Why do civilisations fall

Now ask students to go to How have other people interpreted the evidence? Discuss the responses of other people. Part 2: Understanding Collapse: Other Civilizations The following parts of the website can be read and discussed in class or assigned as homework followed by class discussion.

Direct students to the Understanding Collapse page. Read and discuss it with the class. Read and discuss the website pages in class or assign them as homework.

Then discuss the material in class, asking the questions listed below. Assess student work by using the teacher sheets. Ask students to choose individual or group research topics suggested by this website, using the Related Web Sites listed throughout the site pages and the links listed on the page called Related Resources.

Students may summarize their findings in written reports, class presentations, or a classroom exhibit. Ask students to research and report on factors that caused other famous civilizations to collapse ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Pompeii, Aztecs, Incas, etc.

Their reports should explain how scientists learned what happened archaeological evidence. Revisit the topic of changes in American society in the last 10 to 20 years and factors that have caused those changes.

Based on what they have learned, ask students to identify elements in American society that have stayed the same, elements that have changed, and factors that caused those changes. See the Tool. See the Collection. See the Lesson. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned in any straightforward way.

Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the s.

At this time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached their modern form. Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse. To ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things go wrong.

Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized.

By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization.

Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. You could do the same for the IRS, or for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.

It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon without the United States government, no U. Each of these institutions depends on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.

In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they are doing so.

People who try to effect change are most often frustrated. Countless people spend their lives wrestling with a societal problem, slaving over papers for publication in academia or the nonprofit world.

They act as if there is some sort of metaphorical wall which they throw their papers over, with some responsible person on the other side taking the output of their disinterested scientific study and translating it into policy, medical practice, or industrial production. More often than not, there is nobody on the other side of that wall. Since society is so deeply compartmentalized, it rarely functions as a whole with a single purpose.

Note that dysfunctionality is not a normative distinction; it often boils down to the simple reality of whether or not anyone ever follows up on key actions within the institution. It is also a question of whether or not there is a multiplier—be it individual, bureaucratic, oligarchic—behind that metaphorical wall.

Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the s knew how to make. That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule. Attempts at reverse engineering do not always succeed , if they are even made.

Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. There might be a sudden point where the superstructure gives way dramatically, such as occurred during the Bronze Age Collapse, or there might be slow accommodation to this convergence to zero, as with the Byzantine Empire.

The key dynamic here is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem. Running a large and complex institution requires skills which are often difficult to fully pass on. How can a successful founder ensure a successor who leads as competently as they did?

The succession problem is the central obstacle to transferring the ownership and knowledge of institutions from generation to generation. In the case of the Nobel Committee, for example, the goal of succession is to produce a new chairman with similar faculties of judgment to the original chairman.

In addition to knowledge succession, there is also power succession. The son of the Pharaoh may be just as skilled as his father, but if he does not inherit his base of power, the son will be vulnerable to usurpation or invasion. The succession problem is especially important when transferring secrets.

In ancient Egypt, accurate measurement of the Nile river was a state secret, in order to allow the state to monopolize agricultural production and resource flows. This was crucial to the functionality of Egyptian civilization—it was the legitimating story of the state. The failure to maintain implicit traditions of knowledge speaks to the extreme difficulty of transferring secrets between generations.

This is why claims about multigenerational conspiracies are always highly suspect: such organizations are plagued by succession failures in knowledge. Avoiding collapse is so difficult because succession failure is often opaque.

If the Institute of Pottery lost the ability to make good pots—to mold people into skilled pot makers—would they declare it to the world? Of course not—institutions are very rarely self-abolishing. The same holds true throughout crucial niches of our society, from social engineering to science and philosophy.

The intellectual apocalypse is invisible if there are no true intellectuals around. Again, institutional failure typically comes as a surprise. Modern society faces similar problems. Climate change, overconsumption, and political division contribute to a sense of crisis. Biologists Paul R.

Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich believe that we are on the path to a dramatic decline in food production and a possible global collapse of civilization. But, as they point out, we have an advantage in that we know the danger exists.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. By: James MacDonald. August 29, May 22, Share Tweet Email Print. Want more stories like this one? Have a correction or comment about this article?

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