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I think the only real instance of a widespread collapse of civilization was the Late Bronze Age collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

This entailed most urban centers in the Eastern mediterranean (besides Egypt and Mesopotamia) being violently destroyed, and writing completely disappearing in large regions. And all this happening over the course of maybe 50-100 years.

Arguments can be made for the declining Western Roman Empire, and collapse of some of the Chinese dynastic states. But as you point out, one can rather easily counter argue that this wasn't collapse of civilization but rather the collapse of a specific hegemonic state and its replacement by several smaller competing powers. Civilization still remained: urban center and writing didn't disappear. These were collapses of states not of civilization.

What about the sudden abandonment of cities in Mesoamerica at different periods?

That states fell is not disputed. States and civilizations fell all the time in the Ancient world. This is distinct from the narrative that humanity as a whole would collapse simultaneously. As the parent comment says, the Late Bronze Age collapse is the closest we have to a simultaneous civilization ending event as we know in modern history, and it is very much under active research.

Detroit? It’s still here; just a bit dusty.

Agreed. I didn't talk about the Late Bronze Age collapse because it's still very much an ongoing topic of research, but I definitely agree. You can also draw similar parallels to the transition between the Heian court period in Japan to the Sengoku Warring States eras as well, as far as the collapse/change dichotomy is concerned.

Decline of the Western Roman Empire was, in fact, at least regional collapse of civilization. Cities almost disappeared or at least shrunk considerably, including Rome, which peaked at 1 million people under Augustus, but had only 20-30 thousand people in the Early Middle Ages; other cities of the WRE fared even worse.

Literate secular class, including Roman state bureaucracy, disappeared as well, and with it large scale planning, monetary economy, large construction projects or most of long distance trade. Only the Church still maintained reading and writing, but that was a very small group of people.

All of this may not fulfill your definition of collapse of civilization, but I believe that a Roman citizen of 2nd century AD, suddenly transported to the 8th century, would be aghast seeing what became of his former home. Even cattle shrunk to half its former size and crop yields diminished, as agricultural best practices were forgotten.

> Even the historic concept of "collapse" is ill-defined. It's widely accepted today that the Western Roman Empire (probably the most written-about "collapse" event) didn't really collapse at once as much as it slowly changed from within and without. Is this "linear collapse"? I mean maybe, but it may just be the process of change itself.

I love to point out how the symbolism of many modern governments is the result of a sort of cargo cult of Roman Republican culture. Government buildings to this day copy the dull gray ruins of Roman buildings, just as many 18th/19th century governments declared popular authority from a Latin-imitating "Senate", filled to the brim with Roman symbolism.

With that in mind, it's not surprising that many today believe the 18th/19th century's "fall of Rome" and "barbarian invasion" myths as a sort of predictive weak-spot of modernity. If you view civilization as a linear path, a story of how the intrinsically superior empires of the Greek/Macedonians and Romans successively lifted the world out of its natural, primitive barbarian state, and the shifting power centers of the 3rd-8th century as a "turning back of time to the Dark Ages" or linear regression along the same path, then the "collapse" narrative is as plain as day. This view on history is pure fantasy, of course, which is why the collapse narratives set in modern days seem so fantastic as well.

This may be true if you restrict yourself to English-speaking communities, but there's no shortage of survivalist talk in other countries. E.g. Russia has plenty.

I think that you're lumping together two kinds of collapse "believers" together - one for which "collapse" means the collapse of civilization, and the other for which that word means the collapse of their country/state. The latter is much more likely, and I think that fretters of that kind are more prevalent than you think - I probably have six friends who are of the latter kind, and only one of the former.

> The West _is_ going through a lot of change/political soul searching right now

I believe that you're understating the situation a bit - at least, here in the United States, we're beginning to see markers of the kind of "cultural revolution" that happened in Russia in the 1910's and China in the 1960's - and while neither of those states have collapsed, exactly, tens of millions of innocent people were killed and rather unpleasant governments installed as a result.

While categorically different from total civilization collapse, I don't blame my fellow Americans for starting to get nervous and start prepping like a high-school senior.

well, they are already living it, westeners have the privilege to believe it's not something that is happening but something that will happen in the future and take distance from it framing it as a collapse after peak prosperity. Third world never had peak prosperity or at least it didn't look particularly different from their past. But they are gonna starve and migrate too even if they don't call it collapse.

I think you’re discussing a very different thing to the parent and grandparent comments. Yes, by the standard that counts the end of the Roman Empire as a collapse, any given nation or union of nations may still collapse and those within may starve or migrate; this still won’t look like any of the post-apocalyptic narratives that represent the loudest and most obvious examples of this topic.

I expect that, much like every other community, the loudest “collapsers” are merely an embarrassing minority, and certainly I hear that the people who stockpile food and maintain a strong relationship with their neighbours roll their eyes at those who stockpile ammunition and do nothing else.

The city of Rome went from 1 million people to 20-30 thousand. Literally 97-98 % shrinkage.

If the same happened to New York, with the subway abandoned, whole neighbourhoods overgrown by poison ivy and the skyscrapers collapsing from lack of maintenance, "post-apocalyptic" would probably be a fitting word.

I am not sure how you can call such a massive loss of complexity and population something else than a collapse.

My understanding is the population estimate for 300 AD was ~1 million, declining to ~800k in 400 AD, ~500k in 450 AD and down to ~100k in 500 AD.

It’s the timescale that makes it. I’m thinking Methyr Tydfel in the UK as a point of reference for similar fractional change in the first roughly century of decline, but peaking in the Industrial Age.

If this happened in NYC, I’d expect (say) Queens to turn to rubble while (say) Manhattan is getting freshly built skyscrapers. Plucky adventurers with assault rifles and bows looting tinned food from a suddenly abandoned Whole Foods is more of what I expect during hurricanes than as a standard result everywhere all at one.

I think the bottom was reached around 800 AD with 20-50k people in entire Rome. Admittedly, it is not easy to estimate population development in a city like Rome that has been built several times over and people still live above the ruins. It must nevertheless been quite obvious to the early medieval inhabitants of Rome that the city used to be far bigger, far more populous and far richer.

> Third world never had peak prosperity or at least it didn't look particularly different from their past

If that's what you legitimately think of the developing world, then no wonder you believe in collapse so strongly (almost like the inverse of the "noble savage"; a fear of letting go of the "Western enlightenment" even if it comes from critics of modern Western regimes). Please, go outside and experience the world. Life has fundamentally changed for most of humanity, except for the occasional isolated remote community, over the last 50 years. I urge you to define what "peak prosperity" is and how developing nations lack it before we discuss what "collapse" is and the loss of "peak prosperity".

I have lots of family in developing nations and their lives have absolutely, fundamentally changed. It's borderline insulting to imply that developing nations still live like they did in the past.

My mother grew up in southern Europe in conditions that were bordering middle-age conditions and now life there is completely different.

Prosperity is always relative to the system you're immersed in and in a globalist world, your prosperity is defined by the prosperity of how people on the other side of the world live. Americans can believe they have the best living conditions in the world and same can do northern Europeans and maybe Japanese too. Let's throw in urbanized chinese middle class too. But in developing countries they don't have the privilege to believe they are in that competition. They are always a province of the empire and living in scarcity.

This says nothing about the enormous changes that went on pretty much everywhere in the rural parts of every country with very few, isolated exceptions.