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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
March, 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's edition [slightly late - apologies] contains some
criticisms, sent in by a reader, of the socio-historical theory
underlying predictions of a coming dark age. The author (whom I will
refer to as RR) makes two main points. The first is that while some
civilisations seem to collapse in order to regenerate (the notion of
the 'phoenix principle'), the history of others does not conform to
this simple pattern. I have provided a response to this criticism
further below. RR's second point uses the example of Easter Island to
suggest that global civilisation MIGHT collapse once and for all, never
to recover. I think he makes a very good case and I concede he may be
correct. He will certainly find support among some dark age readers who
believe that the finiteness of natural resources, which we are rapidly
exhausting, presents an ultimate limitation to human history. One
reader has conjured up the vision of a dead planet, circling the sun
for eons to come, with at best some scattered human remnants eking a
living from its barren surface. Personally, I believe that this will
not happen and that humans will continue moving upwards and outwards as
they have always done. But I admit that this is blind faith and I
cannot conclusively prove that RR is wrong.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson
2. HAS WIDDOWSON ERRED?
It's clear that historical case studies are the best means by which to
provide empirical support for Widdowson's hypotheses, since by looking
at past civilizations, we can chart the course of all political, social
and economic phenomena that he analyzes through all the phases of their
development, whereas our current civilization, in so far as it is in
the decline phase and has not yet fallen, is an incomplete case.
Having said that, some historical case studies are 'harder' tests of
this thesis than others. For instance, the thesis represents a
compelling explanation for the rise, and also the decline and fall of
civilization in the Western Roman Empire, as well as for the origins of
the Renaissance that followed it. But, what about the Eastern Roman
Empire? Arguably, its civilization did not actually collapse into a
dark age per se. It still retained a central political authority, as
well as economic organization and a degree of social cohesion (through
Orthodox Christianity and its associated Greek culture) that suggest a
functioning (if unhealthy) civilization, as opposed to the sort of
chaos one would expect in a dark age. It seems fair to say that rather
than collapsing, the Byzantine Empire went into a sort of arrested
decline that lasted for a thousand years. When the Byzantine Empire was
finally conquered by the Ottomans, that does not appear to have been a
collapse of civilization in the region into a dark age, but rather the
absorption of one civilization by another. Following the Ottoman
takeover of the region, there was still a clear, centralized political
authority, an organized economy, and a high degree of social cohesion
imposed through Islam. The Byzantine civilization was brought to an
end, and yet 'civilization' as a political/economic/social phenomenon
did not collapse into the chaos of a full-scale dark age within the
Byzantine remnant territory. [Editor's note: See my response to this in
Section 3, below.]
As a different sort of 'hard' case, consider Easter Island. It is
debatable whether the level of culture there was adequate for it to be
called a 'civilization', at least in so far as they did not have a
system of writing (as opposed to some sort of basic record-keeping).
But, it did exhibit patterns consistent with the rise, decline and fall
of a civilization; from settlement, to the sort of
political/economic/social development required to have engaged in the
massive project of carving, transporting and erecting the famous
statutes, to the abandonment and desecration of those statues and
sacred sites, and the descent of the island's culture into tribal
factionalism, blood-feud and clan-rivalry warfare, cannibalism, and
population collapse. Subsequently, of course, the Island was absorbed
into Western civilization. But (admittedly this is a speculative
question), is there any reason to think that a new civilization could
have emerged from the ruins of the old? Presumably this could not have
happened on Easter Island if it were left in a state of isolation,
because its natural resources were totally exhausted. The Islanders
completely extinguished the tall tree species, and even the sorts of
useful bushes or strong, tall grasses that they would have needed in
order to build/weave boats that could have allowed them to leave the
island in search of a more resource-rich location. So, absent outside
contact, escape from the island and colonization of a new location
would not have been an option for them even if they had re-acquired the
level of political/social/economic development necessary for them to do
so. How then could they have regenerated into a new, vibrant
civilization if they were 'trapped' on their exhausted island by its
lack of resources? Presumably, resource limitation would have placed an
exogenous limit on the pace and extent of their recovery from collapse.
('Exogenous' in the sense that resource limitation as such is not one
of the three underlying primary causes, as opposed to secondary or
contributing cause, of the decline of a civilization, since Widdowson
explains resource limitation problems purely in terms of 'innovation
failure'.) [Editor's note: and in that respect I (Widdowson) largely
borrow from the excellent work by Julian L Simon; see especially his
book "The Ultimate Resource"]
More generally, a substantive issue that flows from the methodological
issue of easy versus hard cases is, how does Widdowson's thesis account
for civilizations that do not appear to have followed the full pattern
of development that he has outlined? What role do factors exogenous to
those studied in this thesis (e.g. conquest of a declining though not
yet fallen civilization by a rival civilization versus barbarians;
effects of resource depletion on efforts at regeneration) play in such
apparent outlier cases? (It would probably be worth doing a
comprehensive empirical survey to determine the extent to which any
apparent exceptions to the general pattern identified are outliers,
statistically speaking - the more outliers, the narrower the range of
'empirical fit' that the thesis would possess, and vice versa).
Finally, Widdowson is skeptical of environmental concerns, in that he
views the challenges posed by environmental problems as challenges to
(sometimes leading to failures of) innovation by a civilization, as
opposed to an inherent limit on its development. Yet the Easter Island
case would seem to be disturbing from the standpoint of our own global
civilization, and the potential for the emergence of a new,
technologically superior civilization following (at some point) the
demise of our own. If, for example, we continue to consume
non-renewable resources at a rapid rate, while failing to develop
substitutes to replace them as they run out (the 'peak oil' issue
possibly being an example of this), does that not potentially damage
the ability of a budding future civilization to even equal our level of
technological development, let alone surpass it? Our planet effectively
is an isolated 'island' until we develop the ability to cheaply and
efficiently colonize and exploit other planets. Presumably, it would
take a substantial degree of recovery from the collapse of our own
civilization before a future civilization could harness these
extra-terrestrial resources, yet until that time, it would be limited
to the resources available on Earth. If many of those non-renewable
resources that would be of value to an industrial civilization have
been depleted by our own civilization, than doesn't our innovation
failure during the period when these resources are still relatively
plentiful, yet are being consumed at a rapid rate, limit the prospects
for a future recovery?
3. RESPONSE
In the above piece, RR points out that the Eastern Roman Empire did not
go through the same cycle of destruction and rebirth that the Western
Roman Empire did. In essence, he says that while the notion of the
Phoenix Principle, which sees dark ages as necessary for human
progress, accounts well for the history of Western Europe, it does not
really apply to Asia Minor.
However, I think that one has to take a more sophisticated view than
simply that there are individual, discrete civilisations which rise and
fall in isolation. It is true that the dark age thesis may not be fully
worked out in this respect, and I may have been responsible for
over-simplifying things. Nevertheless, the thesis does pay attention to
two issues that are relevant to this.
Firstly, history is SEAMLESS, in that all human societies have always
been in contact, and have been exchanging ideas and material objects
since time immemorial. We may divide history into discrete
civilisations the same as we divide the earth's water into discrete
oceans, but they are really connected. (Okay, the Americas, and to some
extent Australia, may have been isolated for long periods, but this is
true if we stick to the World Island, i.e. Africa, Asia and Europe.) Of
course, the level of connectedness has been increasing, amounting to
what in dark age theory is called an increase of scale, and that, for
one thing, is directly related to the growth of technology - but all
that is another issue.
Secondly, history is characterised by a FERMENT, which means that it is
a chaotic process, with fluctuations on all temporal and spatial
scales. That is to say, you don't have a civilisation that rises
smoothly to greatness, then does its thing successfully for a few
centuries, then declines and disappears, for it all to start over
again. On the contrary, when the civilisation is on the way up there
are setbacks, and when it is on the way down it experiences periods of
recovery, and what is more there are setbacks within the periods of
recovery, and periods of recovery within the setbacks, and so on. The
importance of the Phoenix Principle is that it says the setbacks are
not merely negative, but are actually necessary for overall progress to
occur. This seems to be a deep principle, applying not just to human
history but to all complex, evolving systems.
Putting this together, we have to stand well back and look at our
planet as a whole. We should see it as being covered by essentially one
human society. And we should recognise this as being in continual
turmoil, characterised by everything from small disasters affecting
local areas (the most common) up to huge catastrophes taking in
continent-sized regions or even the world as a whole (the rarest, what
we call dark ages). In this view, there is nothing to say that any
particular 'civilisation' or geographical area should go into a dark
age at any particular time. Yet while Asia Minor may not have
experienced a definite dark age as Western Europe did, it was still
part of this seamless global ferment. And it could be argued
furthermore that Asia Minor's failure to experience a really
catastrophic retrenchment was why it was later left behind by Western
Europe, which had.
The bottom line is that the case of Byzantium does not really
contradict the basic socio-historical principles underlying the dark
age thesis. It just illustrates the need for a more subtle approach
than it is possible to give in a brief summary.
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