Lately I’ve been rereading some of the tales of H.P.
Lovecraft. He’s nearly unique among the writers of American horror stories, in
that his sense of the terrible was founded squarely on the worldview of modern
science. He was a steadfast atheist and materialist, but unlike so many
believers in that creed, his attitude toward the cosmos revealed by science was
not smug satisfaction but shuddering horror. The first paragraph of his most
famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” is typical:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the
inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of
our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
It’s entirely possible that this insight of Lovecraft’s will
turn out to be prophetic, and that a passionate popular revolt against the
implications—and even more, the applications—of contemporary science will be
one of the forces that propel us into the dark age ahead. Still, that’s a
subject for a later post in this series. The point I want to make here is that
Lovecraft’s image of people eagerly seeking such peace and safety as a dark age
may provide them is not as ironic as it sounds. Outside the elites, which have
a different and considerably more gruesome destiny than the other inhabitants
of a falling civilization, it’s surprisingly rare for people to have to be
forced to trade civilization for barbarism, either by human action or by the
pressure of events. By and large, by the
time that choice arrives, the great majority are more than ready to make the exchange,
and for good reason.
Let’s start by reviewing some basics. As I pointed out in a
paper published online back in 2005—a PDF
is available here—the process that drives the collapse of
civilizations has a surprisingly simple basis: the mismatch between the
maintenance costs of capital and the resources that are available to meet those
costs. Capital here is meant in the broadest sense of the word, and includes
everything in which a civilizations invests its wealth: buildings, roads,
imperial expansion, urban infrastructure, information resources, trained
personnel, or what have you. Capital of every kind has to be maintained, and as
a civilization adds to its stock of capital, the costs of maintenance rise
steadily, until the burden they place on the civilization’s available resources
can’t be supported any longer.
The only way to resolve that conflict is to allow some of
the capital to be converted to waste, so that its maintenance costs drop to
zero and any useful resources locked up in the capital can be put to other
uses. Human beings being what they are, the conversion of capital to waste
generally isn’t carried out in a calm, rational manner; instead, kingdoms fall,
cities get sacked, ruling elites are torn to pieces by howling mobs, and the
like. If a civilization depends on renewable resources, each round of capital
destruction is followed by a return to relative stability and the cycle begins
all over again; the history of imperial China is a good example of how that
works out in practice.
If a civilization depends on nonrenewable resources for
essential functions, though, destroying some of its capital yields only a brief
reprieve from the crisis of maintenance costs. Once the nonrenewable resource
base tips over into depletion, there’s less and less available each year
thereafter to meet the remaining maintenance costs, and the result is the
stairstep pattern of decline and fall so familiar from history: each crisis leads to a round of capital
destruction, which leads to renewed stability, which gives way to crisis as the
resource base drops further. Here again, human beings being what they are, this
process isn’t carried out in a calm, rational manner; the difference here is
simply that kingdoms keep falling, cities keep getting sacked, ruling elites
are slaughtered one after another in ever more inventive and colorful ways,
until finally contraction has proceeded far enough that the remaining capital
can be supported on the available stock of renewable resources.
That’s a thumbnail sketch of the theory of catabolic
collapse, the basic model of the decline and fall of civilizations that
underlies the overall project of this blog. I’d encourage those who have
questions about the details of the theory to go ahead and read the published
version linked above; down the road a ways, I hope to publish a much more
thoroughly developed version of the theory, but that project is still in the
earliest stages just now. What I want to do here is to go a little more deeply
into the social implications of the theory.
It’s common these days to hear people insist that our
society is divided into two and only two classes, an elite class that receives
all the benefits of the system, and everyone else, who bears all the burdens.
The reality, in ours as in every other human society, is a great deal more
nuanced. It’s true, of course, that the benefits move toward the top of the
ladder of wealth and privilege and the burdens get shoved toward the bottom,
but in most cases—ours very much included—you have to go a good long way down
the ladder before you find people who receive no benefits at all.
There have admittedly been a few human societies in which
most people receive only such benefits from the system as will enable them to
keep working until they drop. The early days of plantation slavery in the
United States and the Caribbean islands, when the average lifespan of a slave
from purchase to death was under ten years, fell into that category, and so do
a few others—for example, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. These are exceptional
cases; they emerge when the cost of unskilled labor drops close to zero and
either abundant profits or ideological considerations make the fate of the
laborers a matter of complete indifference to their masters.
Under any other set of conditions, such arrangements are
uneconomical. It’s more profitable, by and large, to allow such additional
benefits to the laboring class as will permit them to survive and raise
families, and to motivate them to do more than the bare minimum that will evade
the overseer’s lash. That’s what generates the standard peasant economy, for
example, in which the rural poor pay landowners in labor and a share of
agricultural production for access to arable land.
There are any number of similar arrangements, in which the
laboring classes do the work, the ruling classes allow them access to
productive capital, and the results are divided between the two classes in a
proportion that allows the ruling classes to get rich and the laboring classes
to get by. If that sounds familiar, it should.
In terms of the distribution of labor, capital, and production, the
latest offerings of today’s job market are indistinguishable from the
arrangements between an ancient Egyptian landowner and the peasants who planted
and harvested his fields.
The more complex a society becomes, the more intricate the
caste system that divides it, and the more diverse the changes that are played
on this basic scheme. A relatively simple medieval society might get by with
four castes—the feudal Japanese model, which divided society into aristocrats,
warriors, farmers, and a catchall category of traders, craftspeople,
entertainers, and the like, is as good an example as any. A stable society near
the end of a long age of expansion, by contrast, might have hundreds or even
thousands of distinct castes, each with its own niche in the social and
economic ecology of that society. In every case, each caste represents a
particular balance between benefits received and burdens exacted, and given a
stable economy entirely dependent on renewable resources, such a system can
continue intact for a very long time.
Factor in the process of catabolic collapse, though, and an
otherwise stable system turns into a fount of cascading instabilities. The
point that needs to be grasped here is that social hierarchies are a form of
capital, in the broad sense mentioned above. Like the other forms of capital
included in the catabolic collapse model, social hierarchies facilitate the
production and distribution of goods and services, and they have maintenance
costs that have to be met. If the maintenance costs aren’t met, as with any
other form of capital, social hierarchies are converted to waste; they stop
fulfilling their economic function, and become available for salvage.
That sounds very straightforward. Here as so often, though,
it’s the human factor that transforms it from a simple equation to the raw
material of history. As the maintenance
costs of a civilization’s capital begin to mount up toward the point of crisis,
corners get cut and malign neglect becomes the order of the day. Among the
various forms of capital, though, some benefit people at one point on the
ladder of social hierarchy more than people at other levels. As the maintenance
budget runs short, people normally try to shield the forms of capital that
benefit them directly, and push the cutbacks off onto forms of capital that
benefit others instead. Since the ability of any given person to influence
where resources go corresponds very precisely to that person’s position in the
social hierarchy, this means that the forms of capital that benefit the people
at the bottom of the ladder get cut first.
Now of course this isn’t what you hear from Americans today,
and it’s not what you hear from people in any society approaching catabolic
collapse. When contraction sets in, as I noted here in a post two weeks ago, people tend to pay much more attention to
whatever they’re losing than to the even greater losses suffered by others. The
middle-class Americans who denounce welfare for the poor at the top of their
lungs while demanding that funding for Medicare and Social Security remain
intact are par for the course; so, for that matter, are the other middle-class
Americans who denounce the admittedly absurd excesses of the so-called 1% while
carefully neglecting to note the immense differentials of wealth and privilege
that separate them from those still further down the ladder.
This sort of thing is inevitable in a fight over slices of a
shrinking pie. Set aside the inevitable partisan rhetoric, though, and a
society moving into the penumbra of catabolic collapse is a society in which
more and more people are receiving less and less benefit from the existing
order of society, while being expected to shoulder an ever-increasing share of
the costs of a faltering system. To those who receive little or no benefits in
return, the maintenance costs of social capital rapidly become an intolerable
burden, and as the supply of benefits still available from a faltering system
becomes more and more a perquisite of the upper reaches of the social
hierarchy, that burden becomes an explosive political fact.
Every society depends for its survival on the passive
acquiescence of the majority of the population and the active support of a
large minority. That minority—call them the overseer class—are the people who
operate the mechanisms of social hierarchy: the bureaucrats, media personnel,
police, soldiers, and other functionaries who are responsible for maintaining
social order. They are not drawn from the ruling elite; by and large, they come
from the same classes they are expected to control; and if their share of the
benefits of the existing order falters, if their share of the burdens increases
too noticeably, or if they find other reasons to make common cause with those
outside the overseer class against the ruling elite, then the ruling elite can
expect to face the brutal choice between flight into exile and a messy death.
The mismatch between maintenance costs and available resources, in turn, makes
some such turn of events extremely difficult to avoid.
A ruling elite facing a crisis of this kind has at least
three available options. The first, and by far the easiest, is to ignore the
situation. In the short term, this is actually the most economical option; it
requires the least investment of scarce resources and doesn’t require
potentially dangerous tinkering with fragile social and political systems. The
only drawback is that once the short term runs out, it pretty much guarantees a
horrific fate for the members of the ruling elite, and in many cases, this is a
less convincing argument than one might think. It’s always easy to find an
ideology that insists that things will turn out otherwise, and since members of
a ruling elite are generally well insulated from the unpleasant realities of
life in the society over which they preside, it’s usually just as easy for them
to convince themselves of the validity of whatever ideology they happen to
choose. The behavior of the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the
French Revolution is worth consulting in this context.
The second option is to try to remedy the situation by
increased repression. This is the most expensive option, and it’s generally
even less effective than the first, but ruling elites with a taste for
jackboots tend to fall into the repression trap fairly often. What makes repression
a bad choice is that it does nothing to address the sources of the problems it
attempts to suppress. Furthermore, it increases the maintenance costs of social
hierarchy drastically—secret police, surveillance gear, prison camps, and the
like don’t come cheap—and it enforces the lowest common denominator of passive
obedience while doing much to discourage active engagement of people outside
the elite in the project of saving the society.
A survey of the fate of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe is
a good antidote to the delusion that an elite with enough spies and soldiers
can stay in power indefinitely.
That leaves the third option, which requires the ruling
elite to sacrifice some of its privileges and perquisites so that those further
down the social ladder still have good reason to support the existing order of
society. That isn’t common, but it does happen; it happened in the United
States as recently as the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded changes
that spared the United States the sort of fascist takeover or civil war that
occurred in so many other failed democracies in the same era. Roosevelt and his
allies among the very rich realized that fairly modest reforms would be enough
to comvince most Americans that they had more to gain from supporting the
system than they would gain by overthrowing it.
A few job-creation projects and debt-relief measures, a few welfare
programs, and a few perp walks by the most blatant of the con artists of the
preceding era of high finance, were enough to stop the unraveling of the social
hierarchy, and restore a sense of collective unity strong enough to see the
United States through a global war in the following decade.
Now of course Roosevelt and his allies had huge advantages
that any comparable project would not be able to duplicate today. In 1933,
though it was hamstrung by a collapsed financial system and a steep decline in
international trade, the economy of the United States still had the world’s
largest and most productive industrial plant and some of the world’s richest
deposits of petroleum, coal, and many other natural resources. Eighty years
later, the industrial plant was abandoned decades ago in an orgy of offshoring
motivated by short-term profit-seeking, and nearly every resource the American
land once offered in abundance has been mined and pumped right down to the
dregs. That means that an attempt to imitate Roosevelt’s feat under current
conditions would face much steeper obstacles, and it would also require the
ruling elite to relinquish a much greater share of its current perquisites and
privileges than they did in Roosevelt’s day.
I could be mistaken, but I don’t think it will even be tried
this time around. Just at the moment, the squabbling coterie of competing power
centers that constitutes the ruling elite of the United States seems committed
to an approach halfway between the first two options I’ve outlined. The
militarization of US domestic police forces and the rising spiral of civil
rights violations carried out with equal enthusiasm by both mainstream
political parties fall on the repressive side of the scale. At the same time, for all these gestures in
the direction of repression, the overall attitude of American politicians and
financiers seems to be that nothing really that bad can actually happen to them
or the system that provides them with their power and their wealth.
They’re wrong, and at this point it’s probably a safe bet
that a great many of them will die because of that mistake. Already, a large fraction
of Americans—probably a majority—accept the continuation of the existing order
of society in the United States only because a viable alternative has yet to
emerge. As the United States moves closer to catabolic collapse, and the burden
of propping up an increasingly dysfunctional status quo bears down ever more
intolerably on more and more people outside the narrowing circle of wealth and
privilege, the bar that any alternative has to leap will be set lower and
lower. Sooner or later, something will make that leap and convince enough
people that there’s a workable alternative to the status quo, and the passive
acquiescence on which the system depends for its survival will no longer be
something that can be taken for granted.
It’s not necessary for such an alternative to be more
democratic or more humane than the order that it attempts to replace. It can be
considerably less so, so long as it imposes fewer costs on the majority of
people and distributes benefits more widely than the existing order does.
That’s why, in the last years of Rome, so many people of the collapsing empire
so readily accepted the rule of barbarian warlords in place of the imperial
government. That government had become hopelessly dysfunctional by the time of
the barbarian invasions, centralizing authority in distant bureaucratic centers
out of touch with current realities and imposing tax burdens on the poor so
crushing that many people were forced to sell themselves into slavery or flee
to depopulated regions of the countryside to take up the uncertain life of
Bacaudae, half guerrilla and half bandit, hunted by imperial
troops whenever those had time to spare from the defense of the frontiers.
By contrast, the local barbarian warlord might be brutal and
capricious, but he was there on the scene, and thus unlikely to exhibit the
serene detachment from reality so common in centralized bureaucratic states at
the end of their lives. What’s more, the warlord had good reason to protect the
peasants who put bread and meat on his table, and the cost of supporting him
and his retinue in the relatively modest style of barbarian kingship was
considerably less expensive than the burden of helping to prop up the baroque
complexities of the late Roman imperial bureaucracy. That’s why the peasants
and agricultural slaves of the late Roman world acquiesced so calmly in the
implosion of Rome and its replacement by a patchwork of petty kingdoms. It
wasn’t just that it was merely a change of masters; it was that in a great many
cases, the new masters were considerably less of a burden than the old ones had
been.
