The Rise (And Fall) of Civilization

It’s a truism that no civilization or social system lasts forever (see the previous blog, Growing Things).  History bears that out.  Over the last five millennia of “civilized life,” individual civilizations, and whole networks of civilizations (so-called “world systems), have come and gone.  Why? Many people will shrug and answer, “it’s just the way it is,” or “it’s human nature”—which really are no answers.

But archeologists and historians have accumulated much information about the last five millennia of human history (and earlier, for comparison) that shows repeating patterns. 1   If you take the question seriously, and really bore down into the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, there are answers, and pretty straight-forward ones at that.  Here’s a very condensed summary (see also the short reading list below).

1) First, as a civilization grows and its population increases, it  maxes-out the environment that supports it.  What to do?  The obvious solution is to grow more.  The young civilization begins expanding into new territories, raking in new resources by conquest or trade or both.  It builds an empire.  It also grows by developing new technologies of social control, and technologies to more efficiently exploit the environments it already occupies.

2) Second, that expansion, in whatever dimension and by whatever means, drives the growth both of military and bureaucratic organization.  Expansionary society becomes ever more hierarchical, more stratified.  Wealth and power concentrate in ever fewer hands.  But again the growing empire runs into resource and environmental limits.  With its advancing technologies and greater concentrations of power and resources, it responds by expanding yet further.

All this repeats itself over and over in human history.  We’re living that cycle right now (see Why Trump?).  It’s a positive feedback system, or in more technical terms a vicious circle.

3) Eventually, communication and logistical technologies inevitably reach their limits.  Top-heavy bureaucracies become impossibly inefficient.  “Barbarians” on the peripheries of the colonial empire become more threatening.  All this begins to limit further expansion.  Access to resources shrinks, just as the divides between obscenely rich and abjectly poor widen.  Democracy (if there ever was any) devolves into oligarchy.  Elites get ever more disconnected from the social realities and human costs of ever more concentrated wealth and power.  Discontent grows internally.  Politics becomes vulnerable to demagogues who feed on and fan public anger. (Sound familiar?)

At the world-system level, the locus of economic and military power might shift from one region or nation to others.  The whole system becomes more vulnerable to both economic, and eventually military, incursions from outside, and growing internal disarray.  Eventually….

4) Collapse.

 

Where is our own civilization in terms of this cycle?  What is our civilization?  In this era of of globalized capitalist economy and planet-wide communication networks is the whole world becoming subsumed by one overarching civilization—the civilization of modernity?  Such questions, for all their importance, prompt different answers.  I’ll continue developing the approach introduced here in later posts.

 

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A Few Good Readings

As you can imagine, there is a lot there is a lot to read on these topics—though perhaps not as much as one would expect given their current relevance.  Here’s a few resources that helped shape my own thinking.

1 Adams, Robert McC. 1966 The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine.

Diamond, Jared 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin.

Hornborg, Alf 2001 The Power of the Machine: Global, Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment.  Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Mumford, Lewis 1970 (1964) The Myth of the Machine. The Pentagon of Power.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Polanyi, Karl 1944  The Great Transformation.  New York: Rinehart & Co.

Manzanilla, Linda (ed.) 1987 Studies in the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions. The V. Gordon Childe Colloquium Mexico, 1986.  Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series, No. 349.

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974, 1980 (two vols.)  The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002.  The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London and New York: Verso.

Adams and Manzanilla’s collection of articles show how similar expansionary cycles arose independently in the rise of civilization in the Middle East and Mesoamerica.  Jared Diamond’s Collapse explores the role of environmental depletion in societal collapse.  Hornborg and Mumford focus on cultural meanings of technology in its broad sense, in the modern world system.  World systems theorists, beginning with Immanuel Wallerstein’s two-volume set, The Modern World System, study how individual states or societies become integrated into larger networks of trade and warfare that are themselves expansionistic.  Karl Polanyi and Ellen Meiksins Wood define capitalism and how it differs from earlier forms of social/political/economic systems.