11 ms·
Theories of civilisational ‘collapse’ grow less convincing when scrutinised
- fgjjgutjvnu 9y agoWhat about the potato famine in Ireland, killing a million people? Does the article claim there never was a case of a population running into resource limitations, killing a huge percentage of the population?
- jankotek 9y agoThe effect of climate change on population is well documented in medieval Europe during 11th and 12th century.
- quotemstr 9y agoRome had massive food surpluses, much of it from North Africa and Egypt. Famine did not cause the collapse.
- narrator 9y agoRome did not collapse because of environmental factors.
- swombat 9y agoRome 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.
- kristjankalm 9y ago" 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.
- jules 9y agoI wasn't aware of this. What art did they create, and which scientific, commercial, and military developments?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mcguire 9y agoSpecifically, between, say, 400 and 800CE?
- bhaak 9y agoAre 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?
- icc97 9y agoThe 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 [0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03srmm6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03srmm6 [1]: https://archive.org/stream/voyagecaptaindo00unkngoog#page/n108/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/voyagecaptaindo00unkngoog#page/n1...
- gaius 9y agoPersonally I believe the BBC version of events 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.
- icc97 9y agoThe 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.
- pjc50 9y agoI 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.
- bantunes 9y ago> 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".
- Gupie 9y agoIt 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
- mcguire 9y agoI'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.
- ardit33 9y agoYou are confusing Minoans with Mycenaeans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization Yes, the Greeks are the descendants of the Mycenaeans, but Minoans were a totally different civilization. Different language, different people. For what we can read, and archeologic findings, the Minoans civilization collapsed and disappeared
- mcguire 9y agoNo, I don't think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece#Collapse_.28c._1250.E2.80.931100_BC.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece#Collapse_.28c... 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
- erasemus 9y agoThose 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?
- B4TMAN 9y agoThis website looks pretty awesome to follow. Some of their articles are just mind blowing.
- nkoren 9y agoVery 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.
- paganel 9y ago> 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).
- kristjankalm 9y agoDecline 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".
- ThomPete 9y agoThose 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.
- kristjankalm 9y agoeven that i would dispute in case of Rome "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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groans_of_the_Britons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groans_of_the_Britons
- ThomPete 9y agoWe are talking civilization collapse no? Not sure what that Wiki article proves.
- kristjankalm 9y ago>> namely that there wasnt a collapse in the mind of the people back then my quote was an example how people were quite acutely aware of the collapse around them. wiki link just a reference for the quote.
- lmm 9y agoAll 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.
- ThomPete 9y agoI am unconvinced the normal person experienced that. To the it was life not some historical event.
- lmm 9y agoA 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.
- bluGill 9y agoWas 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.
- ThomPete 9y agoCity sure, civilization hardly. 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.
- minitel 9y agoBaltimore, Detroit, and Newark, NJ are examples of cities that have essentially collapsed. Each of them were once prosperous and orderly places. And they're now third world tier. In most cases the collapse occurred thanks to race riots that led to max exodus of productive citizens.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoI'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.
- DiThi 9y ago> These events take place over centuries 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.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoGood 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.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoIn 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.
- mcguire 9y agoOne 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.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoEh, the palaestinians where greeks once?
- leojg 9y agoThis 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.
- froboz 9y agoI 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).
- quotemstr 9y agoI 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.
- known 9y agoVery confusing title
- Chiba-City 9y agoIn 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. "Not with a bang, but a whimper." - T.S. Eliot.
- monday_ 9y agoThe 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]