Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have
been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an
intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall.
On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its
neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history. Its political and religious institutions, its
arts and architecture, and all the other details of its daily life take on
distinctive forms, so that as it nears maturity, even the briefest glance at
one of its creations is often enough to identify its source.
Once the peak is past and the long road down begins, though,
that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly at first, and then with
increasing speed. A curious sort of homogenization takes place: distinctive
features are lost, and common patterns emerge in their place. That doesn’t happen all at once, and
different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at different rates,
but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a civilization
proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in decline. By the
time that trajectory bottoms out, the resemblance is all but total; compare one
postcollapse society to another—the societies of post-Roman Europe, let’s say,
with those of post-Mycenean Greece—and it can be hard to believe that dark age
societies so similar could have emerged out of the wreckage of civilizations so
different.
It’s interesting to speculate about why this reversion to
the mean should be so regular a theme in the twilight and afermath of so many
civilizations. Still, the recurring patterns of decline and fall have another
implication—or, if you will, another application. I’ve noted here and elsewhere
that modern industrial society, especially but not only here in North America,
is showing all the usual symptoms of a civilization on its way toward history’s
compost bin. If we’ve started along the familiar track of decline and fall—and
I think a very good case can be made for that hypothesis—it should be possible
to map the standard features of the way down onto the details of our current
situation, and come up with a fairly accurate sense of the shape of the future
ahead of us.
All the caveats raised in last
week’s Archdruid Report post deserve repetition here, of
course. The part of history that can be guessed in advance is a matter of broad
trends and overall patterns, not the sort of specific incidents that make up so
much of history as it happens. Exactly
how the pressures bearing down on late industrial America will work out in the
day-by-day realities of politics, economics, and society will be determined by
the usual interplay of individual choices and pure dumb luck. That said, the
broad trends and overall patterns are worth tracking in their own right, and
some things that look as though they ought to belong to the realm of the
unpredictable—for example, the political and military dynamics of border
regions, or the relations among the imperial society’s political class, its
increasingly disenfranchised lower classes, and the peoples outside its
borders—follow predictable patterns in case after case in history, and show
every sign of doing the same thing this time around too.
What I’m suggesting, in fact, is that in a very real sense,
it’s possible to map out the history of North America over the next five
centuries or so in advance. That’s a sweeping claim, and I’m well aware that
the immediate response of at least some of my readers will be to reject the
possibility out of hand. I’d like to encourage those who have this reaction to
try to keep an open mind. In the posts to come, I plan on illustrating every
significant point I make with historical examples from the twilight years of
other civilizations, as well as evidence from the current example insofar as
that’s available yet. Thus it should be
possible for my readers to follow the argument as it unfolds and see how it
hangs together.
Now of course all this presupposes that the lessons of the
past actually have some relevance to our future. I’m aware that that’s a
controversial proposal these days, but to my mind the controversy says more
about the popular idiocies of our time than it does about the facts on the
ground. I’ve discussed in previous posts how people in today’s America have taken to using
thoughtstoppers such as "but it’s different this time!" to protect
themselves from learning anything from history—a habit that no doubt does
wonders for their peace of mind today, though it pretty much guarantees them a
face-first collision with a brick wall of misery and failure not much further
down time’s road. Those who insist on clinging to that habit are not going to
find the next year or so of posts here to their taste.
They won’t be the only ones. Among the resources I plan on
using to trace out the history of the next five centuries is the current state
of the art in the environmental sciences, and that includes the very
substantial body of evidence and research on anthropogenic climate change. I’m
aware that some people consider that controversial, and of course some very
rich corporate interests have invested a lot of money into convincing people
that it’s controversial, but I’ve read extensively on all sides of the subject,
and the arguments against taking anthropogenic climate change seriously strike
me as specious. I don’t propose to debate the matter here, either—there are
plenty of forums for that. While I propose to leaven current model-based
estimates on climate change and sea level rise with the evidence from
paleoclimatology, those who insist that there’s nothing at all the matter with
treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer for greenhouse gases are not going
to be happy with the posts ahead.
I also propose to discuss industrial civilization’s decline
and fall without trying to sugarcoat the harsher dimensions of that process,
and that’s going to ruffle yet another set of feathers. Regular readers will
recall a
post earlier this year discussing the desperate attempts to insist
that it won’t be that bad, really it won’t, that were starting to show up in
the flurry of criticism each of these weekly essays reliably fields. That’s even more common now than it was then;
nowadays, in fact, whenever one of my posts uses words such as
"decline" or "dark age," I can count on being taken to task
by critics who insist earnestly that such language is too negative, that of
course we’re facing a shift to a different kind of society but I shouldn’t
describe it in such disempowering terms, and so on through the whole vocabulary
of the obligatory optimism that’s so fashionable among the privileged these
days.
I’m pretty sure, as noted in the blog post just cited, that
this marks the beginning of a shift by the peak oil community as a whole out of
the second of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous five stages, the stage of anger,
into the third stage of bargaining. That’s welcome, in that it brings us closer
to the point at which people have finished dealing with their own psychological
issues and can get to work coping with the predicament of our time, but it’s
still as much an evasion of that predicament as denial and anger were. The fall
of a civilization is not a pleasant prospect—and that’s what we’re talking
about, of course: the decline and fall of industrial civilization, the long
passage through a dark age, and the first stirrings of the successor societies
that will build on our ruins. That’s how the life cycle of a civilization ends,
and it’s the way that ours is ending right now.
What that means in practice is that most of the familiar
assumptions people in the industrial world like to make about the future will
be stood on their heads in the decades and centuries ahead. Most of the
rhetoric being splashed about these days in support of this or that or the
other Great Turning that will save us from the consequences of our own actions
assumes, as a matter of course, that a majority of people in the United
States—or, heaven help us, in the whole industrial world—can and will come
together around some broadly accepted set of values and some agreed-upon plan
of action to rescue industrial civilization from the rising spiral of crises
that surrounds it. My readers may have noticed that things seem to be moving in
the opposite direction, and history suggests that they’re quite correct.
Among the standard phenomena of decline and fall, in fact,
is the shattering of the collective consensus that gives a growing society the
capacity to act together to accomplish much of anything at all. The schism between the political class and
the rest of the population—you can certainly call these "the 1%" and
"the 99%" if you wish—is simply the most visible of the fissures that
spread through every declining civilization, breaking it into a crazy quilt of
dissident fragments pursuing competing ideals and agendas. That process has a
predictable endpoint, too: as the
increasingly grotesque misbehavior of the political class loses it whatever
respect and loyalty it once received from the rest of society, and the masses
abandon their trust in the political institutions of their society, charismatic
leaders from outside the political class fill the vacuum, violence becomes the
normal arbiter of power, and the rule of law becomes a polite fiction when it
isn’t simply abandoned altogether.
The economic sphere of a society in decline undergoes a
parallel fragmentation for different reasons. In ages of economic expansion,
the labor of the working classes yields enough profit to cover the costs of a
more or less complex superstructure, whether that superstructure consists of
the pharaohs and priesthoods of ancient Egypt or the bureaucrats and investment
bankers of late industrial America. As expansion gives way to contraction, the
production of goods and services no longer yields the profit ot once did, but
the members of the political class, whose power and wealth depend on the
superstructure, are predictably unwilling to lose their privileged status and
have the power to keep themselves fed at everyone else’s expense. The reliable
result is a squeeze on productive economic activity that drives a declining
civilization into one convulsive financial crisis after another, and ends by
shredding its capacity to produce even the most necessary goods and services .
In response, people begin dropping out of the economic
mainstream altogether, because scrabbling for subsistence on the economic
fringes is less futile than trying to get by in a system increasingly rigged
against them. Rising taxes, declining government services, and systematic
privatization of public goods by the rich compete to alienate more and more
people from the established order, and the debasement of the money system in an
attempt to make up for faltering tax revenues drives more and more economic
activity into forms of exchange that don’t involve money at all. As the monetary system fails, in turn,
economies of scale become impossible to exploit; the economy fragments and simplifies
until bare economic subsistence on local resources, occasionally supplemented
by plunder, becomes the sole surviving form of economic activity
Taken together, these patterns of political fragmentation
and economic unraveling send the political class of a failing civilization on a
feet-first journey through the exit doors of history. The only skills its members have, by and
large, are those needed to manipulate the complex political and economic levers
of their society, and their power depends entirely on the active loyalty of
their subordinates, all the way down the chain of command, and the passive
obedience of the rest of society. The
collapse of political institutions strips the political class of any claim to
legitimacy, the breakdown of the economic system limits its ability to buy the
loyalty of those that it can no longer inspire, the breakdown of the levers of
control strips its members of the only actual power they’ve got, and that’s
when they find themselves having to compete for followers with the charismatic
leaders rising just then from the lower echelons of society. The endgame, far
more often than not, comes when the political class tries to hire the rising
leaders of the disenfranchised as a source of muscle to control the rest of the
populace, and finds out the hard way that it’s the people who carry the
weapons, not the ones who think they’re giving the orders, who actually
exercise power.
The implosion of the political class has implications that
go well beyond a simple change in personnel at the upper levels of society. The
political and social fragmentation mentioned earlier applies just as forcefully
to the less tangible dimensions of human life—its ideas and ideals, its beliefs
and values and cultural practices. As a civilization tips over into decline,
its educational and cultural institutions, its arts, literature, sciences,
philosophies and religions all become identified with its political class; this
isn’t an accident, as the political class generally goes out of its way to
exploit all these things for the sake of its own faltering authority and
influence. To those outside the political class, in turn, the high culture of
the civilization becomes alien and hateful, and when the political class goes
down, the cultural resources that it harnessed to its service go down with it.
Sometimes, some of those resources get salvaged by
subcultures for their own purposes, as Christian monks and nuns salvaged
portions of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and science for the greater
glory of God. That’s not guaranteed, though, and even when it does happen, the
salvage crew picks and chooses for its own reasons—the survival of classical
Greek astronomy in the early medieval West, for example, happened simply
because the Church needed to know how to calculate the date of Easter. Where no
such motive exists, losses can be total: of the immense corpus of Roman music,
the only thing that survives is a fragment of one tune that takes about 25
seconds to play, and there are historical examples in which even the simple
trick of literacy got lost during the implosion of a civilization, and had to
be imported centuries later from somewhere else.
All these transformations impact the human ecology of a
falling civilization—that is, the basic relationships with the natural world on
which every human society depends for day to day survival. Most civilizations
know perfectly well what has to be done to keep topsoil in place, irrigation
water flowing, harvests coming in, and all the other details of human
interaction with the environment on a stable footing. The problem is always how
to meet the required costs as economic growth ends, contraction sets in, and
the ability of central governments to enforce their edicts begins to unravel.
The habit of feeding the superstructure at the expense of everything else
impacts the environment just as forcefully as it does the working classes: just as wages drop to starvation levels and
keep falling, funding for necessary investments in infrastructure, fallow periods
needed for crop rotation, and the other inputs that keep an agricultural system
going in a sustainable manner all get cut.
As a result, topsoil washes away, agricultural hinterlands
degrade into deserts or swamps, vital infrastructure collapses from malign
neglect, and the ability of the land to support human life starts on the
cascading descent that characterizes the end stage of decline—and so, in turn,
does population, because human numbers in the last analysis are a dependent
variable, not an independent one. Populations don’t grow or shrink because
people just up and decide one day to have more or fewer babies; they’re
constrained by ecological limits. In an expanding civilization, as its wealth
and resource base increases, the population expands as well, since people can
afford to have more children, and since more of the children born each year
have access to the nutrition and basic health care that let them survive to
breeding age themselves. When growth
gives way to decline, population typically keeps rising for another generation
or so due to sheer demographic momentum, and then begins to fall.
The consequences can be traced in the history of every
collapsing civilization. As the rural
economy implodes due to agricultural failure on top of the more general
economic decline, a growing fraction of the population concentrates in urban
slum districts, and as public health measures collapse, these turn into
incubators for infectious disease. Epidemics are thus a common feature in the
history of declining civilizations, and of course war and famine are also
significant factors, but an even larger toll is taken by the constant upward
pressure exerted on death rates by poverty, malnutrition, crowding, and stress.
As deaths outnumber births, population goes into a decline that can easily continue
for centuries. It’s far from uncommon for the population of an area in the wake
of a civilization to equal less than 10% of the figure it reached at the
precollapse peak.
Factor these patterns together, follow them out over the
usual one to three centuries of spiralling decline, and you have the standard
picture of a dark age society: a mostly deserted countryside of small and
scattered villages where subsistence farmers, illiterate and impoverished,
struggle to coax fertility back into the depleted topsoil. Their goverments
consist of the personal rule of local warlords, who take a share of each year’s
harvest in exchange for protection from raiders and rough justice administered
in the shade of any convenient tree. Their literature consists of poems,
lovingly memorized and chanted to the sound of a simple stringed instrument,
recalling the great deeds of the charismatic leaders of a vanished age, and
these same poems also contain everything they know about their history. Their
health care consists of herbs, a little rough surgery, and incantations cannily
used to exploit the placebo effect. Their science—well, I’ll let you imagine
that for yourself.
And the legacy of the past? Here’s some of what an anonymous
poet in one dark age had to say about the previous civilization:
Bright were the halls then, many the bath-houses,
High the gables, loud the joyful clamor,
Many the meadhalls full of delights
Until mighty Fate overthrew it all.
Wide was the slaughter, the plague-time came,
Death took away all those brave men.
Broken their ramparts, fallen their halls,
The city decayed; those who built it
Fell to the earth. Thus these courts crumble,
And roof-tiles fall from this arch of stone.
