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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
January, 2005
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's newsletter has been stimulated by Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Survive". It contains some observations on the environment and collapse. 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. SOCIAL COLLAPSE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
I have enjoyed Jared Diamond's books in the past. In his new one (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) he explains societal collapse in terms of environmental factors. However, it seems to be one step beyond the usual environmental determinism. My view has always been that the significant issue is not that the environment changed, but that the society failed to take it in its stride - in other words, environmental change (which is always happening) does not explain collapse, and instead we need to look at what was going on inside the society. Diamond seems to be arguing something like this with his idea that some societies 'choose' collapse in the face of environmental factors, while others take steps and avoid it. However, I would say that such a thesis is still too narrow, and wrong to privilege the environment as the key influence. Did the British empire disappear because of environmental change? Some people might be able to construct an argument along those lines, just as someone once traced the rise of Hitler back to a decline of the Baltic herring population. But surely there are other lines of argument that have nothing to do with the environment, such as the way that the technological and institutional differential dividing the Victorians from African tribesmen was quickly eroded by colonial contact, or the rise of global mass media and its exploitation by Gandhi. If you look at the fall of the Roman empire, some have attributed this to environmental factors of one kind or another (a comet impact put dust into the atmosphere, causing disease and poor harvests; or cooler, drier weather on the Asian steppes pushed the Huns onto the Goths and Vandals who in turn irrupted into the empire). But there is a whole range of other theories - e.g. Gibbon blamed the pernicious influence of clericalism, to name just one. Diamond might say (if he were to consider the topic) that Christian clericalism was one of the things that sapped the Roman ability to confront environmental change (e.g. it engendered fatalism as people were preparing for the end of the world anyway). However, you would have to bring in other things, like the bloated bureaucracy, the oppressive tax system, and the erosion of differentials between Romans and barbarians after centuries of using them in the Roman army, all of which also encouraged Rome to 'choose' collapse. You thereby leave the environment behind and the real explanation is seen to lie in the social mechanisms that produced clericalism, bureaucracy, over-taxation, use of barbarian mercenaries etc. After all, it is not as though these things only acted at a particular moment of crisis. They represented trends that emerged over centuries. To be fair, I think Diamond is saying that societies create the environmental problems which bring them down, so I would agree to the extent that societies evolve under their own steam, by some inner logic, and are not simply buffeted by external factors. However, I would say that they create a whole lot of other problems for themselves, most of which are sociological. Meanwhile, the fact that there are so many possible explanations for any given example of decline is itself a clue to what is going on. History is chicken-and-egg, not cause-and-effect like the natural sciences. The precise chain of events that caused particular societies to rise and fall can probably never be unravelled. What can be said is that there are certain patterns - of vicious and virtuous circles, of self-defeating logics - that may be discerned widely throughout history, largely because they are in fact characteristic of all complex, evolving systems. It is pointless to worry about the precise sequence of molecular movements that led to a particular storm. What we need is to be able to recognise what a storm looks like, especially when we see one approaching. Furthermore, we should not think in terms of the rise and fall of discrete societies, but of a seamless ferment in which social collapse is just one extreme of a continuum. I believe Diamond might be sympathetic to such points, but I'm not sure he has taken them fully on board. Turning to the present, Diamond's thesis seems to be that our own civilisation is compromising its environment (an idea that could be disputed), and that we also face a choice: change our behaviour and avert disaster, or press on regardless to the ultimate catastrophe. Yet we know that there are many other issues facing our civilisation, some of which have the qualities of impasse. For example, what about the fact that our very wealth and stability is attracting migrants, who as their numbers grow find increasingly less need to adapt and are changing our society from within - so that our civilisation becomes the victim of its own success? Wouldn't that be true whatever might be happening to the environment? And is it not the sort of thing for which the cure might be worse than the disease? And why should we really worry about it? Aren't we descended from the people who once did exactly that to ancient Rome? Diamond's proposed solution, of course, seems to be: throttle back (regulate, intervene) and opt for a kind of benign stagnation (what advocates of this approach might call 'equilibrium' and 'sustainability')? It is not to allow industrial and technological growth to continue unfettered, so that human capabilities expand and we move towards becoming a so-called Kardashev 1 civilisation (one that can control the resources of an entire planet, and for which the problem of managing the global environment is trivial)? Diamond's attitude to the global "population crisis" is indicative. He sees human population growth as a threat to the planet. He acknowledges that this growth is slowing down, and he sees that as a positive thing, but he remarks that it may be too little too late. Diamond therefore does not seem alert to the dark age principle that population growth is the sign of a vigorous society, and that the very fact that population growth is tailing off shows that global civilisation is stagnating. After all, there was a population explosion at the time of the neolithic revolution, the introduction of farming. This was not a problem or a threat to the planet. It simply showed that the invention of agriculture had allowed a large expansion in the human ecological niche. Similarly, the population explosion of the last few hundred years can be traced to the gains of the industrial revolution. It is the termination of that population explosion which shows our society has a problem and the present world order is running out of steam. Incidentally, 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' by the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (CUP, 1988) argued that societies collapse because of diminishing marginal returns, and he used all the same examples that Diamond uses. This seems to illustrate the point that collapse is multifarious, and that different people can read it in different ways, so that in one sense they are all correct, but they also miss the fundamental nature of the phenomenon (i.e., to start with, that it is multifarious).