Studying the demise of historic civilisations

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse

by pitzahoy • 7 years ago

274 337 7 years ago

xiaodai• 7 years ago

Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? They seem to think that Shang and Zhou are different civilisations? Instead of a continuity as they like to call it in China. There are good reasons why they should be considered continuations because they shared a similiar script for writing.

StefanKarpinski• 7 years ago

I had a similar reaction more generally: how meaningful is this without a precise definition of what constitutes a civilization? Still interesting though, even if only as a statistic about the units that historians have decided to split history up into.

Retric• 7 years ago

No. People have been living on the same land in China for a long time and aspects of it’s culture survived, but that’s about it.

Rome lasted ~1500 years as a continuous political entity. Zhou dynasty comes is about half that at ~790 years. Though, you can make various arguments around those numbers.

dak12• 7 years ago

The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script.

For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China.

Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China.

Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts.

Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?

China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.

nitwit0052• 7 years ago

Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?

I was previously curious how many countries declared themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire, and I found there is something of a wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome

hungryhobo4• 7 years ago

honestly this is just not?true.

the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it.

it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty.

Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different

Cthulhu_2• 7 years ago

Not to forget that the current Chinese government is trying to work hard to erase the diversity of the entirety of China, trying to get everyone to use the same spoken and written language - iirc they already use the same written language, it's just that people will speak the same characters differently depending on region.

impostir• 7 years ago

I mostly agree with you, but I have one, albeit a nebulous one, problem. China, as an idea, has been around for ~6000 years. I agree that China, as a distinct political entity, hasn't existed for that time period. The Egyption civilization went through at least 5 significant changes of a political nature, but most would agree that it was still a contiguous civilization.

My guess is that civilization is too nebulous of a term for good discussion, but thats just my 2p.

hangonhn3• 7 years ago

The Caesar of Rome title isn't because the sultans actually viewed themselves as a descendant of the Roman empire but rather the inheritors of their legitimacy to rule and is actually part of the prophecies of Islam. Thus for the Sultan to be legitimate, he must conquer Constantinople and Rome (eventually) and thus fulfill the prophecy. (Source: Empires of the Sea)

The comparison between China and Turkey as descendants of the Roman Empire is a bit of a stretch. China at least uses the same language (old Chinese poems written in the Tang dynasty and even Han dynasty can still rhyme correctly and make sense if read in Cantonese), holidays, culture, etc. Turkey doesn't use a romance language or Greek.

magduf4• 7 years ago

For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese

Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.

Gpetrium• 7 years ago

As some have said, the Roman Empire is considered the longest running empire. I think it is worth noting that governments will use stuff like 'oldest civilization' or 'oldest democracy' as a way to propel nationalism.

tanilama2• 7 years ago

Zhou defeated Shang, but the culture is inherited like the Chinese Characters.

Dynasty usually in China doesn't category as one civilization, it is just a episode in the Chinese history. And this is not a modern invention either, China has the great tradition of 修史, literaly meaning the making of history, which means the later dynasty is responsible of recording the official history of previous dynasty, and by doing so it is treated as a testament to the current dynasty's legimacy.

Interestingly, even PRC is somewhat inherited this tradition, where an official account of Qing's history is set to publish this year, which is almost 30 million characters long.

mcguire2• 7 years ago

I note that the author groups the 25-odd Egyptian dynasties into the three traditional empires.

jcranmer2• 7 years ago

Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization?

Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar.

For example, after the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire was effectively partitioned into a Western and Eastern Empire. The Western Empire proceeded to decentralize itself out of existence over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, but it recoalesced under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties into the Holy Roman Empire by 800 (before splitting up into effectively a Frankish kingdom and the Germanic kingdom of the HRE). The Eastern Roman Empire lasted until around 1200, when the Fourth Crusade conquered it instead (a conquest which didn't last, but the Byzantines never recovered and the Ottomans finally put them out of their misery 250 years later). It's worth noting that pretty much all of the people I've cited considered themselves the true heirs of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile in China, the Han dynasty crashed hard in the early 200s, with three major successor states cropping up. One of these managed to conquer the others, so the successive dynasty was the Jin dynasty. Of course, the Jin last control of most of their territory, which fragmented into the Sixteen Kingdoms, but the entire era is still called the Jin dynasty. After the final collapse of the Jin, the north/south dichotomy continued with the Northern and Southern dynasties, which is again a successive series of powers vying for control eventually coalescing into the Sui dynasty after one wins out, which quickly transitions to the Tang dynasty, the first truly unified China since the fall of the Han dynasty. After about 300 years, the Tang dynasty collapses into a major period of disunity, the next truly unified China again taking 300 years to crop up again.

There's a lot of similarity. The major difference is that Western Europe never reunified into a single unitary state (unless you want to count the extremely short lived Napoleonic Empire and Third Reich). But Western Europe did have a successor state that directly retained the traditions from the Roman Empire (namely, the Byzantines) and could plausibly claim to have no break in continuity (the Byzantines never called themselves anything other than the Roman Empire), and all of the major successor states directly drew inspiration and customs from the Roman Empire, rather like China. The writing system, the state religion, the bureaucratic apparatus, the legal system--all of these are derived from the Roman Empire in Western Europe, just as much as they are derived from the Qin and Han dynasties in China.

jlktrl• 7 years ago

The comparison of the Roman Empire and the Chinese civilization is very flawed. First of all, Rome did not unite neighboring groups in Italy as a culture, never mind Europe. The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people. In China, for thousands of years, you have people from every province celebrating many of the same festivals, educated people reading the same script and Mandarin speaking officials reporting to the Emperor. Furthermore, pretty much everyone in Northern and Western China spoke some variation of Mandarin. The other main language group was Yue in the South and Wu to the East. To add to this, the major historical events in China are much more important than any local ones. Yet, if you ask a French or Italian person about their history, they would tell you very different things.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

Greeks don't count, then? They have the oldest recorded living language. Give me a metric of how China is a civilization that doesn't make Greece also a civilization. Really they're just land masses with specific ethnic groups and traditions. Greek traditions have probably changed a lot more than Chinese traditions over 3,000 years, but much change determines a civilization?

stcredzero6• 7 years ago

much change determines a civilization?

Change happens faster in the centers of civilization. So change is as much an indicator of the degree of civilization.

stcredzero6• 7 years ago

Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization?

More of a metastable meta-civilization. Over thousands of years, they keep collapsing and re-forming the same country.

tha_nose2• 7 years ago

The problem is that "civilization" and "china" are hard to define.

What we can say is that chinese civilization came into existence a long time ago. Then a serious of dynasty ( some not even "chinese" ) like the mongols or the manchus adopted aspects of chinese civilation.

"China" itself didn't survive for thousands of years. The dynasties rose and collapsed. Conquered and got conquered.

And "china", for much of its history, didn't even speak the same language. They used the chinese writing system ( which also evolved through time ), but does a writing system entail "part of civilization". Koreans and Japanese used chinese writing system, does it mean they are part of the chinese civilization? Of course not. Much of africa uses latin alphabet, does that mean africa is part of "greco-roman" civilization? Of course not.

The chinese capital changed multiple times. There have been periods where "china" had multiple competing capitals.

But then you could argue that chinese civilization didn't die out or get supplanted like the egyptian, mayan, mesopatamian, etc civizations.

The more you think about it and the closer you look, the more blurry the situation becomes. But like most things history, I guess the best answer is "it's complicated".

laythea2• 7 years ago

No it is not true. What is true, is that nobody actually knows, since we have no idea when humans began, other than "some point before X", where X may be a shadily derived date based on pseudo scientific methods.

I find the fact that we have no idea quite liberating.

aetiusflavius• 7 years ago

Sir John Glubb analyzed this in The Fate of Empires:

http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

pattisapu• 7 years ago

These are awfully contested dates. Hun: 100? Vedic: 1000? Etc. These statistics obscure more than they explain, I think.

noopnoop2• 7 years ago

I can speak to the Vedic dates. Those are contested but only due to their novelty, meaning they are MUCH older than what western media gives them credit for. And the Vedic civilization exists to this day in India as Sanatana Dharma followers or as the ancient Greeks & the modern Western world calls it - Hindus.

_emacsomancer_3• 7 years ago

Though most varieties of modern 'Hinduism'/Sanatana Dharma are rather different from 'Vedism'.

tlhunter• 7 years ago

It looks like the U.S. has another 93 years to look forward to!

baroffoos• 7 years ago

Thats assuming all civilizations don't collapse before then due to environmental destruction.

budadre75• 7 years ago

The US lasted 243 years. Is it the oldest modern nation? I wonder, how will the modern nations different from the ancient ones?

yks• 7 years ago

it is not, case in point: Great Britain

mamon• 7 years ago

Also: Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, pretty much every European nation.

Edit: Seems that GP conflates "nation" and "state". If we're counting continuity of government, they probably only Great Britain is a good example, other countries had undergone many changes, from absolutism, to constitutional monarchy, to non-existence, to democracy, to fascist dictatorships.

Dirlewanger• 7 years ago

I think judging by the oldest extant constitution (or other equivalent legal document), the US is the oldest.

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

Japan probably claims that crown: 660 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da...

KorematsuFred2• 7 years ago

Typical western garbage. Applying vague nation state ideas to civilization. Hindus for example have seen thousands of years as their own unbroken history. Many mantras that I chant today are at least 1500 year old.

quaunaut• 7 years ago

You understand that an "average" means that many skew higher, often much higher, right?

If anything, this shows most ancient civilizations were measured in decades, not centuries. But some did go thousands.

KorematsuFred2• 7 years ago

Yes but they have given specific numbers like Harappan -> 800.

talonx• 7 years ago

I think you are being downvoted for the unneeded name calling.

But the article does not seem to do a great job in terms of accuracy or being able to distinguish between civilizations and empires. E.g. "Mahanjanapadas" should be "Mahajanapadas", and the Magadha empire was part of an existing civilization.

This is apart from the contested dates that the author seems to accept, without citing any sources.

baud1472584• 7 years ago

And the catholic prayers that I chant today are 2000 years old.

titanix2• 7 years ago

The full article is here: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-...

'Interestingly' the first two listed factors are ecology related, and the biggest thread to the European civilization is not explicitly stated.

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, we've changed the URL to that from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-an.... Thanks!

chx• 7 years ago

The Kingdom of Israel and Judah? While Wikipedia is not a credible source, it's a good summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_mona...

In contemporary scholarship the united monarchy is generally held to be a literary construction and not a historical reality, pointing to the lack of archaeological evidence.

See The Bible Unearthed for a more authentic source. I am slightly biased because I have been to Tel Hazor after and because of reading that book. (No matter who ruled at the time but a 25 x 21 m citadel with two-meter thick walls built three thousand years ago is just jaw dropping.)

Also, Vedic Civilisation [1000]? What evidence do we have that calls for this period to be called a single civilisation...?

neom• 7 years ago

Absolutely fantastic book:- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...

supernova87a2• 7 years ago

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.

And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".

"Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. Or it costs too much to change people's behavior.

That's what I think is happening to western Europe and the US. Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans.

Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...

jlawson• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure "getting old" has always been a big part of the collapse of civilizations.

I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting.

Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.

digitaltrees3• 7 years ago

Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.

avinium2• 7 years ago

A death/inheritance tax seems an absolute no-brainer to me - and I consider myself fairly conservative.

That doesn't mean increasing the overall tax burden, either - it could be introduced to offset income tax reductions. It seems much "fairer" to me.

glerk• 7 years ago

What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?

remarkEon5• 7 years ago

...it would make a difference.

It sure would.

If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”.

That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.

ars• 7 years ago

Make each generation start from scratch

And how do you prevent people from giving gifts? Parents giving their children a gift of money?

And trusts are a thing, so gift tax would not help as much as you would think.

lurcio2• 7 years ago

Why not cut inequality at the root: prevent children accruing socio-economic advantages from the moment of birth

dustingetz• 7 years ago

honest question when a rich person dies should we destroy all their buildings and companies too so the wealth can’t transfer?

adrianN• 7 years ago

I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.

discodave• 7 years ago

Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself.

Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics.

My prediction is that if we ain't seen nuthin' yet.

pjc504• 7 years ago

There are at least three major territorial conflicts ongoing for control of land at the moment. All east of Istanbul.

trentmb• 7 years ago

Crimea

Emma_Goldman2• 7 years ago

Conquest is anachronistic.

The decline of agriculture as a proportion of the economy of advanced nations means that territory no longer has the value that it once did. Population is not as important as it used to be for military power. Physical capital (factories, labour, land) is now less valuable, certainly in the developed world, than human capital (education, skills, networks). This means the gains of conquest have reduced drastically.

Meanwhile, the costs of war have increased markedly. Only a small group of states can afford to build technologically competitive militaries. Nuclear war has made the cost of great power war mutual annihalation. Modern low intensity warfare, on the other hand, makes it extremely difficult for great powers to permanently occupy even small powers (e.g. the US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan). This means that the costs far outweigh the benefits in almost all circumstances. Add to this that in the counterfactual, states can gain most of the economic benefits of war through peaceful means, i.e. trade, at a far lower cost. There's also simply a greater spread of uncertainty in war: it's a dictum of war studies that war is inherently unpredictable.

If international war breaks out in the near future, it will be a fight over global hegemony (US-China), regional hegemony (Iran-Saudi Arabia), revanchism (Russia, Taiwan), or most likely - by accident.

muse9002• 7 years ago

More to your point, we have vilified death a bit too much.

In the past they had poems about death, sung death, created legends.

Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one.

The world needs to renew itself, or else there won't be enough resources to feed one another.

We are at peaceful times but one thing history can show us is our future, and in history there have been times of peace, although they only lasted for a few years.

skrebbel2• 7 years ago

Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one.

Do you really not see that this was sick propaganda, propagated by evil dictators in need of cannon (sword?) fodder?

There's nothing honorable about war or battlefields. It's the worst of the human condition, distilled to the highest concentration. War is repugnant, evil, and unnecessary. We humans should move to rid ourselves of it, not spread fucked up fairy tales about it on the internet.

Honorable, pff. Say that again when you're slowly bleeding out in a ditch somewhere fighting someone else's battle.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

not vilified, just avoided it, as with regular struggle that makes your existence more scary but more dense and your spirit less complacent

pjc504• 7 years ago

Despite hiding it well, this is an extremely fascist post in ideology - the idea that the west is decadent and needs a bit more violence was very prevalent in the 30s.

wallace_f4• 7 years ago

This reasoning does not substantiate your accusation: The idea was prevalent not just in the facist countries.

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

The fact that Stalin believed 2+2=4 doesn't invalidate math by association with mass murder.

Do you have a reason to suspect GP is in fact maliciously trying to push fascist ideology? Because that's what your comment implies, and does not hide it well.

taurath• 7 years ago

Personal sacrifice has really fallen by the wayside especially with the already wealthy. Altruism is probably not the solution though. The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor, and that seems to be in real short supply.

wallace_f4• 7 years ago

If you've ever been poor or on the receiving end of cult of personality of bullying you really quickly realize in how short supply altruism is in the world.

kbenson• 7 years ago

The most charitable people are those who can empathize with the poor

I wonder. The most charitable, or most people that are charitable? According to this[1] (which references a paywalled report), middle-class Americans account for nearly two-thirds of charitable giving. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest is from upper class giving, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption (especially given some of the other points in the article). And if the rich are giving, it might be less of an empathy, and more of a sympathy (or even guilt).

Then again, perhaps you meant the most charitable as in giving the largest percentage of their income. Or maybe of their disposable income, in which case, maybe the poor would actually be the most charitable in some areas.

In any case, I think charitable giving is actually a fairly complex topic that might not be accurately summed up as easily as your comment implies.

1: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Di...

pizzazzaro• 7 years ago

The problem here? The only people who share with the poor are those who can relate. And that happens to be... the poor.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068...

pesmhey• 7 years ago

Perhaps civilizations are born, live and die. With luck, they pass on their memes and genes to the next one.

tanilama2• 7 years ago

Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices ....Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans.

Really? That is at least not what I saw happens in the US, most of the old people could be impoverished by unexpected disease. What you described isn't like 5% of the whole population really...

crimsonalucard5• 7 years ago

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.

According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources.

The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusion.

The irony is that even with the knowledge of our impending doom we are still unable to see it despite the obviousness of it. The original poster makes a chancy prediction on how wealth inequality will take us to our ends while all trendlines and data point to the real way our civilization will end.

One day there will not be enough oil in the world for you to drive to work or fly to another state.

Technology is not our savior. The trendlines in tech are far too slow do make any meaningful difference. What you're actually observing with technology like the tesla is the trendline in hype.

onion2k4• 7 years ago

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.

Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons about being happy with what you have.

Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.

lm284693• 7 years ago

People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.

I have better medicine, better comfort (bed, electricity, running water ..), &c. than the richest emperor of 2000 years ago. Does it invalidate any critics I can make ?

As far as I can tell capitalism didn't sell mere survival as a goal, yet we're telling an ever growing part of the population that they'll have to deal with it.

"The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically."

"The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive."

- Raoul Vaneigem

stcredzero6• 7 years ago

Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans.

Also voting for politicians who pass laws that hamstring the house buying ability of the next generations.

tomc1985• 7 years ago

Given this website attracts loads of innovators and wannabe innovators I'm inclined to take this thought with a grain of salt. There is so much blind faith in the vigor of youth and new ideas that I wonder if many of you can even imagine a world that runs at any slower pace than today.

Given that we are supposedly past the age of aggression and conquering, do you think a peaceful society that keeps to itself is capable of surviving on its own, with a level of happiness that is high by their own (if not world) standards?

ekianjo• 7 years ago

A good war? In this time and age you would not get a refresh, rather a complete reboot to the stone age after utter destruction. Be careful what you wish for...

_Microft• 7 years ago

Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in.

This is exactly the problem we need to solve as well if we ever manage to increase the human lifespan. Instead of society advancing one funeral at a time (c.f. Max Planck on science) as in the past, permanent change would have to come from every individual at a much higher rate than now.

sametmax• 7 years ago

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.

Not sure.

First, the US did invade a lot of places in the last decades, and while they didn't officially turned the countries into US colonies, they still do have massive political and economical influence there, and benefit from the local resources.

But even if you discard this, it's assuming the future will be the same as today, which is unlikely. In the entire human history we never had a single day without a war somewhere on earth. The possibility that our countries will __never__ be at war again on their on soil is slim: we have many tomorrows to create situations where it can happen.

We massively consume limited resources in a close system. We destroy systems that regerate resources we need, a destabilize the balance our organisms a based on, and we have hugely powerful weapons. Conquerying one another is still a tempting solution to many problems.

E.G: India has more than 1 billion people, almost no water, extremly strong social tensions, hot borders, pollution in mass and the nuclear bomb. Anything triggering here can easily creep on to the entire world.

lm284693• 7 years ago

You should check out Raoul Vaneigem, he develops similar ideas, but focusing on the middle class stuck in their "everyday life" and routines. Whatever you do at work, 8 hours a day, leaves you with just enough energy to consume entertainment and wait for the next day. The cycle doesn't end until you're 65 and are allowed to retire, by the time you don't have any kind of energy (physical and/or mental), most people don't even have money to live the dream they've been forced to believe in all their life.

I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves.

I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones.

Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives

Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part.

---

"It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real"

"The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology."

"No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze."

"While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever."

"People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them."

"And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."

coolio2657• 7 years ago

This is a clear perspective and it needed to be put out there for others to understand. I salute your well-worded post, lm28469.

zubspace• 7 years ago

I blame inheritance of wealth and the possibility of unlimited accumulation of richness for this.

In my opinion, property and money, which someone amassed during his lifetime, should automatically be devoted to the common good after that person's gone. In my opinion it's insane, that someone lucky can inherit a fortune by basically doing nothing. There are things which make sense to inherit, like family enterprises, but there should be a limit.

I also believe, that as an individual, there should be an upper bound to how rich you can be. Does it really make sense, that an individual person can have more than a seven-digit pool of money on his bank? Is there a way to limit the crazy strive for individual richness? If there would be a limit, we could basically invest the free money collectively into old and new enterprises which would not simply act as money printers for a few individuals, but actually profit society as a whole... Just a crazy idea...

retsibsi4• 7 years ago

Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...

Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

coldtea5• 7 years ago

Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

Depends on two things:

1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome).

2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.

Mbioguy• 7 years ago

This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that war can somehow mythically rejuvenate the ethos or spirit of a country isn't unique to fascism though. It was also common in the jingoist imperial western european powers, and partly used as justification for aggression against neighbors and abroad.

This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.

This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?

It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.

Oppose these ideas and these tactics, HN.

syn0byte• 7 years ago

Suffering is largely a constant. The difference between "war" and "peace" is only in who is suffering, and how much everyone else does or doesn't care.

coldtea5• 7 years ago

And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations.

That's the case for now, sure.

But that's also exactly what got ancient Athens and Sparta, Rome, Byzantium, and other empires of the past. Outsiders wouldn't do scratch if those empires weren't already rotting from inside for reasons such as those that you've mentioned.

In Rome and Byzantium, for example, such a decline is more or less the established historical narrative.

tim3332• 7 years ago

Those ideas have a history

“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war."

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1878 book that was one of the inspirations for WW1, WW2 and all that. Not one of humanities best times. Though you could have a more positive take on war as in war on poverty and the like rather than the shooting people stuff.

rlucas• 7 years ago

Please read some intellectual history of the period between around 1870-1914. The modern nation state was newish, industrialization was newish, a sense that “decadence” was feminizing or draining nations of their vigor was adopted by myopic elites. There’s nothing novel in your comment here in the history of ideas.

And, what we’ve empirically learned is that that thread of ideology in an industrialized world (to say nothing of a nuclear armed world) leads to slaughter.

I realize this is HN but even so I feel it’s poor form inveighing with a well worn warmongering trope on the course of world history.

bsanr3• 7 years ago

Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for):

The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or else were inevitable on an imminent timescale given past development.

Have at it.

dcow3• 7 years ago

And now, good ol’ western civilization experiences regression to the mean.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Economic and industrial efficiencies don't just inevitably "run out."

tomt23232• 7 years ago

While I agree with the point you're trying to make, I don't think that's a provocative statement for the rest of the world (or even all of the people living in Western Europe and the US), especially now as increased communication and analytic tools help us to better understand the ways in which massive transfers of wealth are still happening from the rest of the "postcolonial" world.

I suppose an argument could be made that it was built on hard work and ingenuity in much the same way that you can say politicians really are better at something than everyone else. It's just not necessarily the thing you'd want them to be good at. In this case, that would be that the powers we're talking about made some incredible innovations in terms of colonialism and internal methods of quelling the dissent of the aforementioned cheap (or enslaved) labor.

Of course, it's not at all clear to me that this hasn't been the case for every single past (or emerging) empire. But the "self-made civilization" is maybe even more ridiculous a concept than the "self-made man".

ddxxdd• 7 years ago

I don't think a King George Washington would preside over a young America as affluent as President George Washington did. Tyranny has a way of sequestering innovative spirit.

pjc504• 7 years ago

Washington was a slave owner. Tyranny, but only for some people.

geowwy2• 7 years ago

What makes you think King George Washington would be a tyrant?

firethief• 7 years ago

It does?

dalbasal7• 7 years ago

Here's another thought experiment.

Take the Russian communist revolution of 1917. Had Lenin been an American and the coup/revolution been american... Do you think that by the late 20th century, the US and Soviet Union's positions would have been reversed?

I don't think we can really answer that, but to me, "yes" feels like an old fashioned answer. I don't think a founding philosophy or constitution (or anything really) has such a deterministic effect. I'm more in the "one-damned thing after another" camp.

raverbashing3• 7 years ago

Several other empires exploited resources and used "free" labor, but only recently they invented industries/mass production, contributed to scientific progress and improved their quality of life with it.

Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options.

Edit: see below for a better explanation

ajross• 7 years ago

Do you have an example of a lasting empire that... did not do all of that stuff? I mean, honestly that statement seems kind of laughably wrong.

wallace_f4• 7 years ago

Other nations such as China or Russia have comparable or arguably better cheap labor stocks or natural resources. Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world...

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world...

Did they? Or was that just something American businessmen liked to scare each other with in a post-war era?

crimsonalucard5• 7 years ago

nah they were dead in the water. Resource embargo was basically a death sentence. The Nuke was done to end it quickly.

Gupie2• 7 years ago

But the first step in Japan's plan to "take over the world" was to take control of China.

mnm14• 7 years ago

In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. It's not even a great feat or accomplishment. The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.

stcredzero6• 7 years ago

In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit.

But that ceases to be competitive past a certain level of technology and value-add. Even slaves in the American South got paid extra for work requiring exceptional skill and attention to detail. It turns out you can't whip people into producing quality past a very basic level.

The legacy of that is still what drives a lot of the economy in the US even today.

No. That's a propaganda fiction used by the Far Left to bring down the current order.

chillacy• 7 years ago

It wasn’t nice but subjugating and enslaving populations definitely was made possible by what I’d call ingenuity or inventiveness in the realm of technology. See Guns, Germs, and Steel.

tormeh• 7 years ago

I think the causality goes the other way around. If the Aztecs could have conquered the world, they would have. It's not as if they were a particularly nice people.

Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.

bilbo0s3• 7 years ago

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term?

Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totally wrong and that's not what "civilization" means?

geowwy2• 7 years ago

>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term?

They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity.

Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.

bilbo0s3• 7 years ago

Good point.

I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.

mcv2• 7 years ago

They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe.

There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures.

And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium.

Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.

goto11• 7 years ago

This quickly gets into a "Ship of Theseus" discussion. Arguable modern Turkey is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, but would you say that modern Turkey is the same political entity as the Roman Republic?

The is no objective answer to such questions - it gets down to who gets to write history and what they are trying to achieve. Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy derived legitimacy by considering themselves the true successor of Rome. So did the Catholic church to some extent. Therefore western historiography have traditionally sidelined the Eastern Roman Empire. Even the name "Byzantine Empire" is part of this framing.

Iv• 7 years ago

"In the graphic below, I have compared the lifespan of various civilisations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure. Given this definition, all empires are civilisations, but not all civilisations are empires."

Under this definition, the British Empire and the USA are totally different civilizations.

You are talking about a cultural entity for which we do not really have a word.

There has been such blocks in the past "Christianity", the "Hellenestic world" which share common values but are separated into entities that may even wage war between them.

LoSboccacc3• 7 years ago

the roman political structure was stable between the republic and empires.

and if you accept the claim that civil wars or political discontinuity are enough to split a civilization the graph is still fishy because why is the empire not split around the 160something civil war while egypt was split around ruling dynasties?

it's not much consistent, all in all determining the civilization arcs is hard, but you need some form of hard barrier if you want to use the data in such fashion as averaging or deriving any conclusion from it.

dalbasal7• 7 years ago

No matter how you define or name these things, your definitions will still be arbitrary. Polity. Empire. Civilization. It's like defining species, or musicals genres. There's obviously a there there, but it's not discreet.

Civilization or polity don't really have discrete meanings or beginning/end dates. Did Cyrus' civilization really end when Alexander beat the Persian imperial armies? Most of the political structures endured and then evolved under Hellenism. Did Hellenism end when Rome conquered the "world?" Well... Greek language and culture continued to dominate politically for another 1000 years.

mannykannot3• 7 years ago

While the physical and temporal scope of a particular empire, and the civilization it ruled over, have sometimes been co-extensive, that does not mean that the definitions are arbitrary or interchangeable. My understanding is that 'civilization' refers to a social organization in which populations, economic and political activity are concentrated in cities, and is independent of which political entity is running the show. In ancient times, civilization did come and go in various regions (e.g. the Indus valley and the Amazon basin), while in the last thousand years, empires have come and gone while the civilizations they fought over have endured.

To be clear, the world did not switch uniformly from one mode to the other. In the Nile and Yangtze valleys, for example, civilization has persisted through several millennia of political change. Cyrus' empire did end with Alexander's invasion, but the underlying civilization of the region remained.

ptah2• 7 years ago

"Western civilization" is not a useful concept so is falling out of use

ptah2• 7 years ago

More specifically, there is not continuity that would make it one big civilization. Later civilizations copied things like legal system from the romans and inherited language. a lot of the seeming continuity is due to renaissance copying the "classics"

aikah• 7 years ago

It's called the "west" in opposition to the eastern block during the cold war. And yes it's a useful concept because it exists and is well defined.

dagaci4• 7 years ago

I think its easy to be hung up on the meaning of the word, but a Civilization would start with a common governance, and sometimes that includes culture, as the proper Britons and Franks of old will have always had a different culture compared to Rome but were part of Rome. But that's just technical.

Emotionally your Civilization is where you would feel comfortable, and that might be Western Europe and North America, Australia, NZ.

ciceryadam• 7 years ago

Theoretically, yes. But Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire were waging wars against one another.

billfruit2• 7 years ago

One defenition of Civilizations as per historian Arnold Toynbee (I am quoting from Wikipedia page for his work "The Study of History") is as follows:

"The 19 major civilizations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumerian, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern, Orthodox Christian (main body), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mexican, Yucatec, and Babylonic. There are four "abortive civilizations" (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian, Abortive Syriac) and five "arrested civilizations" (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan), for a total of 28."

mcguire2• 7 years ago

I agree. Sumerian civilization is reasonably constant from the earliest writing until the conquest by the Persians, if not longer. I'll bet Chinese scholars would agree that China is similar---the same civilization through many changes of governments.

I note the author is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

tha_nose2• 7 years ago

There really isn't a "western civilization". It's a fairly recent geopolitical term made for political purposes.

There is greco or more expansively greco-roman civilization that we adopted, but that doesn't make us part of the greco-roman civilization or a "western civilization". No more than japan adopting bits of chinese civilization makes japan "chinese civilization".

If you think western civilization exists, then there must be an eastern civilization? There is no such thing, other than for convenient geopolitical purposes. There is the chinese civilization, the indian civilization, the myriad of middle eastern, northern african civilizations, etc. But no such thing as an eastern civilation.

Were the chinese, persian, mongol, ottoman, etc empires part of an "eastern civilization"? Of course not.

The idea of a western civilization is a geopolitical concept we invented for political purposes and of course to claim "civilization" for ourselves. To claim we are a part of the greco-roman civilization when we are not part of it. We are adoptees of it. "Western civilization" is ultimately a sneaky way of claiming civilization status for ourselves.

Having said that, I may be a bit biased, but given the cultural, societal, global, linguistic, financial, systematic, military, etc impact we've had, I think the US has moved from an empire to an actual civilization. But ultimately, history confers the status of civilization, not the living. So maybe in a few hundred years, historians will say the US is an actual civilization. But for certain, 500 years, nobody is going to talk of anything called a "western civilization". It simply doesn't exist just like an "eastern civilization doesn't exist.

drallison• 7 years ago

Ignoring the difficult task of actually deciding when a civilization starts and stops, is there some theory that suggests that duration is the right measure? Don't we need a reasonable model of how civilizations work.

It would be interesting to incorporate and merge the data from Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies with the data presented here.

skookumchuck3• 7 years ago

Now that the citizens have discovered they can vote themselves money out of the treasury, and politicians vie to outdo each other in promising free stuff, we'll see how long the US lasts.

Tomminn• 7 years ago

Alternative title: The average length of time an ancient civilization had to last in order to be noticed by us is 336 years.

serkanyersen• 7 years ago

Ottoman empire lasted 624 years and it's not mentioned in this article. They mention 'Western Turk (70)' and I've no idea what that means.

barberousse4• 7 years ago

Politically my guess is modern Turkey but 'Western turk' is legit term to distinguish, culturally, from Eastern turks such as Siberians, Kazahks, etc whom the Turkish language, spoken in Turkey, descends from

mmjaa• 7 years ago

I'm quite disappointed that the aboriginal cultures of Australia are not factored into this. Bias against the idea that they might have been a civilisation?

Oldest oral traditions of any human culture. Oldest, still being worked, mining operation of any human culture. A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths.

I think this report, while interesting - is not quite as complete a view of human civilisation as it could be. Australian aborigines throw out the whole idea - until white guys came along and genocided them, they were the oldest, longest-running civilisation of humankind, ever.

bloak• 7 years ago

Perhaps I'm being too literal and etymological, but to me "civilisation" means towns and cities.

Towns and cities lead to economic specialisation, a legal system, civil service, taxation, and so on. Nomads and people living in villages may have a complex culture but it's rather different from city life, even a low-tech city life like in ancient Egypt, for example.

AnimalMuppet4• 7 years ago

A hippocratic oath encoded in their culture while we, white Europeans, bled people to their deaths.

But those doing the bleeding were following the hippocratic oath. They were trying to do good. The issue was stupidity (or, more charitably, lack of knowledge) rather than malice.

foreigner• 7 years ago

we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past

Why do we have that unique advantage? Plenty of civilisations had historians.

rvn1045• 7 years ago

the number of recent discoveries in just the last 100 years is astonishing. the Indus valley civilization was not even discovered until 1929. We have a fuller picture of human history than ever before.

dagaci4• 7 years ago

Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings.

Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on trades itself and of course looting of weak environments itself.

The aftermath is what is sustainable, but this difference between the glitter and the sustainable is very boring and what the historians call a dark age or dark period because its not newsworthy even thought it is actually the origin of the next age of expansion.

Jedi72• 7 years ago

I think this is a fantastic point, but it leads to the next question which is that are the current world powers any different?

Fordec• 7 years ago

See:

looting of weak environments itself

eeZah7Ux4• 7 years ago

Looting for oil thanks to a powerful army, increasing inequality and oligarchy, environmental degradation, climate change.

...it rings a bell.

tim3332• 7 years ago

There's less looting these days and more making stuff.

dalbasal7• 7 years ago

The bronze age civilisations of the middle east (Akkad, Hati, Egypt) didn't follow this pattern. Egypt, for example, was a Nile + delta empire for most of the three kingdoms/periods. It's only towards the end of the new Kingdom that they expanded into nearby Canaan, and fought frontier wars against hittites along the Phoenician coast (eg, the famous battle of kadesh).

Rome definitely did have an expansion imperative. Land grants and the slave trade were to legions what exits are to tech startups.

Most ancient (and into modernity) armies did self fund by looting though. Even looting fallen enemies for weapons was a substantial motivator. Even in the Roman period, owning a helmet, shield and such equated to moving up a social class.

dagaci4• 7 years ago

Egyptian Civilization was sustained because of the Nile delta productivity. Literally all the nutrients gathered over 1/4 of the of the African continent are deposited nowhere else along the river route but in Nile delta, this unique phenomenon of nature meant this area is extremely resilient and can withstand any level of exploitation.

Egyptian Civilization continued for over 3000 years (what we know about) which is ridiculous.

Egyptian Civilization lasted so long only because of the Delta productivity and ended when Greek and Roman conquest resulted in Egyptian grains being wholesale shipped northward out of the country by force ending the trade southward probably causing famine, and destroying the internal economy and culture which was centered there.

Cactus2018• 7 years ago

> the famous battle of kadesh

Great YouTube lecture\debate on the battle:

The Battle of Kadesh: A Debate between the Egyptian and Hittite Perspectives [1]
The Battle of Kadesh, ca. 1285 BC, is the earliest military encounter that can be analyzed in detail. This conflict between the Egyptian forces of Ramses II and the Hittite army of Muwatalli was celebrated as a personal victory by Ramses, but is often treated by modern scholars as an Egyptian defeat or as a stalemate. In any case, the battle had profound impact on international politics of the age, with unexpected results. Join us for a lively debate presented from the two sides of the ancient conflict, provided by noted Oriental Institute scholars Robert Ritner, for the Egyptian side, and Theo van den Hout, for the Hittites.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AGe2V0qHo

viach• 7 years ago

> Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves

Gas, oil, fresh air, ...

gerbilly4• 7 years ago

Water, lumber (formerly known as trees), open land, furs, fish ...

boudin2• 7 years ago

And cheap labour in countries with lower worker/human right standards

stanfordkid• 7 years ago

I think that's a bit reductionist. Highly recommend reading the Muqaddimah (one of the first sociology books) which talks of a natural cadence to power: http://www.politics.ankara.edu.tr/dergi/pdf/39/1/13_barbara_...

Nietzsche also delves into some of these ideas when he describes the rise and fall of civilizations as a by product of decadence. This decadence is not just the simplistic notion of "consumption", but rather a weak moral system that arises as a result of decadence. It is not consumption, but rather the morality of consumption: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/5avje6/what_...

Looting machines (like companies) required skill, fearlessness, and capital to build.

pastor_elm• 7 years ago

sounds like modern day globalization

Emma_Goldman2• 7 years ago

I don't see how this could be true.

'Looting' is the plundering of goods from others, usually by conquest.

Many civilizations were stable for long periods without expansion. In fact, Arnold Toynbee made the argument that imperial expansion was a symptom of decline.

If by loot you mean - as you say - the use of raw materials, labour and the environment, I don't think the word has any analytic meaning whatsoever.

antisthenes• 7 years ago

If by loot you mean - as you say - the use of raw materials, labour and the environment, I don't think the word has any analytic meaning whatsoever.

By that definition, we have expanded the looting in the last century by several factors of magnitude. In that context, we should also view the global economy as a single empire.

En_gr_Student• 7 years ago

This clearly has outliers from fantastically ancient civilizations. Give it a qqnorm and you would see.

The median age is much more interesting than the mean, and more relevant for today.

rafiki6• 7 years ago

My take on this is that once an economic model begins to fail, the society that is based on it will inevitably also fail. Eventually wars breakout (usually resource wars), and a new dominant player emerges and their economic model gets implemented until it fails. Usually what causes the failure is that the economic model has reached it's growth or sustainability limit.

I actually think company life cycles are very analogous and can teach us much about societies and their growth and decline but on a faster timeline. Companies operate very much like mini-societies with their own culture, beliefs and ingrained practices. They have business models which are constantly evolving. Most if not all of them grow and eventually decline if they fail to adapt.

I'm of the opinion we are experiencing this now with whatever economic model we have in developed nations. It's a never ending cycle, at least until the human species evolves or is eradicated.

dgudkov• 7 years ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention destructive ideologies. Early Christianity contributed to the demise of Roman empire. Marxism and fascism destroyed quite a few nations.

laythea2• 7 years ago

I just started researching this subject recently. Graham Hancock is a very interesting speaker regarding the subject. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this subject to have a listen.

Seems we are on a cycle of occasional doom and gloom, caused by nature. Think ice age cycles.

stareatgoats• 7 years ago

While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses

This kind of reasoning rests on the success of disciplines like physics and chemistry where scientists have found general laws upon which they can build solid models of reality (within some extreme limits). History doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thinking IMO, and only serves to cloak the innermost nature of history: it's uniqueness. Instead we should realize the unique characteristics of our culture vs all preceding (and similarities too, by all means). It is a much more difficult exercise, but also much more rewarding since it can lead to a much better understanding of our predicament.

One thing that comes to mind is our complete interconnection and dependency on a few points of failure like no previous civilization. Our demise might not take several decades like the Roman empire, it might be over in a few days if we don't change course(s) and build better resiliency.

Studying the demise of historic civilisations

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