A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 23 – The Rise and Fall of Civilizations

This is an area of great controversy and the biggest fall of all is looming.

The rise and fall of civilizations has been a study of mine for many years. I recently finished what may be the best single survey of prehistoric humanity that I have seen (other than a deficient discussion of the megafauna extinctions), and the rise and fall of civilizations was a recurring theme. The toolset of anthropologists has expanded dramatically in my lifetime, and they no longer wreck sites and cart off the plunder to Western museums like they used to. Today, investigators of lost civilizations employ pollen studies, to see how the plants changed. They use various isotope studies to reconstruct the climate, tell if a skeleton’s owner was raised in the area where it was buried, the subject’s age at death, what the subject’s diet was during what years, what the subject may have died of, and many other findings that were not feasible in the not-so-distant past.

While I studied Rome’s fall in the 1990s, it was not until I read Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over, raided his references and found Joseph Tainter’s masterpiece, that I began studying collapsed civilizations in earnest. Tainter engaged in academic fisticuffs with Jared Diamond, and many scientists have joined that fray over the years.

There are two basic issues: why civilizations formed and why they collapsed. The prerequisite for any civilization was a stable energy supply. That meant agriculture and low-energy transportation lanes to bring the food and resources to the cities. If that did not exist, the rest was impossible. The four pristine civilizations formed several thousand years after agriculture was invented in each region. Then there is the question of why people would have built and lived in civilization. The two main theories are “conflict,” which meant that elites could exploit the masses, and “integrationist,” which meant that civilization provided unprecedented benefits. Neither one, by itself, is sufficient to explain it, and it was likely a combination of elite dominance and the benefits of civilization.

I really like Keith Otterbein’s explanation for the rise of civilization. Otterbein argued that plant domestication was only feasible where the megafauna had been hunted to extinction or nearly so, so that megafauna hunting and its attendant warfare declined, so it was peaceful enough to safely experiment with crops. Those societies often became matrilocal or multilocal, which broke up gangs of related males, and those were the most peaceful preindustrial societies. After plants had been domesticated, then the familiar pattern of male dominance reappeared, and the relatively peaceful times were over, but the pristine civilizations all arose fairly peacefully. Before long, however, it was back to warfare, but on a new scale, with much larger populations from agriculture, and with far deadlier weapons. Women’s status declined with the rise of all civilizations, as they became the broodmares of agrarian civilizations.

From the first civilization in Sumer, city-states conquered each other, which led to rising and falling empires in that region ever since. Not only did empires rise and fall, but the civilizations themselves did. The ruins that archeologists crawl over today, which dot the world, are virtually all remnants of collapsed civilizations. There have been great academic battles over collapsing civilizations, including whether they collapsed at all (a weak argument, in my opinion), whether environmental destruction was responsible, and many other explanations such as warfare and disease.

The primary reason for civilization collapses was that they were energetically unsustainable. There is plenty behind the catabolic collapse theory. Agrarian civilizations always had thin energy surpluses, and energy surpluses have always been the very definition of survival, for all life. Many early collapses have been found to “coincide” with climate events, such as the 4.2K event and the drought that coincided with the Bronze Age collapse. The Classic Mayans had a drought over a millennium ago that coincided with their collapse. The 8.2K event happened before the rise of civilization, but it wiped out early farming societies. With the thin agricultural surpluses of agrarian societies, one good drought could wipe them out. But they also likely contributed to their demise through deforestation and other environmental impacts. Commandeering an ecosystem for human benefit brought great consequences. Wild mammals hardly exist anymore, and the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic typified today’s Middle East, which is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable.

Those were all preindustrial civilizations that collapsed, but we are starting to see industrialized societies collapse as they run out of energy. I live in history’s richest and most powerful nation, and we have been in economic decline ever since our energy consumption began declining over 50 years ago. It is no coincidence. Modern ruins are popping up all over the USA.

The West’s machinations in the Middle East for over a century have been all about who gets the oil. As Bucky Fuller said, if we priced oil at the benefit that humanity gets from it, oil would cost a million dollars a barrel. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize.

As fossil fuels run out, it will be a collapse of all industrial civilizations, but there will likely be environmental collapses, wars that may become nuclear, and other existential events. And none of that needs to happen. I have always been divided between forestalling the catastrophe and ushering in the biggest event in the human journey. To hold those two motivations at once has been an “interesting” journey. It requires a comprehensive perspective to take that all in and make sense of it.