Evolution of Civilisations: Prelude to Collapse

19th Century American artist Thomas Cole's 5-part series of paintings, The Course of Empire, beautifully portrays the evolutionary rise and fall of an arbitrary civilisation in history. The theme of civilisational rise and fall has been replayed so many times that it has become a cliche -- and yet each civilisation believes itself immune to the universal mechanisms which guided the ascent and descent of its predecessors.

Perhaps the best known scholarly look at this phenomenon is Caroll Quigley's The Evolution of Civilizations. Quigley's treatment is a masterpiece of penetration, worth the time of any student of history. Such a book is more properly described as "meta-history", since it carefully examines the mechanisms behind repetitive and cyclical historical processes.

Earlier this year, John Robb took a look at Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations (TEOC), in an attempt to fit some of Quigley's ideas into his own program to modify society to create more resilient communities and societies. Robb made some unexpected discoveries in his study of Quigley, as is likely to happen to most thinkers who had not been exposed to "TEOC" before.

Many modern historians and thinkers are contemplating whether our civilisation has reached the end-game stage. Among them is Niall Ferguson, who suggested earlier this year that the collapse of the US hegemony may occur quite suddenly and unexpectedly as a result of uncontrollable complexities inherent in the modern system.

Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder -- on "the edge of chaos," in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England. _Ferguson_February 26, 2010 "Foreign Affairs" - March/April 2010 Edition

Thomas Cole paintings courtesy of Wikipedia

The short lifespan of humans -- a matter of mere decades -- combined with a relatively low average intelligence, leads to inevitable instabilities and tendencies to the dissolution of polities over time. This is due to the way that power is actually seized, controlled, and administered at various levels of complex societies, in a short-lived, semi-intelligent species of barely advanced apes.

The type of disorder within Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan -- or any number of third world states -- that one may have observed from afar, can easily visit your home town without so much as a by-your-leave. Violent dissolution needs no excuse to intrude in a highly complex civilisation. It only needs a few tumblers to fall in the proper places, to merely get its foot in the door.