Book Notes: The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph A. Tainter
👍👍😍
Note: “Book Notes” are brief jots on books I’m reading, not full blown reviews.
Totally fascinating.
- Societies are ripe for collapse when marginal returns on societal complexity investment diminish and when surrounded by less complex neighbors. In other words, collapse isn’t regime change. It’s a collapse to a lower level of social complexity.
- Collapse, historically, has been adaptive!
- Though societal collapse is generally portrayed as a negative in present discourse, and thus perceived as a cause for fear and alarm, historical examples of collapse paint a much different picture: collapse, especially from the standpoint of the support population (e.g., peasants), is seen as favorable compared to their present society. (E.g. Roman peasants resisted barbarian incursions in the early days of Rome, when marginal returns were high; but they cheered the Barbarians in Rome’s twilight, when being a Roman peasant meant starvation because the Romans taxed all your crops away and you were forced to sell your children into slavery just to survive. Analogous situations arose for the Mayan polities in the Yucatán and the Chacoan communities in the San Juan Basin).
- Societies today can’t collapse — at least not unilaterally. (Their regimes would either be saved by neighbors — for example through military or economic support — or they would be taken taken over by neighbors. Remember, collapse isn’t the same as regime change. It’s a sustained reduction of social complexity.)
- In this respect, the world today is similar to situation that the Southern Lowland Mayans encountered: we are a collection of competing (and cooperating) city states. The difference: when the various Mayan polities collapsed all at once, they had a jungle to dissolve back into — in other words, they could resort to lower forms of social complexity without being taken over and subjugated — they could be left alone.
- But today, there’s no more jungle left to dissolve into. We’re like the Mayans, but on a global scale. Collapse, if it happens, will be global.
Tick, tock.