel comfortable, and that might be Western Europe and North America, Australia, NZ.

"The 19 major civilizations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumerian, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern, Orthodox Christian (main body), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mexican, Yucatec, and Babylonic. There are four "abortive civilizations" (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian, Abortive Syriac) and five "arrested civilizations" (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan), for a total of 28."

I note the author is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

There is greco or more expansively greco-roman civilization that we adopted, but that doesn't make us part of the greco-roman civilization or a "western civilization". No more than japan adopting bits of chinese civilization makes japan "chinese civilization".

If you think western civilization exists, then there must be an eastern civilization? There is no such thing, other than for convenient geopolitical purposes. There is the chinese civilization, the indian civilization, the myriad of middle eastern, northern african civilizations, etc. But no such thing as an eastern civilation.

Were the chinese, persian, mongol, ottoman, etc empires part of an "eastern civilization"? Of course not.

The idea of a western civilization is a geopolitical concept we invented for political purposes and of course to claim "civilization" for ourselves. To claim we are a part of the greco-roman civilization when we are not part of it. We are adoptees of it. "Western civilization" is ultimately a sneaky way of claiming civilization status for ourselves.

Having said that, I may be a bit biased, but given the cultural, societal, global, linguistic, financial, systematic, military, etc impact we've had, I think the US has moved from an empire to an actual civilization. But ultimately, history confers the status of civilization, not the living. So maybe in a few hundred years, historians will say the US is an actual civilization. But for certain, 500 years, nobody is going to talk of anything called a "western civilization". It simply doesn't exist just like an "eastern civilization doesn't exist.

Rome lasted ~1500 years as a continuous political entity. Zhou dynasty comes is about half that at ~790 years. Though, you can make various arguments around those numbers.

For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China.

Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China.

Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts.

Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?

China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.

Dynasty usually in China doesn't category as one civilization, it is just a episode in the Chinese history. And this is not a modern invention either, China has the great tradition of 修史, literaly meaning the making of history, which means the later dynasty is responsible of recording the official history of previous dynasty, and by doing so it is treated as a testament to the current dynasty's legimacy.

Interestingly, even PRC is somewhat inherited this tradition, where an official account of Qing's history is set to publish this year, which is almost 30 million characters long.

Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar.

For example, after the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire was effectively partitioned into a Western and Eastern Empire. The Western Empire proceeded to decentralize itself out of existence over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, but it recoalesced under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties into the Holy Roman Empire by 800 (before splitting up into effectively a Frankish kingdom and the Germanic kingdom of the HRE). The Eastern Roman Empire lasted until around 1200, when the Fourth Crusade conquered it instead (a conquest which didn't last, but the Byzantines never recovered and the Ottomans finally put them out of their misery 250 years later). It's worth noting that pretty much all of the people I've cited considered themselves the true heirs of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile in China, the Han dynasty crashed hard in the early 200s, with three major successor states cropping up. One of these managed to conquer the others, so the successive dynasty was the Jin dynasty. Of course, the Jin last control of most of their territory, which fragmented into the Sixteen Kingdoms, but the entire era is still called the Jin dynasty. After the final collapse of the Jin, the north/south dichotomy continued with the Northern and Southern dynasties, which is again a successive series of powers vying for control eventually coalescing into the Sui dynasty after one wins out, which quickly transitions to the Tang dynasty, the first truly unified China since the fall of the Han dynasty. After about 300 years, the Tang dynasty collapses into a major period of disunity, the next truly unified China again taking 300 years to crop up again.

There's a lot of similarity. The major difference is that Western Europe never reunified into a single unitary state (unless you want to count the extremely short lived Napoleonic Empire and Third Reich). But Western Europe did have a successor state that directly retained the traditions from the Roman Empire (namely, the Byzantines) and could plausibly claim to have no break in continuity (the Byzantines never called themselves anything other than the Roman Empire), and all of the major successor states directly drew inspiration and customs from the Roman Empire, rather like China. The writing system, the state religion, the bureaucratic apparatus, the legal system--all of these are derived from the Roman Empire in Western Europe, just as much as they are derived from the Qin and Han dynasties in China.

More of a metastable meta-civilization. Over thousands of years, they keep collapsing and re-forming the same country.

What we can say is that chinese civilization came into existence a long time ago. Then a serious of dynasty ( some not even "chinese" ) like the mongols or the manchus adopted aspects of chinese civilation.

"China" itself didn't survive for thousands of years. The dynasties rose and collapsed. Conquered and got conquered.

And "china", for much of its history, didn't even speak the same language. They used the chinese writing system ( which also evolved through time ), but does a writing system entail "part of civilization". Koreans and Japanese used chinese writing system, does it mean they are part of the chinese civilization? Of course not. Much of africa uses latin alphabet, does that mean africa is part of "greco-roman" civilization? Of course not.

The chinese capital changed multiple times. There have been periods where "china" had multiple competing capitals.

But then you could argue that chinese civilization didn't die out or get supplanted like the egyptian, mayan, mesopatamian, etc civizations.

The more you think about it and the closer you look, the more blurry the situation becomes. But like most things history, I guess the best answer is "it's complicated".

I find the fact that we have no idea quite liberating.

Towns and cities lead to economic specialisation, a legal system, civil service, taxation, and so on. Nomads and people living in villages may have a complex culture but it's rather different from city life, even a low-tech city life like in ancient Egypt, for example.

But those doing the bleeding were following the hippocratic oath. They were trying to do good. The issue was stupidity (or, more charitably, lack of knowledge) rather than malice.

I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting.

Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.

In the past they had poems about death, sung death, created legends.

Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one.

The world needs to renew itself, or else there won't be enough resources to feed one another.

We are at peaceful times but one thing history can show us is our future, and in history there have been times of peace, although they only lasted for a few years.

Really? That is at least not what I saw happens in the US, most of the old people could be impoverished by unexpected disease. What you described isn't like 5% of the whole population really...

According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources.

The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusion.

The irony is that even with the knowledge of our impending doom we are still unable to see it despite the obviousness of it. The original poster makes a chancy prediction on how wealth inequality will take us to our ends while all trendlines and data point to the real way our civilization will end.

One day there will not be enough oil in the world for you to drive to work or fly to another state.

Technology is not our savior. The trendlines in tech are far too slow do make any meaningful difference. What you're actually observing with technology like the tesla is the trendline in hype.

Also voting for politicians who pass laws that hamstring the house buying ability of the next generations.

Given that we are supposedly past the age of aggression and conquering, do you think a peaceful society that keeps to itself is capable of surviving on its own, with a level of happiness that is high by their own (if not world) standards?

This is exactly the problem we need to solve as well if we ever manage to increase the human lifespan. Instead of society advancing one funeral at a time (c.f. Max Planck on science) as in the past, permanent change would have to come from every individual at a much higher rate than now.

Not sure.

First, the US did invade a lot of places in the last decades, and while they didn't officially turned the countries into US colonies, they still do have massive political and economical influence there, and benefit from the local resources.

But even if you discard this, it's assuming the future will be the same as today, which is unlikely. In the entire human history we never had a single day without a war somewhere on earth. The possibility that our countries will __never__ be at war again on their on soil is slim: we have many tomorrows to create situations where it can happen.

We massively consume limited resources in a close system. We destroy systems that regerate resources we need, a destabilize the balance our organisms a based on, and we have hugely powerful weapons. Conquerying one another is still a tempting solution to many problems.

E.G: India has more than 1 billion people, almost no water, extremly strong social tensions, hot borders, pollution in mass and the nuclear bomb. Anything triggering here can easily creep on to the entire world.

I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves.

I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones.

> Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives

Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part.

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"It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real"

"The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology."

"No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze."

"While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever."

"People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them."

"And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."

In my opinion, property and money, which someone amassed during his lifetime, should automatically be devoted to the common good after that person's gone. In my opinion it's insane, that someone lucky can inherit a fortune by basically doing nothing. There are things which make sense to inherit, like family enterprises, but there should be a limit.

I also believe, that as an individual, there should be an upper bound to how rich you can be. Does it really make sense, that an individual person can have more than a seven-digit pool of money on his bank? Is there a way to limit the crazy strive for individual richness? If there would be a limit, we could basically invest the free money collectively into old and new enterprises which would not simply act as money printers for a few individuals, but actually profit society as a whole... Just a crazy idea...

Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

That's the case for now, sure.

But that's also exactly what got ancient Athens and Sparta, Rome, Byzantium, and other empires of the past. Outsiders wouldn't do scratch if those empires weren't already rotting from inside for reasons such as those that you've mentioned.

In Rome and Byzantium, for example, such a decline is more or less the established historical narrative.

“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war."

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1878 book that was one of the inspirations for WW1, WW2 and all that. Not one of humanities best times. Though you could have a more positive take on war as in war on poverty and the like rather than the shooting people stuff.

And, what we’ve empirically learned is that that thread of ideology in an industrialized world (to say nothing of a nuclear armed world) leads to slaughter.

I realize this is HN but even so I feel it’s poor form inveighing with a well worn warmongering trope on the course of world history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da...

I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor.

Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".

Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options.

Edit: see below for a better explanation

Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.

If anything, this shows most ancient civilizations were measured in decades, not centuries. But some did go thousands.

But the article does not seem to do a great job in terms of accuracy or being able to distinguish between civilizations and empires. E.g. "Mahanjanapadas" should be "Mahajanapadas", and the Magadha empire was part of an existing civilization.

This is apart from the contested dates that the author seems to accept, without citing any sources.