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Desolation, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836)
Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless
of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and
transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never
recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Societal collapse is generally quick but rarely abrupt.
Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have
proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations
involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of
resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social
cohesion, rising inequality, long-term decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in
some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one
are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in
sophistication. Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death.
The study of societal collapse, collapsology, is a topic for specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. More recently, they are joined by experts in cliodynamics and study of complex systems.
Concept
Joseph Tainter frames societal collapse in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), a seminal and founding work of the academic discipline on societal collapse. He elaborates that 'collapse' is a "broad term," but in the sense of societal collapse, he views it as "a political process."
He further narrows societal collapse as a rapid process (within "few
decades") of "substantial loss of sociopolitical structure," giving the fall of the Western Roman Empire as "the most widely known instance of collapse" in the Western world.
Others, particularly in response to the popular Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond and more recently, have argued that societies discussed as cases of collapse are better understood through resilience and societal transformation, or "reorganization", especially if collapse is understood as a "complete end" of political systems, which according to Shmuel Eisenstadt has not taken place at any point.
Eisenstadt also points out that a clear differentiation between total
or partial decline and "possibilities of regeneration" is crucial for
the preventive purpose of the study of societal collapse.
This frame of reference often rejects the term collapse and critiques
the notion that cultures simply vanish when the political structures
that organize labor for large archaeologically prominent projects do.
For example, while the Ancient Maya
are often touted as a prime example of collapse, in reality this
reorganization was simply the result of the removal of the political
system of Divine Kingship largely in the eastern lowlands as many cities
in the western highlands of Mesoamerica
maintained this system of divine kingship into the 16th century. The
Maya continue to maintain cultural and linguistic continuity into the
present day.
Societal longevity
The social scientist Luke Kemp analyzed dozens of civilizations,
which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities,
military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political
structure," from 3000 BC to 600 AD and calculated that the average life
span of a civilization is close to 340 years. Of them, the most durable were the Kushite Kingdom in Northeast Africa (1,150 years), the Aksumite Empire in Africa (1,100 years), and the Vedic civilization in South Asia and the Olmecs in Mesoamerica (both 1,000 years), the Byzantine Empire (1083 years) and the shortest-lived were the Nanda Empire in India (24) and the Qin dynasty in China (14).
A statistical analysis of empires by complex systems specialist
Samuel Arbesman suggests that collapse is generally a random event and
does not depend on age. That is analogous to what evolutionary
biologists call the Red Queen hypothesis, which asserts that for a species in a harsh ecology, extinction is a persistent possibility.
Contemporary discussions about societal collapse are seeking resilience by suggesting societal transformation.
Causes of collapse
Because
human societies are complex systems, common factors may contribute to
their decline that are economical, environmental, demographic, social
and cultural, and they may cascade into another
and build up to the point that could overwhelm any mechanisms that
would otherwise maintain stability. Unexpected and abrupt changes, which
experts call nonlinearities, are some of the warning signs. In some cases, a natural disaster (such as a tsunami, earthquake, pandemic, massive fire or climate change) may precipitate a collapse. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation, or resource depletion
might be contributory factors of collapse, but studies of past
societies seem to suggest that those factors did not cause the collapse
alone.
Significant inequity and exposed corruption may combine with lack of
loyalty to established political institutions and result in an oppressed
lower class rising up and seizing power from a smaller wealthy elite in
a revolution. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures. Jared Diamond suggests that societies have also collapsed through deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or rising endemic violence.
In the case of the Western Roman Empire, some argued that it did not collapse but merely transformed.
Natural disasters and climate change
The Indus Valley Civilization likely de-urbanized and shifted because of changes in crop patterns.
Archeologists identified signs of a megadrought for a millennium
between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago in Africa and Asia. The drying of the
Green Sahara not only turned it into a desert but also disrupted the
monsoon seasons in South and Southeast Asia and caused flooding in East
Asia, which prevented successful harvest and the development of complex
culture. It coincided with and may have caused the decline and the fall
of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. The dramatic shift in climate is known as the 4.2-kiloyear event.
The highly advanced Indus Valley Civilization
took roots around 3000 BC in what is now northwestern India and
Pakistan and collapsed around 1700 BC. Since the Indus script has yet to
be deciphered, the causes of its de-urbanization remain a mystery, but there is some evidence pointing to natural disasters.
Signs of a gradual decline began to emerge in 1900 BC, and two
centuries later, most of the cities had been abandoned. Archeological
evidence suggests an increase in interpersonal violence and in
infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis.
Historians and archeologists believe that severe and long-lasting
drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the
collapse.
Evidence for earthquakes has also been discovered. Sea level changes
are also found at two possible seaport sites along the Makran coast
which are now inland. Earthquakes may have contributed to decline of
several sites by direct shaking damage or by changes in sea level or in
water supply.
Volcanic eruptions can abruptly influence the climate. During a large eruption, sulfur dioxide (SO2) is expelled into the stratosphere,
where it could stay for years and gradually get oxidized into sulfate
aerosols. Being highly reflective, sulfate aerosols reduce the incident
sunlight and cool the Earth's surface. By drilling into glaciers and ice
sheets, scientists can access the archives of the history of
atmospheric composition. A team of multidisciplinary researchers led by
Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada
deduced that a volcanic eruption occurred in 43 BC, a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar
on the Ides of March (15 March) in 44 BC, which left a power vacuum and
led to bloody civil wars. According to historical accounts, it was also
a period of poor weather, crop failure, widespread famine, and disease.
Analyses of tree rings and cave stalagmites from different parts of the
globe provided complementary data. The Northern Hemisphere got drier,
but the Southern Hemisphere became wetter. Indeed, the Greek historian Appian
recorded that there was a lack of flooding in Egypt, which also faced
famine and pestilence. Rome's interest in Egypt as a source of food
intensified, and the aforementioned problems and civil unrest weakened
Egypt's ability to resist. Egypt came under Roman rule after Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC. While it is difficult to say for certain whether Egypt would have become a Roman province if Okmok volcano (in modern-day Alaska) had not erupted, the eruption likely hastened the process.
Global
average temperatures show that the Little Ice Age was not a distinct
global time period but the end of a long temperature decline, which
preceded the recent
global warming.
More generally, recent research pointed to climate change as a key
player in the decline and fall of historical societies in China, the
Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, paleoclimatogical
temperature reconstruction suggests that historical periods of social
unrest, societal collapse, and population crash and significant climate
change often occurred simultaneously. A team of researchers from
Mainland China and Hong Kong were able to establish a causal connection
between climate change and large-scale human crises in pre-industrial
times. Short-term crises may be caused by social problems, but climate
change was the ultimate cause of major crises, starting with economic
depressions.
Moreover, since agriculture is highly dependent on climate, any changes
to the regional climate from the optimum can induce crop failures.
The Mongol conquests corresponded to a period of cooling in the
Northern Hemisphere between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
when the Medieval Warm Period
was giving way to the Little Ice Age, which caused ecological stress.
In Europe, the cooling climate did not directly facilitate the Black Death, but it caused wars, mass migration, and famine, which helped diseases spread.
The
Thirty Years' War
devastated much of Europe and was one of the many political upheavals
during the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which is causally
linked to the Little Ice Age.
A more recent example is the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
in Europe, which was a period of inclement weather, crop failure,
economic hardship, extreme intergroup violence, and high mortality
because of the Little Ice Age. The Maunder Minimum involved sunspots
being exceedingly rare. Episodes of social instability track the
cooling with a time lap of up to 15 years, and many developed into armed
conflicts, such as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which started as a war of succession to the Bohemian throne. Animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire
(in modern-day Germany) added fuel to the fire. Soon, it escalated to a
huge conflict that involved all major European powers and devastated
much of Germany. When the war had ended, some regions of the empire had
seen their populations drop by as much as 70%.
However, not all societies faced crises during this period. Tropical
countries with high carrying capacities and trading economies did not
suffer much because the changing climate did not induce an economic
depression in those places.
Foreign invasions and mass migration
Between ca. 4000 and 3000 BCE, neolithic populations in western Eurasia declined, probably due to the plague and other viral hemorrhagic fevers. This decline was followed by the Indo-European migrations. Around 3,000 BC, people of the pastoralist Yamnaya culture from the Pontic–Caspian steppe, who had high levels of WSH ancestry, embarked on a massive expansion throughout Eurasia, which is considered to be associated with the dispersal of the Indo-European languages
by most contemporary linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists. The
expansion of WSHs resulted in the virtual disappearance of the Y-DNA of Early European Farmers
(EEFs) from the European gene pool, significantly altering the cultural
and genetic landscape of Europe. EEF mtDNA however remained frequent,
suggesting admixture between WSH males and EEF females.
A mysterious loose confederation of fierce maritime marauders, known as the Sea Peoples, was identified as one of the main causes of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Sea Peoples might have themselves been victims of the environmental
changes that led to widespread famine and precipitated the Collapse. After the Battle of Kadesh against the Egyptians in 1285 BC, the Hittite Empire
began to show signs of decline. Attacks by the Sea Peoples accelerated
the process, and internal power struggles, crop failures, and famine
were contributory factors. The Egyptians, with whom the Hittites signed a
peace treaty, supplied them with food in times of famine, but it was
not enough. Around 1200 BC, the Sea Peoples seized a port on the west
coast of Asia Minor, cutting off the Hittites from their trade routes
from which their supply of grain came. Hattusa,
the Hittite capital, was destroyed. Some Hittite territories survived
but would eventually be occupied by the Assyrians in the seventh century
BC.
The Minoan civilization, based on Crete, centered on religious rituals and seaborne trade. In around 1450 BC, it was absorbed into Mycenaean Greece, which itself went into serious decline around 1200 BC because of various military conflicts, including the Dorian invasion from the north and attacks from the Sea Peoples.
In the third century BC, a Eurasian nomadic people, the Xiongnu,
began threatening China's frontiers, but by the first century BC, they
had been completely expelled. They then turned their attention westward
and displaced various other tribes in Eastern and Central Europe, which
led to a cascade of events. Attila rose to power as leader of the Huns and initiated a campaign of invasions and looting and went as far as Gaul
(modern-day France). Attila's Huns were clashing with the Roman Empire,
which had already been divided into two-halves for ease of
administration: the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. Despite managing to stop Attila at the Battle of Chalons in 451 AD, the Romans were unable to prevent Attila from attacking Roman Italy the next year. Northern Italian cities like Milan were ravaged. The Huns never again posed a threat to the Romans after Attila's death, but the rise of the Huns also forced the Germanic peoples
out of their territories and made those groups press their way into
parts of France, Spain, Italy, and even as far south as North Africa.
The city of Rome itself came under attack by the Visigoths in 410 and was plundered by the Vandals in 455.
A combination of internal strife, economic weakness, and relentless
invasions by the Germanic peoples pushed the Western Roman Empire into terminal decline. The last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned in 476 by the German Odoacer, who declared himself King of Italy.
In the eleventh century AD, North Africa's
populous and flourishing civilization collapsed after it had exhausted
its resources in internal fighting and suffering devastation from the
invasion of the Bedouin tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal. Ibn Khaldun noted that all of the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become arid desert.
In 1206, a warlord achieved dominance over all Mongols with the title Genghis Khan
and began his campaign of territorial expansion. The Mongols' highly
flexible and mobile cavalry enabled them to conquer their enemies with
efficiency and swiftness. In the brutal pillaging that followed Mongol invasions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the invaders decimated the populations of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Islamic Central Asia. Later Mongol leaders, such as Timur, destroyed many cities, slaughtered thousands of people, and irreparably damaged the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia. The invasions transformed a settled society to a nomadic one.
In China, for example, a combination of war, famine, and pestilence
during the Mongol conquests halved the population, a decline of around
55 million people. The Mongols also displaced large numbers of people and created power vacuums. The Khmer Empire
went into decline and was replaced by the Thais, who were pushed
southward by the Mongols. The Vietnamese, who succeeded in defeating the
Mongols, also turned their attention to the south and by 1471 began to
subjugate the Chams. When Vietnam's Later Lê dynasty went into decline in the late 1700s, a bloody civil war erupted between the Trịnh family in the north and the Nguyễn family in the south. More Cham provinces were seized by the Nguyễn warlords. Finally, Nguyễn Ánh emerged victorious and declared himself Emperor of Vietnam (changing the name from Annam) with the title Gia Long and established the Nguyễn dynasty. The last remaining principality of Champa, Panduranga (modern-day Phan Rang, Vietnam), survived until 1832, when Emperor Minh Mạng (Nguyễn Phúc Đảm) conquered it after centuries of Cham–Vietnamese wars. Vietnam's policy of assimilation involved the forcefeeding of pork to Muslims and beef to Hindus, which fueled resentment. An uprising followed, the first and only war between Vietnam and the jihadists, until it was crushed.
Famine, economic depression, and internal strife
Around 1210 BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt
shipped large amounts of grains to the disintegrating Hittite Empire.
Thus, there had been a food shortage in Anatolia but not the Nile
Valley. However, that soon changed. Although Egypt managed to deliver a decisive and final defeat to the Sea Peoples at the Battle of Xois,
Egypt itself went into steep decline. The collapse of all other
societies in the Eastern Mediterranean disrupted established trade
routes and caused widespread economic depression. Government workers
became underpaid, which resulted in the first labor strike in recorded
history and undermined royal authority.
There was also political infighting between different factions of
government. Bad harvest from the reduced flooding at the Nile led to a
major famine. Food prices rose to eight times their normal values and
occasionally even reached twenty-four times. Runaway inflation followed. Attacks by the Libyans and Nubians made things even worse. Throughout the Twentieth Dynasty
(∼1187–1064 BC), Egypt devolved from a major power in the Mediterranean
to a deeply divided and weakened state, which later came to be ruled by
the Libyans and the Nubians.
Between 481 BC and 221 BC, the Period of the Warring States in China ended by King Zheng of the Qin dynasty succeeding in defeating six competing factions and thus becoming the first Chinese emperor, titled Qin Shi Huang.
A ruthless but efficient ruler, he raised a disciplined and
professional army and introduced a significant number of reforms, such
as unifying the language and creating a single currency and system of
measurement. In addition, he funded dam constructions and began building
the first segment of what was to become the Great Wall of China
to defend his realm against northern nomads. Nevertheless, internal
feuds and rebellions made his empire fall apart after his death in 210
B.C.
In the early fourteenth century AD, Britain suffered repeated
rounds of crop failures from unusually heavy rainfall and flooding. Much
livestock either starved or drowned. Food prices skyrocketed, and King
Edward II attempted to rectify the situation by imposing price controls,
but vendors simply refused to sell at such low prices. In any case, the
act was abolished by the Lincoln Parliament in 1316. Soon, people from
commoners to nobles were finding themselves short of food. Many resorted
to begging, crime, and eating animals they otherwise would not eat.
People in northern England had to deal with raids from Scotland. There
were even reports of cannibalism.
In Continental Europe, things were at least just as bad. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age. Some historians suspect that the change in climate was due to Mount Tarawera in New Zealand erupting in 1314.
The Great Famine was, however, only one of the calamities striking
Europe that century, as the Hundred Years' War and Black Death would
soon follow. (Also see the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.) Recent analysis of tree rings
complement historical records and show that the summers of 1314–1316
were some of the wettest on record over a period of 700 years.
Disease outbreaks
The angel of death striking a door during the plague of Rome; engraving by Levasseur after Jules-Elie Delaunay (1828–1891).
Historically, the dawn of agriculture led to the rise of contagious diseases.
Compared to their hunting-gathering counterparts, agrarian societies
tended to be sedentary, have higher population densities, be in frequent
contact with livestock, and be more exposed to contaminated water
supplies and higher concentrations of garbage. Poor sanitation, a lack
of medical knowledge, superstitions, and sometimes a combination of
disasters exacerbated the problem.
The journalist Michael Rosenwald wrote that "history shows that past
pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions
of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked.
Generations have been annihilated."
From the description of symptoms by the Greek physician Galen,
which included coughing, fever, (blackish) diarrhea, swollen throat,
and thirst, modern experts identified the probable culprits of the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD) to have been smallpox or measles. The disease likely started in China and spread to the West via the Silk Road.
Roman troops first contracted the disease in the East before they
returned home. Striking a virgin population, the Antonine Plague had
dreadful mortality rates; between one third to half of the population,
60 to 70 million people, perished. Roman cities suffered from a
combination of overcrowding, poor hygiene, and unhealthy diets. They
quickly became epicenters. Soon, the disease reached as far as Gaul and
mauled Roman defenses along the Rhine. The ranks of the previously
formidable Roman army had to be filled with freed slaves, German
mercenaries, criminals, and gladiators. That ultimately failed to
prevent the Germanic tribes from crossing the Rhine. On the civilian
side, the Antonine Plague created drastic shortages of businessmen,
which disrupted trade, and farmers, which led to a food crisis. An
economic depression followed and government revenue fell. Some accused
Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Co-Emperor Lucius Verus, both of whom victims of the disease, of affronting the gods, but others blamed Christians. However, the Antonine Plague strengthened the position of the monotheistic religion of Christianity
in the formerly-polytheistic society, as Christians won public
admiration for their good works. Ultimately the Roman army, the Roman
cities, the size of the empire and its trade routes, which were required
for Roman power and influence to exist, facilitated the spread of the
disease. The Antonine Plague is considered by some historians as a
useful starting point for understanding the decline and fall of the
Western Roman Empire. It was followed by the Plague of Cyprian (249–262 AD) and the Plague of Justinian (541-542). Together, they cracked the foundations of the Roman Empire.
In the sixth century AD, while the Western Roman Empire had
already succumbed to attacks by the Germanic tribes, the Eastern Roman
Empire stood its ground. In fact, a peace treaty with the Persians
allowed Emperor Justinian the Great to concentrate on recapturing territories belonging to the Western Empire. His generals, Belisarius and Narses, achieved a number of important victories against the Ostrogoths and the Vandals. However, their hope of keeping the Western Empire was dashed by the arrival of what became known as the Plague of Justinian (541-542). According to the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea,
the epidemic originated in China and Northeastern India and reached the
Eastern Roman Empire via trade routes terminating in the Mediterranean.
Modern scholarship has deduced that the epidemic was caused by the
bacterium Yersinia pestis,
the same one that would later bring the Black Death, the single
deadliest pandemic in human history, but how many actually died from it
remains uncertain. Current estimates put the figure between thirty and
fifty million people, a significant portion of the human population at that time. The Plague arguably cemented the fate of Rome.
The epidemic also devastated the Sasanian Empire in Persia. Caliph Abu Bakr seized the opportunity to launch military campaigns that overran the Sassanians
and captured Roman-held territories in the Caucasus, the Levant, Egypt,
and elsewhere in North Africa. Before the Justinian Plague, the
Mediterranean world had been commercially and culturally stable. After
the Plague, it fractured into a trio of civilizations battling for
power: the Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, and what later
became known as Medieval Europe. With so many people dead, the supply of
workers, many of whom were slaves, was critically short. Landowners had
no choice but to lend pieces of land to serfs to work the land in
exchange for military protection and other privileges. That sowed the
seeds of feudalism.
Spread of the Bubonic plague through Europe
There is evidence that the Mongol expeditions may have spread the bubonic plague across much of Eurasia, which helped to spark the Black Death of the early fourteenth century. The Italian historian Gabriele de’ Mussi wrote that the Mongols catapulted the corpses of those who contracted the plague into Caffa (now Feodossia, Crimea) during the siege of that city
and that soldiers who were transported from there brought the plague to
Mediterranean ports. However, that account of the origin of the Black
Death in Europe remains controversial, though plausible, because of the
complex epidemiology of the plague. Modern epidemiologists do not
believe that the Black Death had a single source of spreading into
Europe. Research into the past on this topic is further complicated by
politics and the passage of time. It is difficult to distinguish between
natural epidemics and biological warfare, both of which are common
throughout human history.
Biological weapons are economical because they turn an enemy casualty
into a delivery system and so were favored in armed conflicts of the
past. Furthermore, more soldiers died of disease than in combat until
recently. In any case, by the 1340s, Black Death killed 200 million people. The widening trade routes in the Late Middle Ages helped the plague spread rapidly. It took the European population more than two centuries to return to its level before the pandemic. Consequently, it destabilized most of society and likely undermined feudalism and the authority of the Church.
With labor in short supply, workers' bargaining power increased
dramatically. Various inventions that reduced the cost of labor, saved
time, and raised productivity, such as the three-field crop rotation
system, the iron plow, the use of manure to fertilize the soil, and the
water pumps, were widely adopted. Many former serfs, now free from
feudal obligations, relocated to the cities and changed profession to
crafts and trades. The more successful ones became the new middle class.
Trade flourished as demands for a myriad of consumer goods rose.
Society became wealthier and could afford to fund the arts and the
sciences.
Aztec victims of smallpox, from the Florentine Codex (1540–85)
Encounters between European explorers and Native Americans exposed
the latter to a variety of diseases of extraordinary virulence. Having
migrated from Northeastern Asia 15,000 years ago, Native Americans had
not been introduced to the plethora of contagious diseases that emerged
after the rise of agriculture in the Old World. As such, they had immune
systems that were ill-equipped to handle the diseases to which their
counterparts in Eurasia had become resistant. When the Europeans arrived
in the Americas, in short order, the indigenous populations of the
Americas found themselves facing smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and the bubonic plague, among others. In tropical areas, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, river blindness, and others appeared. Most of these tropical diseases were traced to Africa. Smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s and killed 150,000 in Tenochtitlán alone, including the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, which aided the European conquerors.
A combination of Spanish military attacks and evolutionarily novel
diseases finished off the Aztec Empire in the sixteenth century. It is commonly believed that the death of as much as 90% or 95% of the Native American population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases, though new research suggests tuberculosis from seals and sea lions played a significant part.
Similar events took place in Oceania and Madagascar. Smallpox was externally brought to Australia. The first recorded outbreak, in 1789, devastated the Aboriginal
population. The extent of the outbreak is disputed, but some sources
claim that it killed about 50% of coastal Aboriginal populations on the
east coast.
There is an ongoing historical debate concerning two rival and
irreconcilable theories about how the disease first entered the
continent (see History of smallpox).
Smallpox continued to be a deadly disease and killed an estimated 300
million people in the twentieth century alone, but a vaccine, the first
of any kind, had been available since 1796.
As humans spread around the globe, human societies flourish and
become more dependent on trade, and because urbanization means that
people leave sparsely-populated rural areas for densely-populated
neighborhoods, infectious diseases spread much more easily. Outbreaks
are frequent, even in the modern era, but medical advances have been
able to alleviate their impacts.
In fact, the human population grew tremendously in the twentieth
century, as did the population of farm animals, from which diseases
could jump to humans,
but in the developed world and increasingly also in the developing
world, people are less likely to fall victim to infectious diseases than
ever before. For instance, the advent of antibiotics, starting with penicillin
in 1928, has resulted in the saving of the lives of hundreds of
millions of people suffering from bacterial infections. However, there
is no guarantee that would continue because bacteria are becoming
increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and doctors and public health experts such as former Chief Medical Officer for England Sally Davies
have even warned of an incoming "antibiotic apocalypse." The World
Health Organization warned in 2019 that the spread of vaccine scepticism
has been accompanied by the resurrection of long-conquered diseases
like measles. This lead the WHO to name the antivaccination movement one
of the world's top 10 public-health threats.
Demographic dynamics
Writing in The Histories, the Greek historian Polybius largely blamed the decline of the Hellenistic world
on low fertility rates. He asserted that while protracted wars and
deadly epidemics were absent, people were generally more interested in
"show and money and the pleasures of an idle life" than in marrying and
raising children. Those who had children, according to him, had no more
than one or two, with the express intention of "leaving them well off or
bringing them up in extravagant luxury."
By around 100 BC, the notion of romantic love
started becoming popular in Rome. In the final years of the Roman
Republic, Roman women were well known for divorcing, having extramarital
affairs, and being reluctant to bear children.
Viewing that as a threat to the social and political order and
believing that the Roman upper-class was becoming increasingly
cosmopolitan and individualistic, upon the establishment of the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus introduced legislation designed to increase the birthrate.
Men aged 20 to 60 and women aged 20 to 50 were legally obliged to
marry, and widowed or divorced individuals within the relevant age range
were required to remarry. Exemptions were granted to those who had
already had three children in the case of free-born people and four in
the case of freed slaves. For political or bureaucratic office,
preference was given to those with at least three legitimate children.
Diminished inheritance rights awaited those who failed to reproduce.
In a speech to Roman nobles, he expressed his pressing concern over the
low birthrates of the Roman elite. He also said that freed slaves had
been granted citizenship and Roman allies given seats in government to
increase the power and prosperity of Rome, but the "original stock" was
not replacing itself and leaving the task to foreigners.
Other population imbalances may occur when low fertility rates coincides with high dependency ratios or when there is an unequal distribution of wealth between elites and commoners, both of which characterized the Roman Empire.
Several key features of human societal collapse can be related to population dynamics. For example, the native population of Cusco, Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest was stressed by an imbalanced sex ratio.
There is strong evidence that humans also display population cycles.
Societies as diverse as those of England and France during the Roman,
medieval, and early modern eras, of Egypt during Greco-Roman and Ottoman
rule, and of various dynasties in China all showed similar patterns of
political instability and violence becoming considerably more common
after times of relative peace, prosperity, and sustained population
growth. Quantitatively, periods of unrest included many times more
events of instability per decade and occurred when the population was
declining, rather than increasing. Pre-industrial agrarian societies
typically faced instability after one or two centuries of stability.
However, a population approaching its carrying capacity alone is not
enough to trigger general decline if the people remained united and the
ruling class strong. Other factors had to be involved, such as having
more aspirants for positions of the elite than the society could
realistically support (elite overproduction),
which led to social strife, and chronic inflation, which caused incomes
to fall and threatened the fiscal health of the state.
In particular, an excess in especially young adult male population
predictably led to social unrest and violence, as the third and
higher-order parity sons had trouble realizing their economic desires
and became more open to extreme ideas and actions. Adults in their 20s are especially prone to radicalization.
Most historical periods of social unrest lacking in external triggers,
such as natural calamities, and most genocides can be readily explained
as a result of a built-up youth bulge. As those trends intensified, they jeopardized the social fabric, which facilitated the decline.
Military and civilian fatalities
Theories
Historical theories have evolved from being purely social and
ethical, to ideological and ethnocentric, and finally to
multidisciplinary studies. They have become much more sophisticated.
Cognitive decline and loss of creativity
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter theorized that collapsed societies essentially exhausted their own designs and were unable to adapt to natural diminishing returns for what they knew as their method of survival. The philosopher Oswald Spengler argued that a civilization in its "winter" would see a disinclination for abstract thinking.
The psychologists David Rand and Jonathan Cohen theorized that people
switch between two broad modes of thinking. The first is fast and
automatic but rigid, and the second is slow and analytical but more
flexible. Rand and Cohen believe that explains why people continue with
self-destructive behaviors when logical reasoning would have alerted
them of the dangers ahead. People switch from the second to the first
mode of thinking after the introduction of an invention that
dramatically increases the standards of living. Rand and Cohen pointed
to the recent examples of the antibiotic overuse leading to resistant
bacteria and failure to save for retirement. Tainter noted that
according to behavioral economics, the human decision-making process
tends to be more irrational than rational and that as the rate of
innovation declines, as measured by the number of inventions relative to
the amount of money spent on research and development, it becomes progressively harder for there to be a technological solution to the problem of societal collapse.
Social and environmental dynamics
During the 9th century AD, the central
Maya region suffered major
political collapse, marked by the abandonment of cities
What produces modern sedentary life, unlike nomadic hunter-gatherers,
is extraordinary modern economic productivity. Tainter argues that
exceptional productivity is actually more the sign of hidden weakness
because of a society's dependence on it and its potential to undermine
its own basis for success by not being self limiting, as demonstrated in Western culture's ideal of perpetual growth.
As a population grows and technology makes it easier to exploit
depleting resources, the environment's diminishing returns are hidden
from view. Societal complexity
is then potentially threatened if it develops beyond what is actually
sustainable, and a disorderly reorganization were to follow. The
scissors model of Malthusian
collapse, in which the population grows without limit but not
resources, is the idea of great opposing environmental forces cutting
into each other.
The complete breakdown of economic, cultural, and social
institutions with ecological relationships is perhaps the most common
feature of collapse. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
Jared Diamond proposes five interconnected causes of collapse that may
reinforce each other: non-sustainable exploitation of resources, climate
changes, diminishing support from friendly societies, hostile
neighbors, and inappropriate attitudes for change.
Energy return on investment
Energy
has played a crucial role throughout human history. Energy is linked to
the birth, growth, and decline of each and every society. Energy
surplus is required for the division of labor and the growth of cities.
Massive energy surplus is needed for widespread wealth and cultural
amenities. Economic prospects fluctuate in tandem with a society's
access to cheap and abundant energy.
Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and ecologist Charles Hall proposed an economic model called energy return on investment (EROI), which measures the amount of surplus energy a society gets from using energy to obtain energy. Energy shortages drive up prices and as such provide an incentive to
explore and extract previously uneconomical sources, which may still be
plentiful, but more energy would be required, and the EROI is then not
as high as initially thought.
There would be no surplus if EROI approaches 1:1. Hall showed
that the real cutoff is well above that and estimated that 3:1 to
sustain the essential overhead energy costs of a modern society. The
EROI of the most preferred energy source, petroleum,
has fallen in the past century from 100:1 to the range of 10:1 with
clear evidence that the natural depletion curves all are downward decay
curves. An EROI of more than ~3 then is what appears necessary to
provide the energy for socially important tasks, such as maintaining
government, legal and financial institutions, a transportation
infrastructure, manufacturing, building construction and maintenance,
and the lifestyles of all members of a given society.
The social scientist Luke Kemp indicated that alternative sources
of energy, such as solar panels, have a low EROI because they have low
energy density, meaning they require a lot of land, and require
substantial amounts of rare earth metals to produce.
Hall and colleagues reached the same conclusion. There is no on-site
pollution, but the EROI of renewable energy sources may be too low for
them to be considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels, which
continue to provide the majority of the energy used by humans.
The mathematician Safa Motesharrei and his collaborators showed
that the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels allows
populations to grow to one order of magnitude larger than they would
using renewable resources alone and as such is able to postpone societal
collapse. However, when collapse finally comes, it is much more
dramatic.
Tainter warned that in the modern world, if the supply of fossil fuels
were somehow cut off, shortages of clean water and food would ensue, and
millions would die in a few weeks in the worse-case scenario.
Homer-Dixon asserted that a declining EROI was one of the reasons
that the Roman Empire declined and fell. The historian Joseph Tainter
made the same claim about the Maya Empire.
Models of societal response
According to Joseph Tainter
(1990), too many scholars offer facile explanations of societal
collapse by assuming one or more of the following three models in the
face of collapse:
- The Dinosaur, a large-scale society in which resources
are being depleted at an exponential rate, but nothing is done to
rectify the problem because the ruling elite are unwilling or unable to
adapt to those resources' reduced availability. In this type of society,
rulers tend to oppose any solutions that diverge from their present
course of action but favor intensification and commit an increasing
number of resources to their present plans, projects, and social
institutions.
- The Runaway Train, a society whose continuing function depends on constant growth (cf. Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis).
This type of society, based almost exclusively on acquisition (such as
pillaging or exploitation), cannot be sustained indefinitely. The Assyrian, Roman and Mongol Empires, for example, all fractured and collapsed when no new conquests could be achieved.
- The House of Cards, a society that has grown to be so large
and include so many complex social institutions that it is inherently
unstable and prone to collapse. This type of society has been seen with
particular frequency among Eastern Bloc and other communist
nations, in which all social organizations are arms of the government
or ruling party, such that the government must either stifle association
wholesale (encouraging dissent and subversion) or exercise less authority than it asserts (undermining its legitimacy in the public eye).
Tainter's critique
Tainter
argues that those models, though superficially useful, cannot severally
or jointly account for all instances of societal collapse. Often, they
are seen as interconnected occurrences that reinforce one another.
Tainter considers that social complexity is a recent and
comparatively-anomalous occurrence, requiring constant support. He
asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his
own words (p. 194):
- human societies are problem-solving organizations;
- sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
- increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
- investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
With those facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss
of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus
the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and
external communication and exchange, and productivity.
Toynbee's theory of decay
In his acclaimed 12-volume work, A Study of History (1934–1961), the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee
explored the rise and fall of 28 civilizations and came to the
conclusion that civilizations generally collapsed mainly by internal
factors, factors of their own making, but external pressures also played
a role. He theorized that all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
For Toynbee, a civilization is born when a "creative minority"
successfully responds to the challenges posed by its physical, social,
and political environment. However, the fixation on the old methods of
the "creative minority" leads it to eventually cease to be creative and
degenerate into merely a "dominant minority"
(that forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience), which
fails to recognize new ways of thinking. He argues that creative
minorities deteriorate from a worship of their "former self", by which
they become prideful, and they fail in adequately addressing the next
challenge that they face. Similarly, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler discussed the transition from Kultur to Zivilisation in his The Decline of the West (1918).
Toynbee argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a Universal State, which stifles political creativity. He states:
First the Dominant Minority
attempts to hold by force - against all right and reason - a position of
inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat
repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with
violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement
ends in positive acts of creation - and this on the part of all the
actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a
universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the
External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands.
He argues that as civilizations decay, they form an "Internal
Proletariat" and an "External Proletariat." The Internal proletariat is
held in subjugation by the dominant minority inside the civilization,
and grows bitter; the external proletariat exists outside the
civilization in poverty and chaos and grows envious. He argues that as
civilizations decay, there is a "schism in the body social", whereby abandon and self-control together replace creativity, and truancy and martyrdom together replace discipleship by the creative minority.
He argues that in that environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence
(meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight,
as a prophet). He argues that those who transcend during a period of
social decay give birth to a new Church with new and stronger spiritual
insights around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form after
the old has died. Toynbee's use of the word 'church' refers to the
collective spiritual bond of a common worship, or the same unity found
in some kind of social order.
The historian Carroll Quigley expanded upon that theory in The Evolution of Civilizations (1961, 1979).
He argued that societal disintegration involves the metamorphosis of
social instruments, which were set up to meet actual needs, into
institutions, which serve their own interest at the expense of social
needs.
However, in the 1950s, Toynbee's approach to history, his style of
civilizational analysis, started to face skepticism from mainstream
historians who thought it put an undue emphasis on the divine, which led
to his academic reputation declining. For a time, however, Toynbee's Study remained popular outside academia. Interest revived decades later with the publication of The Clash of Civilizations (1997) by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington,
who viewed human history as broadly the history of civilizations and
posited that the world after the end of the Cold War will be multipolar
and one of competing major civilizations, which are divided by "fault
lines."
Systems science
Developing
an integrated theory of societal collapse that takes into account the
complexity of human societies remains an open problem.
Researchers currently have very little ability to identify internal
structures of large distributed systems like human societies. Genuine
structural collapse seems, in many cases, the only plausible explanation
supporting the idea that such structures exist. However, until they can
be concretely identified, scientific inquiry appears limited to the
construction of scientific narratives, using systems thinking for careful storytelling about systemic organization and change.
In the 1990s, the evolutionary anthropologist and quantitative historian Peter Turchin
noticed that the equations used to model the populations of predators
and preys can also be used to describe the ontogeny of human societies.
He specifically examined how social factors such as income inequality
were related to political instability. He found recurring cycles of
unrest in historical societies such as Ancient Egypt, China, and Russia.
He specifically identified two cycles, one long and one short. The long
one, what he calls the "secular cycle," lasts for approximately two to
three centuries. A society starts out fairly equal. Its population grows
and the cost of labor drops. A wealthy upper class emerges, and life
for the working class deteriorates. As inequality grows, a society
becomes more unstable with the lower-class being miserable and the
upper-class entangled in infighting. Exacerbating social turbulence
eventually leads to collapse. The shorter cycle lasts for about 50 years
and consists of two generations, one peaceful and one turbulent.
Looking at US history, for example, Turchin identified times of serious
sociopolitical instability in 1870, 1920, and 1970. He announced in 2010
that he had predicted that in 2020, the US would witness a period of
unrest at least on the same level as 1970 because the first cycle
coincides with the turbulent part of the second in around 2020. He also
warned that the US was not the only Western nation under strain.
However, Turchin's model can only paint the broader picture and
cannot pinpoint how bad things can get and what precisely triggers a
collapse. The mathematician Safa Motesharrei also applied predator-prey
models to human society, with the upper class and the lower class being
the two different types of "predators" and natural resources being the
"prey." He found that either extreme inequality or resource depletion
facilitates a collapse. However, a collapse is irreversible only if a
society experiences both at the same time, as they "fuel each other."
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