The fate of complex civilizations

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I’ve previously posted remarks on the most urgent threat we face, climate change, and on the Limits to Growth analyses that convincingly argue that our growth-centered industrial society would eventually be forced into decline by some other problem, if not by climate change. But there is a third tier of threat: the possibility that all large, complex civilizations, even lacking industrialization, inherently tend to become unstable and at risk of collapse. Let’s touch on that briefly.

 

 

If you’re like most Americans, you might find it hard to imagine that our civilization could face a really hard fall. This is outside modern experience. Most of us may only have heard of a couple of “collapsed civilizations,” the Romans and the Mayans, and those were all safely long ago and “somewhere else.” But there have been some dozens of complex societies that we know of, which left ruins around the world showing evidence of concentrated populations, surplus agricultural productivity, centrally directed labor, and specialized building skills, from Africa, Europe, and Asia to North America and the Amazon jungle. Many of the more recent civilizations left written records or the equivalent, some still undeciphered. We likely underestimate their number, perhaps greatly, because the remains of complex societies in areas that are now underwater or covered by dense rainforest are hard to find, and most of their cultural products have been destroyed.

From modest-sized Mediterranean Bronze Age states to empires spanning much of a continent, the common historical pattern for successful civilizations is one of growth, prosperity (usually amassed by robbing and/or enslaving their neighbors), and then decline, sometimes uneven, often catastrophic. While China has managed to rise, fall, then rise again repeatedly for millennia, far more—Harappa, Meroe, Rome, the Minoans, the Mayans, the Mississippians, and on and on—collapsed and never rebounded. Sophisticated cultures often re-emerged in the same regions, but they were different cultures. Declines in population and power had been so severe that much of the first culture’s ways of life had been abandoned or irrevocably lost. After the Roman empire fell, though many of its subjects at the time might have been happy to get the dysfunctional imperial boot off their necks, most of its culture, from sophisticated medicine to music and literature, was lost.

This phenomenon has of course been of interest to many historians over the centuries. It is such a universal pattern that early historians, like the pioneering 14^th-century historian Ibn Khaldun and the 18^th-century Giambattista Vico, formulated cyclical theories of history, seeing growth as inevitably followed by mismanagement or conflict and decay, so that regimes could be said to have a life cycle including old age and death just as people do. More recent European historians, perhaps expressing their own cultural anxieties, blamed some form of “decadence” for loss of power. Others have explained individual states’ collapse as resulting from resource scarcity, ecological change, barbarian invasion, or internal conflict.

Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), concisely summarizes the views of dozens of historians over several centuries. It must be said that Tainter himself takes not just a scientific view of history but a scientistic view, which defines explanations that do not offer explicit, currently testable “causal mechanisms” as inherently unworthy of consideration. Mystical explanations that presuppose a natural life cycle, whose “controlling mechanisms” are unimaginable by 20^th-century reductionist science, are not just “indefensible” but “necessarily incorrect” [!]. The “elite mismanagement argument,” Tainter says, may be “confidently dismiss[ed] ... as unproductive” since elite neglect of the working class would be contrary to elites’ “elementary self-interest,” even though he admits that it may indeed have contributed to the fall of the late Roman empire. “Until some theory is developed” to explain why Roman elites did not behave in accordance with their self-interest, offering their irrational behavior as an explanation for Rome’s collapse is “not illuminating” in Tainter’s view—even if it is factually true!

That said, Tainter proposes a general theory of collapse that, while certainly neither sufficient nor necessary to explain all collapses, may be relevant to many of them. When a large state society is developed from what were previously independent farming villages, say, the amount of complexity increases greatly. More levels of bureaucracy must be supported to manage a large state than a small community (or, at least, generally are supported; David Graeber and David Wengrow [2021] in their superb new book The Dawn of Everything amass evidence that this may not have been universally true in the past). The rulers must either provide benefits to the people to maintain legitimacy for their rule, or hire thugs to keep the people cowed into paying taxes or doing labor. There are more different social and economic roles, and more types of goods and services produced, in a complex society. Infrastructure such as roads or irrigation systems, once built, must be maintained indefinitely or be lost. All these aspects of complexity have costs.

Tainter’s crucial insight is that increasing complexity has diminishing marginal returns. The first investments in a particular field of activity will have small results. As methods improve or more people are affected, future investments of the same size at first make a bigger impact, but as time goes by, further equal investments start to have diminishing benefits. Tainter gives the examples from our own civilization of education (early childhood education costs less than college education but is more essential to our welfare) and science (questions that can be answered cheaply got answered first, so the questions now being explored are those that require more money). You could think of examples from the amount of electric lighting in your home to the amount of paved streets we have. At some point, adding another unit of more, while it costs just as much, wouldn’t have much real benefit.

At some point beyond that, adding more could actually be detrimental. State societies try to solve problems by adding layers of complexity (build more infrastructure, hire more bureaucrats, conquer another province or two). Rome, for example, had very profitable early conquests, allowing “the homeland” to prosper. As the imperial borders moved farther outward, conquests became more expensive and the victims poorer, so the net profit to the empire was smaller. Eventually, they were spending more on conquest than they got out of it. They had reached the point of negative net benefits. (Our own empire recently spent trillions of dollars on a war of choice in Iraq, originally planned to obtain control over that nation’s oil revenues. Have we—even defining Halliburton executives as “we”—made trillions of dollars from that war? No.)

When a society reaches a level of complexity it can ill afford to support, a variety of problems will appear. If the ruling elites deal with those problems by the usual pattern of adding more complexity, the costs will increase even further and be even harder to pay, creating yet more problems. If crises, which someday will occur, must be paid for from the already stressed general operating budget, it will become increasingly necessary to let something slide. If that’s infrastructure maintenance, the infrastructure will start to decay. If it’s the benefits or public services that have maintained the government’s legitimacy and the citizenry’s loyalty, those will start to decay. Substituting more aggressive policing costs money too, and, like benefits, has diminishing marginal returns.

When the last layers of complexity added have had a negative net benefit, the same level of overall benefits, or quality of life, could be obtainable at a lower level of complexity, making collapse seem attractive. At some point, “collapsing” back to a much less complex society is not only unavoidable but, Tainter suggests, beneficial, getting those layers of useless management and unsustainable infrastructure off the backs of the peasantry so they can support themselves. (The fact that collapses often involve 90% population declines suggests that they’re not so good for the generations who experience them, which Tainter nods to but doesn’t emphasize.)

Tainter considers the possibility of economically driven collapse for our culture. Declining marginal returns are seen in important aspects of our economy, including resource extraction, agriculture, education, health, research, and management of industry and government. Yet our society was and is still growing, or “improving” from the view of a pro-growther, in all these areas. The point is not that we have stopped increasing agricultural yields or creating new inventions, but that each unit of “progress” in those areas costs more than it used to. Tainter regards these as red flags. “Although collapse is an economic adjustment,” he remarks, “it can nevertheless be devastating where much of the population does not have the opportunity or the ability to produce primary food resources” — as is the case in all urbanized societies.

Historically, Tainter notes, full-scale collapse could only happen in a power vacuum: in societies that dominated their geographic areas, without any neighboring states of similar power and complexity on their borders. In a region of competing states of similar power, such as Europe in recent centuries, if one government fell apart, its nation would rapidly be invaded, conquered, and its land and surviving people absorbed into the neighboring state. In that circumstance, because military power is proportional to complexity, maintenance of complexity becomes an essential state need no matter how crushing its costs are.

Because almost the entire planet is now densely populated by state societies, Tainter argues, collapse is no longer possible. A state that can’t maintain the burdens of complexity would have to be absorbed by another or become the vassal of a greater power (including the IMF) to obtain support. This may not always be true—if the land is poor in resources and its people feisty enough, its neighbors may not feel like taking on the challenge of conquering a failed state—but it also leaves open the possibility of multiple powers collapsing simultaneously, perhaps hastened by the costs of their military competition, as Tainter suggests the Mayan States did. Late-stage industrial capitalism represents the first global civilization. Every powerful nation depends on global supply chains and nonrenewable resource extraction; all will face climate change almost simultaneously, though not all with equal severity. All may decline together. Is it possible that all might collapse together?