Jessica McKenzie writes:

In the introduction to his seminal 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter explained that lost civilizations have a vise-like hold on the human imagination because of the implications their histories hold for our own, modern civilization. Untangling how and why civilizations fall could, in theory, help humanity avoid a future calamitous collapse. “The reason why complex societies disintegrate is of vital importance to every member of one, and today that includes nearly the entire world population,” Tainter wrote. “Whether or not collapse was the most outstanding event of ancient history, few would care for it to become the most significant event of the present era.”

This issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is dedicated to tipping points, primarily tipping points within the Earth’s climate system—when elements of the Earth system are pushed past a threshold and move from one stable state, to another, very different, stable state.

Civilizations are also complex systems, and ones that are not guaranteed to be indefinitely stable and secure. “Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things,” Tainter wrote, and collapse is actually quite common—“a recurrent feature of human societies.” What’s more, the kind of global civilization humanity currently enjoys is an aberration; for most of human history, people have lived in much simpler societies (which were also relatively stable systems). Consequently, Tainter wrote: “[W]e today are familiar mainly with political forms that are an oddity of history, we think of these as normal, and we view as alien the majority of the human experience. It is little surprise that collapse is viewed so fearfully.”

Do civilizations, then, have tipping points that determine their rise and fall?

Tainter’s theory of collapse is deceptively simple—especially when paraphrased. Collapse occurs, he argues, when the costs of complexity are greater than its returns to society. Complex societies are problem-solving organizations, and when the costs of coping with crises are too great, they fail.

One sentence in particular stood out: “Once a complex society enters the stage of declining marginal returns, collapse becomes a mathematical likelihood, requiring little more than sufficient passage of time to make probable an insurmountable calamity.” Although the phrase “tipping point” had not yet been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell or adopted by climate scientists at the time of the book’s publication, this certainly sounded like a kind of tipping point.

The book challenged some of my preconceived notions, and underscored things I don’t necessarily like or want to accept—that inequality is practically a requisite feature of complex societies, for example. Similarly, I chafed at some of the descriptions of class stratification, like the observation that: “Peasants are frequently disaffected, but they rarely revolt. They are usually passive spectators of political struggles.”

I also took note of the signs and portents of a civilization in decline. For example, when “tax rates rise with less and less return to the local level,” resulting in increasing dissatisfaction; or when “stress begins to be increasingly perceived, and…ideological strife” becomes noticeable; when the “system as a whole engages in ‘scanning’ behavior, seeking alternatives that might provide a preferable adaptation”; when “inflation becomes noticeable”; and “the hierarchy imposes rigid behavior controls…in an attempt to increase efficiency.”

Finally, I reached out to Tainter himself to discuss his theory, whether or not the tipping point metaphor is apt for civilizational collapse, and his more recent work on sustainability. [Continue reading…]