August 29th, 2022
I didn’t realize this book is from 1988. I don’t know how much of our knowledge and understanding of various civilizations have changed in the last 30 years, but I doubt it is revolutionary, especially in regards to the topic at hand. The beginning of the book so far has just explained its purpose and is giving a brief introduction to the different societies that will be discussed. The main thing to note is the author’s point that a society at an level can collapse. Collapse is to be define more or less as a lessening of centralization of power or control. Rome collapsed and broke up into many different kingdoms and duchies. A farming society can collapse when villages under the sway of one chief village become independent and even conflicting.
August 30th, 2022
The rest of the first chapter continues on mentioning different civilizations. Kind of a drag to read but it’s only setup.
August 31st, 2022
I don’t want to say this is boring, but it is a bit of a slog. Kind of tough to get through, but this is to be expected with a more academic writing style. The second chapter’s job is to define “complexity”. The author seems to favor a continuum of complexity rather than stages such as “tribal”, “chiefdom”, or “state”. He questions the widely agreed upon notion that there is a “Great Divide” between state and non-state societies, claiming many believe that there are “steps” to being a state and thus it is not such a huge difference after all. A state is defined as a polity that is based on territory as opposed to something like a tribe or chiefdom, which tend to be less land fixed and more kin based. Complexity increases as inequality and heterogeneity (if I’m using the correct word) increase. Compelx societies become more stratified and hierarchical. They also have more societal diversification, which I think means, for example, you won’t find a plumber among the aristocracy. In a band of hunter-gatherers, you will find more egalitarianism. Most men will perform the same task of hunting. There is not a designated “firewood cutting” class, people throughout the society would have to do this task. Seems pretty logical to me. Like complexity, collapse would be on a continuum. A large state can collapse to a small state. A chiefdom can collapse to wandering band. Let’s see what else he’s got.
September 1st, 2022
I guess the main point of this next section was more of a philosophical discussion on why states form. The vast majority of human history was of stateless society. The past 5000 years have been an anomaly. Once a state forms, it spreads or influences the neighboring territory. Thus it is considered that there are only 6 “primary” state formations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, Peru. All subsequent states are somehow a result of these initial formations. The question of why states form has two schools of thought. The one is conflict, the other is integration. The conflict school believes that the state formed as a result of one group controlling a surplus and needed a system to keep this surplus in their hands. Thus the state is a result of conflict between the haves and the have-nots. The flaw with this is that it assumes greed and desire for surplus are universal and uniform among all societies. If that is so, why did no states form earlier in human history? Creating a surplus surely was possible to previous societies. The conflict school of thought seems to make more sense in the maintaining of existing states, sort of a Marxist view of government. The second school is that the state formed because it was beneficial to the people. At some point, it was necessary to have some set of people perform “administrative” tasks, and they were rewarded for what was considered a difficult job. It was a symbiotic relationship. This seems more logical, since a group of people could easily stop one man from amassing some power, especially in a more migratory society. This does not necessarily justify the state today, as Hobbes would claim in his social contract theory. We accept the existing state as part of our birth, there is no opting out. Yet it is correct that the existence of the state has tangible benefits, and while these benefits last and outweigh the negatives of the state, there should be no collapse.
September 2nd, 2022
The third chapter is about the study of collapse. The author wishes to avoid the term “civilization” as what is considered civilized is subjective. Older authors tended to describe the collapse in terms of governments or polities, not civilization or culture. Culture is constantly changing, anyway. He then goes on mentions 11 points that lead or coincide with collapse, which I do not remember. I think they will be explored in detail, because the rest of what I read today was about one of them. This was resource depletion. A resource can be depleted because it runs out, because of environmental effects, or from mismanagement. Forest depletion is man made, but years of bad harvest is environmental. Running out of oil would be another example. Then he gives examples in a bunch of different civilizations (I don’t know how to avoid this word). The author claims the flaw in this alone is that why do societies not react accordingly? One could assume that the problem is not instant. Maybe they don’t have the ability or manpower. If the region becomes an arid desert, there is really nothing that can be done. If harvest is bad, a natural or man made cause, this could lead to death and lack of people to maintain the existing structures. I like to look at our present environmental problems because we see that it is purely a matter of people not wanting to do anything. A total lack of interest. Those in power today want to keep the status quo, continue to profit at the expense of the plant, and this will undeniably lead to societal collapse. What makes earlier societies any different? Why would a leader in a central city care that the fringes of his territory are not doing so well? The money is still rolling in, and if it doesn’t, make them work harder. Just another case of humans being garbage animals. Environmental change may not be a cause of collapse on its own, but it is certainly a major factor in many cases. And it will be again.
September 3rd, 2022
The chapter continues with more of theories of what leads to collapse. Most don’t get as much attention as the depletion of resources/environmental effects. One is a discovery of new resources which would nullify the need for “an agreement” between ruler and ruled. This seems mostly nonsense. One interesting point is that the spread of iron allowed “barbarian” tribes to compete militarily with establish societies and thus lead to destabilization. Another point is catastrophes, such as floods or earthquakes. A fan favorite, but the author puts little faith in it. Complex societies are constantly dealing with natural disasters and it would say a lot about the society if just one can put an end to it. I’ll skip over one and come back to it, another short point was the presence of other complex societies. The author also scoffs at this one as neighboring complex societies don’t tend to collapse. One may wane as the other rises and could possibly be absorbed by it, but I don’t think history has ever had an instance of mutual destruction. The one that I skipped and got a lot of attention, mainly due to how open it is, is a society’s insufficient response to something. This could easily be tied to the resource depletion or environmental issues. Due to it’s wide implications, “insufficient response” or the wrong choice seems like it could lead to a collapse. An example was the Romans taxed heavily the farmers on the fringe in order to support those living in the city. This led to many leaving their fields for the cities and instead of easing up on the farmers to attract them back, they continued to tax or worsened the taxes. Something like this creates a positive feedback loop that leads to an unstable system. I think we can easily see our leaders making a bad choice that makes a situation worse, and if it is not corrected in a reasonable amount of time, it becomes too late. This is also a vague enough idea that it can be applied to all types of societies throughout history. Even a simple bad choice by a chieftain, maybe something that leads to a loss in battle, could destabilize his control and thus break apart some sort of federation. It’s the most “human” answer so far.
September 5th, 2022
The chapter continues with some more collapse theories. The author doesn't give much credence to invaders or “society falling apart”. The next big concept is internal conflict, another vague and wide ranging one. I think it covers a lot of the same ground as the inefficient response topic. This can be called class conflict or the increase in power of regional governors as opposed to central power. It's unlikely this is the Marxist view of peasants fighting the elite, chances are this is elite vs elite. The author doesn't seem to be really into this idea and it sounds like he says it is not in the self-interest of the elite to act in this way. He's assuming that people are logical creatures and that they consider the outcomes of their actions. People are ****-ups.
September 6th, 2022
The next item is a little misleading in name, the author calls is mystical means, or something like that. What he means by that is non-quantifiable subjective ideas. These can encompass words like “decadence”, “virtue”, “vitality”, any comparison to living organisms, impiety, etc. These all have in common that they are opinions or moral judgements and have no scientific means of measuring. It’s pure philosophy or metaphysics. A culture is not a living thing. Yes, it can change over time, but it does not grow and die. Any connection of change to an opinionated term like growth or decline makes it a non-scientific study. Change can be found in archaeology, growth cannot. The author gives a lot of examples of people who have written about this and many are modern. I agree that there is no place for pseudoscience in scientific endeavors. One’s philosophy is always formed by one’s worldview and upbringing. It is not correct to make judgement calls on an alien culture or a distant time period. There is nothing wrong with having an opinion on such matters, but it should be noted as an opinion and thus a writer should not attempt to apply their opinion as a definitive statement.
September 7th, 2022
The 3rd chapter concludes with two more modes and a summary. One is the concatenation of events, which seems valid, but is useless for this book as it is trying to find a general rule for collapse. The concatenation of events is inherently unique to whatever society it is applied to. The last one, which is clearly the author’s favorite, is economics. As a pseudointellectual, I despise when history crosses paths with economics. Putting everything in economical terms is just as bad as using biological terms to me. This is hyperbole. Regardless, economical evidence is at least quantifiable and provable. The chapter ends with the author acknowledging the benefits of all the ideas given, sans mysticism, but heavily favoring economics. It seems obvious to me that there must be some synthesis of the resource/environmental, economic, and poor response paths. The 4th chapter proves the author’s love of economics and will view the law of diminishing returns in sociopolitical terms. It’s a derivative of input. Assume output increases when input increases. However, the rate of output rise decreases when input crosses a certain threshold. Thus it takes more labor, but the delta gain is smaller. The author provides data where this is evident in agriculture (he specifies subsistence agriculture, not sure if that will come into play). It can also be seem, for example, when societies switched from wood (due to lack of quantity) to coal for energy. It is a more difficult resource to get than wood, and over time mining deeper becomes more difficult. Thus dI/dO becomes negative and d2I/dO2 is negative.
September 8th, 2022
The fourth chapter throws more data and charts at you that show the author’s point. I’ll have to take him at face value. Besides agriculture and resources, the three other metrics are information processing (e.g. inventions, proven through drop in patents as number of scientists/engineers increases), bureaucracy (e.g. the British colonial service increase in the 20th century as the empire itself shrunk), and economics (boring). Then in the next section the author justifies the data that he has shown. The agriculture and resource marginal returns are self-evident. The lack of inventions is also logical. Work in a scientific field is like a pyramid. There is much room to build the base and it is easier. Building subsequently off this base gets more and more difficult. As more people specialize in this tiny section of the huge pyramid, returns are less. Make an engine more efficient becomes more difficult once the efficiency is already high, and the reward is smaller. Discovering the nature of the solar system has immediate benefits on understanding our daily lives. Finding a quasar does not affect anyone’s life. Some advances are important and necessary, such as improving batteries for electric vehicles or improving solar panels, but the point is the marginal returns are less when compared to their initial years of development.
September 12th, 2022
The book continues with how a societies’ response to certain stresses has a declining marginal return after a certain point. It seems to me that most of these stresses are trying to maintain the status quo as population increases. Control population growth and you do not necessarily need to make societal changes. Food production and energy acquisition become more complex because more people require it. A larger bureaucracy is needed to process the higher population. It is also not such a bad thing to have a large bureaucracy, as these additional people will require work. I also don’t think you can look at it in 100% economic or scientific terms, though it makes it simpler. There is always a human and not totally rational aspect to one’s actions. Society could simply collapse due to cultural differences. Could the Civil War have been predicted by such methods? I doubt it. This would say the slave states would find a supplemental energy source as marginal returns of slavery dropped below a certain threshold. Certainly the US would not have collapsed. Yet there was a temporary collapse as the nation shrank. Can’t win them all.
Chapter 5 looks into evaluating three different historical cases of collapse. First is the Western Roman Empire, then it will go into the Maya (a less centralized but still highly hierarchical society), and then the Choacon or something like that, I can’t remember the name. They were natives of the Colorado Plateau and had villages but no writing or centralization I guess. The first 10 pages are, probably the rest of this first section, is a history of the late Roman empire. It’s main points so far are that the income of the empire came from expansion, which fueled and paid for further expansion. Augustus ended the expansion policy because they couldn’t really hold anything across the Rhine, and so financial troubles started. The author really focuses on currency debasement, which saw the sestertius’ silver content drop as far as 50%. To keep power in a society where anyone could kill the emperor and usurp the throne, the military was expanded and paid higher wages. Roman citizens, who were not taxed for many years, were once again taxed. All freemen became citizens, bringing in more income. The mid 200s were a tumult time and the empire nearly collapsed. Different parts of the empire were ruled by different usurpers. A plague in Marcus Aurelius’ time wiped out maybe a quarter of the population, and these difficult times 50 years later did not allow the population to rise. It will probably go into the rule of Diocletian next and explain what he did, if he can be given credit, for preventing the collapse.
September 13th, 2022
The book claims that the collapse of Rome was due to over taxation. I’m forgetting a lot of it, but the general idea is that the lower classes were unproportionally taxed and could not support or feed themselves. This led to a discouragement of population growth, which had shrunk due to plagues and instability. The empire began to force occupations to be inheritable, e.g. a soldier’s son must be a soldier. Serfdom grew out of this, but also could grow from small landholders selling their untenable holdings (to stop paying the taxes) and working on large estates. Lots of land became uncultivated. Germanic invasions were met with indifference or seen as a release from imperial taxation. And that’s that. If this is true, then I can see how unfair taxation on the base of society can cause it to topple. The imperial actions were to keep the empire from collapsing and it led to its collapse, and it’s never fair to judge in hindsight. Possibly a progressive taxation that fairly taxed the poor and encouraged them to maintain and farmland could have avoided this scenario. Imperial expenses may have been reducible, though this may have led to instability elsewhere. It’s a complex situation and a complex society. One small change could have dramatic repercussions. The eastern half of the empire, which will be touched on later as to why it did not collapse, had more stable borders and was based on a society that could handle a higher level of taxation. Next on the Maya.
The next section mostly describes the Maya. I don’t know how accurate it is, since at the time of this writing they did not understand Mayan script. Today, it is fairly well understood. I also know that the use of LIDAR today has helped detect edifices lost in the overgrown jungle. The book discusses how the population grew and thus the Maya needed to move from swidden or “slash-and-burn” agriculture to something that could sustain a higher population. They had terraces, irrigation, drained swamps etc. This led to hierarchical organization and cities such as Tikal. It does not seem that they were a unified “empire” as with Rome, but culturally affiliated city-states. There was certainly warfare, though not in the European way. With the lack of horses, pack animals, and iron, warfare would be between small bands. Sieges were out of the question. There was a period around 600 known as the “hiatus” because it seems that monument building slowed to a crawl, territory may have shrunk, and possibly there was a decrease in agricultural output seen in pollen samples. There was a “revival” or post-classic period, but by 1000, the cities were mostly abandoned. Next we will find out why.
September 14th, 2022
There’s not much to say about the rest of chapter 5. As mentioned, the population increased and agriculture became more complex in response. There was not much environmental diversity, so as the culture expanded, a famine or shortage would affect the entire region. The author claims that warfare was used to supplement agriculture and that monument building was used in lieu of a standing army to show prowess. Much of Mayan art shows the torture or killing of defeated enemies. This system lasted 1000 years and eventually became too large a burden for a weaking peasantry. Human remains show poor nutrition and there is evidence of large population drop, though it is unknown how much was mortal and how much was emigration. The peasantry was no longer able to support this system and so it collapsed. Note that this was in the southern lowlands. The northern Maya around Chichen Itza or Belize did not collapse at this time and became dominant.
Then the third society discussed is the Chacoan of Chaco Canyon in Colorado/New Mexico. They had no written language and are known entirely through archaeology. They build some really big houses, so must have had a large labor force. The upper plateau and the surrounding lowlands had enough diversity that they could support each other when one had abundance and one was in need. Due to the nature of the area, they were often at opposite ends of this spectrum. As the culture expanded and included more “villages”, for lack of a better term, the marginal returns were less. The newer people had less to contribute but needed the same sustenance. As the bubble grew, there was less room for “reserve” supplies of food as everyone in the system experienced the same shortages. This strained the system and tribes began to leave in order to support themselves. This system lasted from about 900 to 1150. Like the Maya, tribes in another region, such as Navajo, became dominant afterwards. The chapter ends summarizing everything it had said. A summary chapter remains.
September 15th, 2022
The last chapter is mostly a summary of the book. At first it adds very little. It hones the definition of collapse a little bit. Collapse is something that happens in a power vacuum; if there is a competing state, there is no collapse. The Byzantine empire did not collapse but weakened over time until it was taken over by a neighboring power. The Byzantines could not collapse in the early days because the Persian empire would fill any void. Collapse is quick, while decay is slow. In Western Europe or Southern Mexico, there were no other powers. Modern European states haven’t collapsed one by one because a neighboring power would take control. Polities in these situations will develop complexity together, in competition, and must collapse together, as in the Maya or Mycenean states. The Ancient Greek states could not collapse one by one for this reason. We’ll see what else it says; I’ll finish the book tomorrow.
September 16th, 2022
The book ends with some more repetition and then discusses the “present day” (30+ years ago). One important thing mentioned before that I forgot was in response to the “improper response” theory. The author claims this is a fallacy by people who value complex society. A decrease in complexity is indeed a response and may be the most reasonable economic choice at hand. I’d be curious to read his opinions on the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and whether these are considered “collapses” by his definition. He claims that the world, unlike any former period, is full with complex societies. There are no vacuums. Either everyone collapses together or a collapsed region is consumed by another power. That’s where his definition is confusing. Is a decrease in complexity a collapse or not? If a central government no longer controls 11 different localities, is that not a decrease in complexity? If the United States splits into two nations, is that considered a collapse? Is it even a decrease in complexity? Or is it an increase in complexity now that there are two complex federal governments? Everything is intentionally vague and it is kind of annoying. The environment is going to degrade and we are all going to die.