Civilizational Collapse after Industrialization
Friday 24 March 2023
So I’ve written a couple of apocalyptic newsletters, with no. 227 concerned with failure conditions of civilizations and no. 228 concerned with the role of organized crime in civilizational decay. I’m not finished yet in my role as analyst and chronicler of our decline. It remains to note the significant ways in which social failure in the present differs from social failure in the past.
Westerners have the collapse of the western Roman Empire as our paradigmatic example of catastrophic social collapse, and it is a great example. We still study the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, still draw lessons from it, and are still haunted by it. Not only is it fascinating from a scholarly perspective, but it also has romantic elements that make it a great story. Western Europe is covered in impressive ruins that remind us at a glance that a sophisticated society once existed, and then it failed so completely that its cities were abandoned and its infrastructure was left to decay.
At the present juncture of history, the only way in which this or a similar scenario could occur again would be if civilization failed on a planetary scale, because civilizations today are all pressed up against each other at their borders, populations both reinforce these borders and pass over them, and both formal and informal economic networks circulate within nation-states and among nation-states. A failure within one nation-state, or even a failure within a given region, does not mean that the remainder of the anarchic nation-state system goes down with it. Now, obviously, if a sufficiently large nation-state fails, or a sufficiently large region fails, it can drag down much of the world with it, but here “drag down” literally means pulling down measures of GDP and productivity; we aren’t talking about a Mad Max scenario. You only get the Mad Max scenario when a powerful nation-state or region fails catastrophically, and this catastrophic failure leads to a cascading failure. At present, this cascading failure would have to be planetary in scale in order to get an industrial age equivalent to the failure of the western Roman Empire.
The present differs from the past in (at least) two important respects: population and industrialization. In the past, the human population was much smaller; it was only in the twentieth century that population began to grow at an exponential rate, due both to the availability of food and the availability of scientific medicine lowering death rates and increasing birth rates. Both food supply and scientific medicine are, in turn, results of industrialized civilization, which both industrialized food production and made scientific medicine cheap enough to supply to mass populations. But industrialization isn’t just about increasing the population. Industrialization has made us so rich in comparison to the entirety of human history that we can sustain non-survival behavior much more readily than was the case with past societies.
The wealth of industrialized societies can be caricatured in terms of consumerism, but what I’m really talking about here is the productivity of the economy. The amount of food we have available for cheap prices, notwithstanding the fact that only about two percent of the population works in agriculture, is only one obvious example of this. We have plentiful cement and steel and machine tools. A middle class family can afford to buy a tractor (both my neighbors to the east to the west of my country house have their own tractors), and with a tractor each family can build its own little infrastructure projects.
The ability to sustain non-survival behaviors at increasing levels of ridiculousness is remarkable in itself, as past societies sustained a lot of non-survival behavior long before industrialization. The organization of societies provided by civilization made it possible for human beings to raise civilizations like that of Rome, with its still-impressive aqueducts and the Colosseum and the Pantheon. Even today we marvel at these engineering achievements, and they are not trivial achievements even by modern measures.
Pre-civilized peoples are capable of sustaining non-survival behaviors if they are kept below the threshold of constituting a failure condition. Sam Harris commented on this in his The Moral Landscape:
“Many social scientists incorrectly believe that all long-standing human practices must be evolutionarily adaptive: for how else could they persist? Thus, even the most bizarre and unproductive behaviors — female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice, dangerous male initiations, restricting the diet of pregnant and lactating mothers, slavery, potlatch, the killing of the elderly, sati, irrational dietary and agricultural taboos attended by chronic hunger and malnourishment, the use of heavy metals to treat illness, etc. — have been rationalized, or even idealized, in the fire-lit scribblings of one or another dazzled ethnographer. But the mere endurance of a belief system or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests that it hasn’t led directly to a society’s collapse or killed its practitioners outright.”
Agricultural civilizations can sustain even greater non-survival behaviors than those described in the above paragraph, and industrialized civilizations can sustain non-survival behaviors even greater than those of non-industrialized civilizations. Thus the many absurd and irrational practices and beliefs of our own time are under less severe selection pressure than past absurd and irrational practices and beliefs. There is both an optimistic and a pessimistic way to spin this.
Optimistically, the wealth and power provided by industrialization may allow us to continue our development despite our self-sabotage, and if the wealth and power of our civilization is sufficiently great, we may be able to make it to the next great juncture of civilizational development, whether that juncture is a spacefaring civilization, the development of strong AGI (perhaps even machine consciousness), indefinite human lifespans, or inexhaustible virtual worlds to create and explore. If we make it to the next stage of development, a new kind of civilization will appear, superseding and displacing industrialized civilization, and at that point the problem set of industrialized civilization will be replaced by the problem set of its successor civilization. Sometimes I refer to this process as “the race against time” (on which cf. newsletter 218), as it can be an open question as to whether a society fails (because a failure condition obtains), or whether a transcendence condition obtains and a new form of civilization appears.
Pessimistically, the wealth and power of industrialized civilization may allow us to dig ourselves into a hole from which we cannot extricate ourselves, and, once we have dug our way to the bottom, and the inevitable stagnation sets in, then we are stuck at the bottom of a hole (or at the bottom of a gravity well) and that is where we will make our final stand, and where we will go extinct when our final stand proves to be a pointless piece of theater.
In newsletter 215 I mentioned that my go-to contrast for modern civilization, my anchor and my point of reference, is medieval civilization, which is nicely self-contained and which is strikingly different from our own civilization in so many ways. This is relevant to the present discussion in at least two ways. Firstly, medieval civilization provides us with any number of examples of spectacular non-survival behaviors that even a civilization of relatively low productivity can sustain. We have here constant warfare in the absence of effective centralized political authority, the burning of heretics, the brutal persecution of minority groups in society, the regulation of trade to the point of stifling innovation and opportunity, sumptuary laws, the perpetuation of ineffective and often counter-productive non-scientific medicine, a non-scientific epistemic establishment rife with perverse incentives, and so on and on.
Secondly, the transition from medieval civilization to modern civilization was seamless. Medieval civilization disappeared without collapsing. (Or we can say that medieval civilization won the race against time, and a transcendence condition obtained before a definitive failure condition obtained, but it just as well might have been the other way round.) Medieval cities grew into modern cities, and eventually into industrialized cities, sometimes retaining their organic medieval street plans, so different from the regular blocks of ancient or modern cities. Modern civilization might, like medieval civilization, disappear in a similarly seamless fashion, without any catastrophic collapse such as attended the failure of the western Roman Empire. Medieval cities that stagnated at the end of the medieval period and ceased to grow usually did not fall into ruin; today they are jewels of historic architecture like Bruges and Aigues-Mortes and Girona (all of which I have visited).
It could be argued that this has happened before. Fustel de Coulanges wrote at the end of his classic study, The Ancient City, in a masterful piece of understatement:
“We have written the history of a belief. It was established, and human society was constituted. It was modified, and society underwent a series of revolutions. It disappeared, and society changed its character. Such was the law of ancient times.”
For Fustel de Coulanges, the ancient city was a very specific social institution, and this social institution came to an end co-eval with the appearance of Christianity. He does not say, as Gibbon said, that he was describing the triumph of barbarism and superstition, and indeed the turning point that he identifies is about two centuries earlier than the opening of Gibbon’s history of the decline and fall of Rome.
The ancient city of which Fustel de Coulanges wrote, with its law of ancient times, disappeared seamlessly, continuous at every point in time, as the Roman Republic was being transformed into an empire. There is a sense in which the institution of the ancient city continued, but another sense in which the institution of the ancient city was transformed. Buildings remained largely continuous; populations remained largely continuous; economic institutions remained largely intact. But religious and family institutions were uprooted and altered, never to be the same again.
If you and I had lived in late antiquity, say, about 500 AD, and we were, at that time, being the analysts and chroniclers of the decline of our society (as we are now being the analysts and chroniclers of the decline of our modern societies), we might look back five hundred years and identify this transition that Fustel de Coulanges was to identify in the 19th century as being the turning point (as today we look back five hundred years ago and recognize the turning point from medievalism to modernism), noting that history remained continuous, but something important changed, and the world was never again the same. We might, from that late antique vantage point, construct a history of civilization constituted by ancient times, which came to an end with the catastrophic collapse of civilizations about 1200 BC, followed by a dark age, and then the Middle Ages of antiquity, and then “modern” antiquity following the time of Christ. The parallelism is truly remarkable now that I think about it.
We might look back on that entire grand sweep of ancient history and say to ourselves that this civilization has played out, that it is well and truly exhausted, so that the kind of collapse that ended civilization in western Europe was almost inevitable. I do think that ancient history, however divided into periods and regions, exhibits a certain unity, but I can’t yet put my finger on what constituted this unity. Since I regard this holistic conception of antiquity to be an agglomeration of basal civilizations (cf. newsletters 180 and 186), we might separately identify central projects of the several basal civilizations, distinct central projects again of regional clusters, and a yet more abstract and evanescent central project of the agglomerated whole.
Insofar as the continuous record of Western civilization since the Middle Ages constitutes an agglomerated civilization (and, in an even more extended sense, there is another agglomerated civilization that includes classical antiquity), I don’t think that it is played out, not least due to the fact that contemporary science still has several centuries of development ahead of it, and it was science that drove the industrial revolution, and it was the industrialized revolution that drove and still drives expanding populations, increasing productivity, and historically unprecedented wealth of modernity. On the basis of this hunch, I say that no planetary scale collapse of civilization is going to happen in the near to mid-term future. Therefore, such failures as do happen will be local and regional.
Somalia is what social collapse looks like in the present. Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central government for decades, and yet its cell phone penetration rate is higher than many other African nation-states. Parts of Somalia have electrical power, while other parts do not. Somalia has the rather more functional nation-state of Kenya to the south, the almost-as-dysfunctional nation-state of Ethiopia to the west, and the much more functional nation-state of Djibouti to the north. Somalis have fled to other nation-states and remittances from abroad constitute a significant portion of the Somali economy. Even if Somalia remains as lawless in the coming decades as it has been in the past several decades, this is not a center of failure that is going to cascade outward to any great degree. The desire of surrounding nation-states of stabilize themselves internally will prop up Somalia to a certain extent, so that Somalia is not likely to get much worse, in spite of its lawlessness.
We could see a pattern of history in the coming centuries in which there are regions of instability and lawlessness, while other regions are more stable, where science and technology continue to develop. Moreover, these regions will not be fixed, but will shift over historical time, meaning slowly and gradually, so that an economically robust region in one century may become a backwater in the next century, much as the US “rustbelt” was a thriving economic region in the middle of the twentieth century, and now, nearing the middle of the twenty-first century, it is a backwater for all practical purposes.
There are other forces at work as well. The degree of change to ecosystems and agriculture from climate change is unknown, but this could well drive the shift of robust economies toward the poles. Also, in this century it is likely that human population will peak and then decline. We have the odd “privilege” of living in the age of peak population. On the other side of the peak, we don’t know how rapid or steep the decline will be, or whether it will eventually be followed by a population revival.
The end of peak population could be catastrophic, or it could be a gentle readjustment to a sustainable level of human population on Earth. These distinctive historical forces of the present will shape the way in which the perennial forces of human history play out.
