Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that "The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification. It may be taken as axiomatic that there was no one cause of cultural collapse."
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.
> Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that
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).
Indoor bathrooms did not go away on some specific Tuesday, they also where not that common around 250 CE. The real question is what happens to the 98% of the population that actually maintain day to day civilization not what happens to the people who make it into history books even as a footnote of a footnote.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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
I do agree with most of that (as one can deduce from my comment up there), but I have to notice that the general trend is about simplifying things, making procedures more repeatable, and documenting those procedures.
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.
Because this stuff is discoverable it's less important than you might think. When you have 10's of millions of archers doing that as a job then curving an arrow is not going to stay secret for that long.
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.
Concrete is really useful. We lost it for 1,300 years. Calculus is really really useful. We figured out the basics, and then lost them for 2 millennia.[1] Flexible glass would be really useful. We apparently had it, then lost it, and never got it back.[2]
Calculus was not lost as many original texts where preserved, however it was of limited use prior to Algebra being invited. Gothic cathedrals demonstrate a much more advanced practical matimatics than available to the Romeans. Who again could gather and transport resources over vast areas, but had a very low standard of living for the population on average.
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.
I thought the same, until I looked back at when experiential knowledge was lost and then reacquired. If it is within a generation or two of loss and recovery, the process seems to proceed along the lines of what you mention. Beyond that, and recovery success rates looks like a cliff function. Metallurgy has been independently worked upon around the world, and specific aspects lost many times over. Someone demonstrated they were on the right path to working out precision hand-built gearing with the Antikythera mechanism. The discovered mechanism wasn't very accurate, but we lost that tech for about 13 centuries. Another way of considering that lost tech: it took about three centuries to get the first mechanical computers from the 14th century onwards (about when we recovered the level of the Antikythera mechanism's tech); we could potentially have had software on mechanical if not electronic computers say, 7 centuries ago, if the Antikythera tech was not lost.
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".
Don't forget the role simple population size presents in terms of economic activity. Ancient Rome covered a huge territory, but a smaller population and GDP than Ethiopia does today.
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.
That longbow story seems similar to one I had heard about the martial art of two-handed sword combat being largely lost. The argument was essentially that a late medieval European knight with two-handed sword and pike was actually a more effective soldier than the Japanese samurai with daisho and bow, but the latter had been better remembered and afforded better retroactive status, since their military tradition has been preserved via traditions of pseudo-religious martial arts societies.
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 don't think this was a know how thing so much as an efficiency issue. If you're rich you can have a servant to draw water and maintain a chaimber pot easily.
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'.
I don't agree that economic collapse is the correct term as it suggests total production drops alongside things like hyperinflation etc.
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.
Lead refining collapsed after Rome's crisis of the third century. There are Greenland ice cores saying so. Lead production didn't recover to Roman levels until the 16th century.
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.
Lead is a very poor proxy for economic development. It was actually known to be somewhat toxic though very useful even back then. And it's use declined in part because people got better at metallurgy not simply because the overall economy declined.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 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).
> The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification
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.
The difference between localized collapses today and in the late Bronze Age is that today's communication and trade is so much faster that rebuilding within a couple of decades is feasible. Knowledge isn't really lost and what material goods have been destroyed can quickly be manufactured and imported from elsewhere.
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.
Computer modeling suggests climate change might just do it though. The disruptions that come from it would only continue to become more extreme post-collapse -- and our ability to quickly adjust in such a way as to reduce them would be destroyed with civilization -- making rebuilding difficult or impossible.
Collapse denial is one of the more frustrating parts of contemporary historiography. It feels rooted in contemporary post-modernism in academia: if we acknowledge the possibility of "collapse", then we create a rank order of civilization, in which the pre-collapse society is "better" than post-collapse society. Since, under modern postmodern doctrine, all societies are equally worthy, "collapse" therefore doesn't happen.
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.
If you were living in Rome in the year 477, I wonder if you were deemed part of a cranky unmentionable fringe for expressing the idea that your civilisation was decaying and indeed collapsing all around you.
477 wasn't that bad. Ravenna was capital, but Rome itself was kept in decent shape. The forum continued to be swept. The aqueducts kept working. Still, at the time, the population was declining and civic upkeep became harder and harder. The Senate still met. There are stories of thieves stealing whole statues while poorly paid watchmen slept or we're bribed not to notice. It reminds me a bit of Detroit.
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.)
No, the Roman culture always considered themselves in a state of decline compared to the mythical "golden age", so that would be the mainstream viewpoint.
Hell, many Americans today consider the US to be in decline compared to some equally mythical period of the 1950's when men were men, women knew their place, and youngsters respected their elders.
That period wasn’t totally mythical as it corresponded to a time when much of the rest of the world’s production capacity had been destroyed by war and many of the world’s great countries had been empoverished fighting said war, and 10’s of millions of people in other countries had been recently killed by war. As a result the USA enjoyed a one-time huge commercial advantage that may not have been obvious to everyone (and it seems still isn’t).
> 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.
> 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.
Sorry, you're conflating the collapse of empires (loss of a high level of political organisation) with the collapse of civilisations (loss of most levels of social and economic organisation, from top to bottom). Although sometimes coincident, they are not at all the same thing.
Then, isn't that what the Roman Empire underwent as well? Language stayed, territory diminished, religion only gradually changed, most technologies and societal structures only gradually changed (just like in USSR or British Empire). The biggest differences were the changes in institutions and governance (although that also happened gradually).
I don't have the source handy (one of Norman Cantor's less nutty books, perhaps), but IIRC, historians know considerably more about life and society in the late Roman empire than about early medieval life and society, in spite of the fact that the two are temporally and spatially contiguous and the latter is up to 500 years more recent.
When the USSR collapsed, people in the Eastern Bloc didn't stop writing stuff down.
They had as much (or rather as little) to do with ‘nations’ as the Roman Empire. Vast conquered areas, spanning several religions, languages, and etnicities.
The Commonwealth, as a civilization, still exists unchanged. Unless the Australians actually have lost the skill of writing and reverted to their previous tribal structures.
..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.
That's not true about the lifespan. Surviving into your 40's was not as common, but if you made it to 50, you'd make it to 60 or even 70, why not. It wasn't that rare. We live longer on average now because medicine can cure so much in the early stages of our lives.
i agree, just because a few remnants of a civilization continue on doesn't mean it didn't collapse. perhaps they are confusing collapse with complete, absolute annihilation.
If you were living around 477 you were probably a slave, and the fall of Rome coincided with the ban of slavery, so you probably ended up better off just BECAUSE "civilization" was dying. Good riddance.
The alternative may have been a gradual improvement of moral and ethical thinking, leading to the end of slavery, while retaining the benefits of civilization and its technological achievements. There were anti-slavery thinkers at the time.
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.
It is strange that the article contains a lot about the Mycenaean 'collapse' but does not mention that this was part of a general collapse of all the states in the eastern Mediterranean:
I'm not sure whether that helps or hurts his point about the complexity of the "collapse". The Mycenaeans had a large scale trade empire across large parts of the Mediterranean, from Italy up through the Black Sea. The "collapse" involved other "civilizations", including the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians, all of which were relatively tightly bound by trade and diplomacy.
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.
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 recent Easter Island BBC film [0] was pretty good on this. Jared Diamond did consider all the European destruction in his book 'Collapse' but still believed that there had been a large amount of deforestation well before the first Europeans arrived in 1722.
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
I could see it either way. Only a little later Scotland was suffering from severe deforestation, which was only reversed in the 20th century by plantation forestry.
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.
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.
The BBC also had an documentary claiming that it was environmental collapse back in 2012 which is mentioned in the aeon article. They have now produced another with a separate view point.
Irrespective of the BBC bias I still think that disease + slavery + 70,000 sheep was more likely cause for collapse.
> The Maya did not disappear, though cities were abandoned, the population fell and life changed
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".
Decline or collapse, or whatever word one uses -- is not subjective, as this article seems to imply. There are loads of metrics -- levels of urbanisation, existence of monetary system and taxes, levels of literacy, state funded infrastructure projects, literary projects, libraries and institutions of education. All of these pretty much disappeared in western europe between 400 and 700AD or were reduced to tiny isolated examples. Same dynamic with Hittites or Harappan city states. You can call it something else than a collapse but it's not a "subjective value judgement".
Those are metrics for how we might identify something as a collapse, the author seems to be saying something else namely that there wasnt a collapse in the mind of the people back then, instead some power structure slowly erroded until a new one took over. Its fuzzy no concrete no matter how we define it, the life lived and the recorded history are two very different things.
It seems likely that somewhere, sometime, someone sat around thinking, "My great uncle was proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul, but my grandchildren can't read and are subsistence farmers."
"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."
ok, to really flesh it out for you then -- this is a desperate letter by the representatives of roman citizens in britain to Aetius, consul, to send help or do something since barbarians, crop failures, raids etc.
it certainly gives the impression of people witnessing and being subject to the collapse of the civic society.
if you want more than an anecdote read the whole account of roman collapse in britain by gildas, a contemporary. its pretty desperate in tone and attitude.
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.
>> you would be able to find similar letters begging for Romes intervention during Romes reign.
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?
Your examples don't portray someone aware of the collapse of a civilization it portrays someone aware of the lack of roman authority. That is in no shape or form the same.
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.
All models are false; some are useful. Yes, collapse is complex, as is everything, but a simplification is useful. To talk about a "state collapse" seems more misleading and less helpful than calling it a "civilisational collapse", at least by the article's examples: we are not talking about a constitutional crisis or a shift in the balance of power between social classes, but radical changes to the whole population's way of life complete with the destruction or abandonment of cities.
A city being abandoned has gotta be a significant event or period to live through. Even something like a palace being destroyed and not rebuilt would surely be notable.
Was it in the way of realizing civilization as they knew it was collapsing though? Detroit has been going through the process of abandonment since the 1970s. Civilization doesn't seem to be collapsing though, just the one city as people move abandon it. (though of course that might be my perspective, history will tell if that is the early sign of the collapse of our civilization of the next few hundred years, or just a minor blip.
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.
The author's position seems to be that the very notion of civilizational collapse is flawed because people often come up with reductionist, poorly supported ways of explaining it. The unspoken implication here is that whoever brings up a threat of collapse in a political argument hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Stephen Bannon referencing Gibbons work comes to mind, and, come think of it, that's probably what prompted the author to write this piece.
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.
This article confuses civilization with culture, you probably can't have the first without the latter. but culture by itself won't do great public works, wont even develop a written language.
Civilization means cohesion to a greater level than a mere culture.
I think the problem is that the term "culture" is generally misdefined by most people, and the term "civilization" is incredibly problematic in the post-colonial world.
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).
I reject the idea that "civilization" is a bad word. I regard regard large-scale, organized, and literate societies as being obviously better than barbarism. Scientific progress exists and it improves the human condition.
These views would make me unemployable in academia.
"Civilization" is not a _bad_ word so much as it's a badly _mis-used_ one (same as "culture"). My point was perhaps unclear; the issue is how it's been implemented politically that's the problem. I happen to think one _can_ use it in a scholarly context as a broad brushstroke reference, but only with care and discretion and an understanding of its historical use.
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.
Being from Eastern Europe myself, I also don't suffer from the American/West-European self-hatred and self-flaggelation that seems so rampant in Leftist circles. Heck, I remember what it was like to walk in Rome/Paris in the mid 90's compared to how it is now, and, God help me and my future employment prospects if this wasn't anonymous, I think it was better in many regards then, for reasons I dare not speak of.
I'm not an expert but maybe collapse is a misnomer anyway. These events take place over centuries, and existing civilizations are in a continuous transformation and often defined in arbitrary political terms. For example, many of Europeans and Americans are pretty much direct descendants of the West Roman Empire and the Mongolian Empire, mixed with many other influences. Others are primarily descendants of the Chinese Empire, which still exists in some form of political unity, mixed with many other influences.
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.
Good point, you're right. I should have been more precise. I didn't want to claim that technological advances cannot lead to mass genocide, I wanted to make the more modest point that these events seem to be rare and that fairly slow assimilation processes based on mixing cultures, intermarriage and migration, seem to be the norm.
In my eyes, the power of the individual is often underestimated. Individuals propagate a system, indivduals can turn neutral to a system, or long for its destruction. Beyond a certain tipping point, small men, refusing to carry wheat and may the world burn anyway, shatter empires.
One theory of the late Bronze Age collapse I've heard is that great numbers of peasant types ran off to avoid governmental pressures and became nomads and raiders that eventually attacked and took down the large states.
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.
Are you talking about the Roman Empire or the city of Rome?
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?
Rome did not collapse at all, it just entered a long slow decline period where the central power became less and less effective while independent city states thrived and created numerous works of art, developed scientifically and commercially and militarily, and generally weren’t particularly aware that there was a “collapse” going on.
" generally weren’t particularly aware that there was a collapse going on"
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.
In defense, the scope, scale, timeline and ripple effects of change were different (slower and slower spreading) for most of human history before trains, automobiles, airplanes or widespread literacy, photography and now film and TV.
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.
Those Easter Island Statues: did building them help to keep the islanders sane or was it merely a shocking waste of time and resources? (serious question). When the final crisis hit, did they see the problem and grapple with it or did they merely double down and build more identical heads?
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.