Chapter Review - After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (Part 5)
Tying up some loose ends
In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the role which access to resources - and the ability of elites to garner an outsized share of these resources - has on collapse and regeneration. For this final portion of this chapter review, I’ll cover the effects which various miscellaneous factors can have on the process. As we’ve noted previously, collapse and regeneration are complex, non-linear phenomena. Small changes at one point can yield big results on down the line (and also the opposite - events which contemporaries are sure will have huge effects on the future may end up being nothingburgers). The point is that many different factors are involved, so the ensuing discussion (as well as this series as a whole) should not be taken as some kind of definitive listing of everything that plays into the course which secular cycles will follow.
First, I’d like to circle back to what I said previously about how polities which are tied together into world-systems tend to “synch up” in terms of their demographic-structural cycles. I pointed out that this this occurs because of “the ties that bind” due to trade relations which tend to make neighbouring societies more dependent upon each other both for elite prestige goods and for harder to obtain necessities (e.g Mesopotamians needing to import stone and timber into their treeless, mountainless flood plain). But that can’t be all of it, certainly, or at least not directly. However, with trade comes second-order effects such as cultural interchange and so forth. This definitely assists the cyclic processes, especially during regeneration when a recovering society is looking for inspiration moving forward,
So while a society that is coming out of collapse, enduring its depression phase, and moving towards its next growth cycle, may often think that it is “holding true to our forebearers” or whatever, there are probably going to be significant cultural influences from their neighbours which will put both societies on a closer path. Culture is a powerful thing. The reason for this is because a society’s culture is a lot like its personality. Strong personalities tend to influence those around them, whether we’re talking about popular kids in middle school or influential movie stars and the like. People tend to imitate “what works,” and cultures that successfully transit the collapse phase tend to serve as examples to others, which “catches them up” to each other.
Another element that can have tremendous, civilisation-wide impact is that of climate and the availability of natural resources. Changes in climate (either externally applied or due to migration into different climactic zones) can upend entire ecosystems and the socioeconomic systems which have been built around them. A steppe-based society that moves into forested or agricultural zones will most likely have to change its entire social system to accommodate. Desertification (or, oppositely, increases in rainfall) will grossly distort any system and lead to huge changes across the board. Indeed, there is a very plausible case to be made that a major driver in the Bronze Age collapse of the late 13th-early 12th centuries BC (which saw the entire world system from the Baltic to the Indus fall apart) was the systematic, climactic alteration of weather patterns that made western and central Europe wetter but led to drier conditions in everything further east. Certainly, collapse can be “assisted” by this type of change.
Of course, this can also work in the opposite direction - improved climactic conditions can prolong and intensify a society’s or civilisation’s regeneration.
As this citation notes, the reason for this is because one of the most important “natural resources” is agriculture and food production. When there’s more food to go around, population increases and there is still enough for the commoners even despite elites garnering an outsized share for themselves. When this stops being the case, collapse and its attendant ills of famine and plague become more frequent. While we might tend to think of this in terms of “primitive” or “premodern” societies, keep in mind that this is still an extremely salient point even for us today. After all, you can’t eat transistors or smart phone apps.
Relatedly, new technologies can also have a drastic impact on demographic-structural cycles,
As with the heavy plow, so also could we say for things like widespread iron working starting at the end of the 2nd millennium BC and the introduction of mass industrialisation during the 19th century AD. We should note, however, that the really impactful technological innovations which affect the courses of secular cycles are those which involve productive, industrial centralisation for the most part - those things which require a larger, more intricate specialist and/or monied-capitalist component to sustain. Military technologies like long-distance sailing ships and gunpowder may enable the geographical extension of a successful society, but don’t seem to impact its overall rise and fall as much as core productive capacities do.
This is because these sorts of technologies - which include social technologies relating to governmental organisation and the extension of power - open up new ways for elites to centralise power to themselves. The introduction of grain agriculture in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium BC started the process and it has kept right on going. That elites work to do exactly this is commonplace, but new techniques allow them to be much more successful at it, at least until such a time as everyone else “catches up.”
The effect which this centralisation has on secular cycles is found in that centralisation speeds the transition into the stagnation and then collapse phases. Centralisation allows for enhanced elite overproduction and elite expropriation of resources, leading to increased intraelite competition, trending into collapse. Paradoxically, centralisation (which one might assume leads to stability) tends to negatively impact a society’s cohesion and durability over time. This suggests, for some societies at least, a path through,
As we’ll be seeing, polities that can avoid overcentralisation and maintain a relatively decentralised or heterarchical organisation tend to be more robust in the long term. They’ll still go through collapse eventually, but their collapses may be less destructive and their regenerations quicker and easier. In our case, the American system of semi-sovereign states (well, that’s the theory at least…) is probably the closest we can come to this type of heterarchical system. This should make our present collapse phase somewhat less detrimental, barring some kind of outside context problem like a nuclear war driving us back to a true tribal level.
Another factor at play in collapse and (especially) regeneration is that of ethnogenesis and the corresponding rise of new elites. I’ve previously pointed out that the White American population is more or less diverging into two broad, culturally distinct ethnies, generally corresponding to what we might call “Red America” and “Blue America” (i.e. what appears to be a “political” divide actually runs much deeper).
Now, new ethnies (whether generated endogenously or imported from abroad) may establish themselves as aristoclades within a regenerating system. If this occurs with already-present endogenous groups, the “rebels” in question can be (and indeed are likely to be) notable personages from among non-elite strata within a collapsed and regenerating social system. Consider, for example, how a grossly disproportionate share of Dominate Roman emperors were of non-senatorial, provincial extraction - something never before seen prior to that cycle of collapse and regeneration.
Like it or not, there will always be a place for Great Man theory in the collapse and regeneration of complex social systems. There will always be individuals who have a profound and overextensive effect on the directions their societies take, whose “butterfly effect” on social evolution will swamp that which the regular joe is capable of effecting. Truly, Carlyle smiles upon us.
So what happens when a prevailing elite is too successful in suppressing potential challengers?
This failure to regenerate a complex system (i.e unrecoverable collapse) can occasionally happen, as certain authors in this book note within their particular chapters. Most often this comes about, as noted, from the exclusion of local notables from administrative power, which is a consequence of overcentralisation. The ruling elite refuse to entrust local leaders with power (perhaps they don’t trust them, perhaps they simply don’t want to share power or access to resources), which means that when the inevitable collapse does take place, there are far fewer competent people available to “take up the mantle.” This type of situation may also be a consequence of importing foreigners to fill up your elite stratum, leaving the natives out in the cold. As we all known, transnational foreign elites tend to not stick around when times get tough but have (and use) the ability to abscond back home or to the next place they can be inducted as useful elites.
We can see more historical support for this,
The policy of the Neo-Assyrian and other Iron Age Mesopotamian empires of transporting subject populations all over their empires and installing them in foreign lands was successful in the sense of rendering these peoples more docile by breaking their connexion to their homelands. However, it also introduced a lot of cultural diversity (which destroys social cohesion) and undermined the legitimacy of local elites by disconnecting them from the remaining native people who actually belong in a certain area. As a result, these empires tended to have short lifespans and fell apart whenever a change in dynasty took place, requiring bloody wars to reunify.
With this, I’ll bring this series of posts to a close. Throughout we’ve seen a whole host of aspects relating to the collapse and regeneration of complex societies. There are nearly 5,000 years of history in which these demographic-structural cycles can be discerned, which makes them extremely relevant for the current collapse we find ourselves in as a world-system. The lessons we can learn from history can be applied moving forward, hopefully with a view towards ameliorating this collapse and expediting the following regeneration.
💯 Excellent series!
"Paradoxically, centralisation (which one might assume leads to stability) tends to negatively impact a society’s cohesion and durability over time."
Feudalism; God's Will or Common Sense?