Sure that is not the way of tribes back then, and in fact such thinking for a time would be condemned. As long as they are in the Leaver mindset. But as one becomes more and more dependant on farming, you have to constantly fight pests and vermin that threaten your crops and therefore you livelyhood, not to mention storms, floods, hail, and all sorts of weather. In otherwords, a Leaver mindset can’t last in those conditions. But change is not often based on farseeing vision. There will be those status-seeker who will encourage the growing of crops. They might not be Takers, but that doesn’t mean they will be consistantly egalitarian. Of course, after the collapse, they will have a much shorter life span.
The civilizatios that form as a result, not the person. :-[
I always felt that civilization srang from a mindset that says “we can create our own invironment to benefit us”. I feel like if we ingrained the ideals that we are ultimately at the will of the earth and should not alter it to serve us, will be ok. The main problem with that idea though is it dissempowers people from fullfilling nitches in ecosystems, such as the burning of understories and plains. I don’t know, bad point perhaps but the storing of large amounts of food kinda bothers me (not winter stashes) and altering the earths ecosestem for souly human ussage bothers me
Yeah, I agree with this, but ‘ingraining ideals’, that makes me feel real uncomfortable.
From what I’ve seen of paleo-climate records going back over the last 100,000 - 400,000 years, the last 10,000 years is the only window of opportunity humans were ever really given to create an agricultural society.
Agriculture requires a lush, warm, stable climate, and for most of the time we’ve been on Earth those conditions didn’t exist. The last 10,000 years of warmth and stability are not the norm for Earth. The 100,000+ years of climatic instability prior to that are the norm for Earth. And even with favorable conditions, it took 9,800 some odd years for things to get to the point of a global empire.
In many parts of the world (for instance Australia) agriculture never emerged until oil made it possible, because the climate there had never been stable enough for agriculture (until massive irrigation infrastructure and chemical fertilizers could be built via oil-dependent industrial technologies).
Just 500 years ago over half the planet’s surface was still covered by hunter-gatherers, and even just 200 years ago probably a third was still occupied by them…in my eyes, that’s because those hunter-gatherer cultures were the most advanced societies ever evolved to adapt to the bioregions in those areas. They worked. Civilization didn’t. The only reason they have been overrun now is because of (again from my perspective) a fluke. That fluke is the discovery of oil. That enabled some of us to import food from areas where we (meaning us takers) knew how to survive by farming into areas where we didn’t. This allowed us to invade lands where we don’t (still don’t) know how to survive.
Take Alaska (where I grew up and live now) as an example. There are 600,000 “takers” living here and not a single one of them knows how to live here without importing food and other goods from thousands of miles south. Once the oil runs out (and oil production peaked in Alaska 10 years ago) this state is going to be de-populated. Once again any people who live here will have to live much as they lived for the thousands of years prior to oil being harnessed by the mainstream of civilized culture.
Once oil runs out, it’s gone. It won’t be back for many, many millions of years (if ever).
And even with plenty of oil and a stable climate, civilization isn’t sustainable…ultimately it’s going to end badly. Prophets have known this since it first began. Not being sustainable means it’s going to end. Ending badly means people will have bad memories of it once it’s over.
So I’d say the things that will prevent civilization from emerging (anywhere other than in small localized pockets) again are:
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Oil being gone.
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Climate being unstable (i.e. back to the norm for Earth).
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Our oral traditions about how misserably the whole civilized experiment finally ended.
Does that mean it will never emerge again? No. But so what if it does? The Earth has been through worse. Life is still a gift, and never totally secure. As I see it, that’s what makes life precious.
You make a good point. However, there is still coal which would allow civilization to use steam-powered things instead of oil. I haven’t heard about coal running out anytime soon, but I could be wrong. Solar power also gives civilization at least some energy, and why would dams be dismantled?
Oral traditions is another thing. It would require all humans left to believe that civilization was not in our best interests. Some group will always strive to get back to what they would believe was a golden age of humans.
As I see it, coal will be a basis for civilization to be extended, not to return. Coal may extend global empire by a few hundred years, but what is that when compared to the time scales we’re talking about here? Either way you figure it, global empire will be at most a few hundred or thousand year blip compared to the millions of years where the Old Ways make up the life of humans.
Besides, it remains to be seen how much empire coal can support, it’s EROI (energy return on investment) is much lower than for oil (especially middle eastern oil). A switch to a coal economy is likely to mean (at very least) a shrinking of empire out of areas that were recently colonized over the last hundred years or so. This alone would open up huge areas of land for the return of the Old Ways.
And solar power (I’m assuming you mean photovoltaics here?) simply doesn’t supply an EROI large enough to make for a global empire…a photovoltaic pannel takes 12 years of operation before it recoups the oil energy that went into it’s construction. Solar maybe able to support a few localized pockets of civ where local agriculture is easy, but empire? Not in my opinion. Too much transportation infrastructure is needed for empire.
Most of civilization’s mythology characterizes the old ways as the “golden age” not so much the other way arround. Right now I can’t think of a group of post-imperial people whose oral tradition speaks of a golden age of empire. The Mayans didn’t seem to yearn for the days of great kings and pyramids when the Spanish met them. But this is an area I’d like to look into more, since I haven’t really researched it much yet.
And when it comes to the oral tradition, I think the tradition will just tend to reflect reality as people experience it. If civilization ends horrifically over the course of a couple generations, I don’t think too many people who survive those generations will see it as much of a golden age. Especially if they learn to live well as our Old Way ancestors have for millions of years. The only people likely to see it like that are people currently living well who suddenly loose everything…say in a situation like the movie “Castaway”, but that just isn’t the reality of collapse. The reality of collapse (as I see it unfolding) will take awhile, and I don’t see the people who survive it thinking of it as just an accident or a fluke. I think they’ll see how things didn’t really work out.
Also, oral tradtions tend to be practical for hunter gatherers, I doubt they’ll be putting a lot of energy into longing for a life that’s impossible to achieve given the energy and climate realities of their lives. Civilized mythology has lots of room for impotent nostalgia, but not so much Old Way oral traditions. They tend to tell stories that actually help the people live, because living is actually a challenge (and an adventure) that must be risen to. That’s why (I think) it brings out the best in us.
quote]Once the oil runs out (and oil production peaked in Alaska 10 years ago) this state is going to be de-populated. Once again any people who live here will have to live much as they lived for the thousands of years prior to oil being harnessed by the mainstream of civilized culture.[[/quote]
Haven’t you heard Alaska has more readily available geothermal energy than Iceland.
Not near it’s major population centers…most of that geothermal is out in the middle of “nowhere”. Besides, you cant fly airplanes, drive semi trucks or run ships using geothermal energy. The issue for Alaska is the ability of any large empire to ship huge amounts of food and supplies here and then get it all out to the rural areas. Local geothermal doesn’t really help with that.
I don’t think civilization had anything to do with anyone’s mindsets. We like those myths, because they empower us. It means that civilization grew because we decided it. It makes us feel more powerful than the alternative: that a fluke constellation of factors created civilization, and it spread in spite of what anyone wanted, thanks to things like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. That’s a harder pill to swallow, even if it’s closer to the truth, because it means we were pawns, and our free will and intellect had nothing to do with it.
How will we stop civilization from returning? Short answer, we don’t. People will try, and in what few pockets of naturally arable land remain, I’m sure little scavenger kingdoms will spring up regularly, find they can’t expand anywhere, wipe out the soil they found, and collapse. Living next to one of them would suck, but they’ll be few in number, small in size, and incapable of expanding.
In the short term, the exhaustion of all the world’s soils for agricultural purposes, which precipitated the Green Revolution, will create a few centuries during which agriculture without fossil fuels is impossible. Looking a little longer term, that period bridges the end of the Holocene. Agriculture is a uniquely Holocene-adapted strategy.
Over millions of years, fossil fuels will replenish, and useful ores will push up towards the surface close enough to be relevant, so after we climb down from global warming, go into an ice age, and then enter an interglacial like the Holocene, somewhere on earth where all the right conditions (climate, geography, domesticable plants and animals, etc.) all come together in one place, if it can happen, it probably will.
Of course, I have a hard time worrying too much about that. We’re talking about millions of years in the future, far longer than the entire time that humans have even existed on the planet so far. We won’t be the same species we are now. It’s impossible to predict what we’ll even be, much less how we’ll react in that same situation.
Of course, preserving myths about civilization will just put the idea in kids’ heads, and we all know how some kids feel about their grandparents’ warnings. Try to guard against civilization actively, and I think you’ll just succeed in helping start a few more of those little pockets as you inspire your grandchildren to go try. But such unexpected consequences are precisely what we get when we start flattering ourselves about how important our free will and intelligence is.
in a more pessimistic view, I think we should just deal with the fact that time and time again, it comes back. Like the economics Jason alluded to above, there will always be in this world the ‘incentive to cheat’.
Perhaps social technologies like lasting peace could give birth to the unimaginable, a world where humans don’t eat and plant the easiest food, but the healthiest, least violent methods of raising those foods.
Without competition, something hard for us to imagine now, there would be no incentive to have more food than our neighbors.
Tip of the iceburg stuff here, really…
Makes me think of those conspiracy theories about previous intelligent civilizations that were wiped out millions of years ago. 
Interestingly enough, maybe in a million years from now, we wouldn’t need oil or technology at all…
or of the civilizations that we ?blackwashed? out of history. For example, we are taught that ‘tribes’ and ‘chieftans’ sacked rome, but it was germans. when we use the term barbarian, we are using the roman racial slur that derogatorily refers the way the romans heard spoken german. it sounded like ‘bar bar bar bar’ to them, thus the term, barbarian, the relation to the beards of the ‘pagans’ is simply an etymological mistake.
Or for example, the great mississippian and mesoamerican civilizations. People were in such disbelief that the Indians had civilization, that Joseph Smith was able to base his sucessful religion of LDS on the idea that a lost tribe of Israel built the mounds and mesoamerican pyramids.
I have two suggested readings for people worried about the ‘return’ and the ‘getting rid of’ civilization. Collapse by Jared Diamond and 1491 by Charles Mann. If you have any doubt left in your mind that humans are hard-wired to build ‘complex’ societies, then I’d be happy to help ‘change’ your mind. hahaha That is, I’d love to discuss with someone the implications of thsoe two books on the absurd misanthropic principle of the ‘Noble Savage’ and the concept of small, scattered groups of human beings.
How do either of those books suggest that humans have a hard-wired impulse towards complexity? Yes, the Americas produced complex societies just like Europe, Asia and Africa. What I think stands out most, though, lies in the timing. We’re talking about only the barest sliver of recent human history, and all of a sudden, all over the world, without any possibility of cultural transmission, you have centers of complexity springing up, essentially overnight, all at once, everywhere. Now, if humans have some kind of hard-wired impulse towards complexity, wouldn’t we have built towards complexity steadily? Where can you find that impulse in the millions of years prior to the Holocene? It seems pretty clear to me that the pattern of complexity simply follows energy, i.e., complexity sprang up everywhere not because we have any kind of predilection towards it, but because an ecological fluke made it adaptive. No more, no less.
Well, history is written by ‘the winners’ if cetain groups of people, anywhere on the world, started to do the same things at the same time. Humans have self-selected out groups that as a matter of social repetoire didn’t take advantage of that available energy. So even if there were social technologies that would disprove a ‘hard-wire’ hypothesis, they are already lost, or hiding, regardless, they aren’t being transmitted, which, is the reason why we are having this very complex discussion, and not a more simple one.
More energy is going to be available after oil, not less, as I see it. Regardless of complexity forecasts, or the newest revelations of anthropology pointing to million-plus American societies rivialing and surpassing their european and asian counterparts. Sure, ‘they’ had the wheel, but ‘we’ had a caledar based on zero, but our cities and polities were about the same size, and similar ecological collapses were faced on both sides of the Atlantic.
It appears to me that given the choice, people will choose ‘most complex’, given available energy, or in our case, we’ve chosen a complexity that is above our available, sustainable inputs. Given limitations, as Diamond points out, some societies change rather than collapse based on their flexibilty.
The American civilizations, societies and polities (as opposed to the perjorative ‘tribes’ and ‘chiefdoms’) are shining examples of this social alchemy of flexibilty and taking advantage of the greatest complexity available.
Agro-forestry in the Amazon being the best example. Irrigation technology that the Army Corps of Engineers should be studying.
I do, too, finding the timing fascinating, and mourn the information loss of ‘the losers’ in the human rat race, whose social technologies have been lost to those who became more rapidly complex.
Ecological events still need a proclivity within humans to use explore the ‘edges’ of complexity, when the opportunity presents itself. So hardwired maybe be indeed a strong word for my hypothesis, but certainly, there is more to it than rain and sunshine. Could humans themselves be the ecological fluke?
As far why aren’t there any signs of civilization, well, the deeper we dig, the further we’re pushing back the calendar. I wouldn’t say, yet, that at this point, a lack of evidence of complex societies precludes a lack of societies.
For example:
Evidence of early humans living on the coast in South Africa, harvesting food from the sea, employing complex small stone tools and using red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago,
So, starting 164,000 years ago, our descents were engaged in symbolic behavior, creating symbols and notations for their experience in the world. Showing, that this symbology didn’t come out of a crude need to account for grain, or to pay soldiers, but as an innate need to express the thoughts in our heads, to interact with our environment, and communicate through time. So, exhibit A, for a steady build towards complexity. Communicating now through time, learning, and trial and errors can begin. The edges of society are now transmitted, rather rediscovered from failure to failure. In an animist world, these symbols had the power of the gods. I think I’m going to get really exhausted if I try and flesh out that tangent…
"This evidence shows that Africa, and particularly southern Africa, was precocious in the development of modern human biology and behavior. We believe that on the far southern shore of Africa there was a small population of modern humans who struggled through the glacial period 125,000 to 195,000 years ago using shellfish and advanced technologies, and symbolism was important to their social relations. It is possible that this population could be the progenitor population for all modern humans," Marean said.“The oldest view that early Homo sapiens didn’t have full modern behavior was built largely on an absence of evidence,” added Minichillo. “Now we have data that doesn’t match that idea. It may be that early modern humans had that ability when they first appeared on the landscape.”
Dare I coin the term ‘geological domestication’?
Although I’m not entirely sure how cave paintings and face paintings lead to city-building (which, we’re not talking about directly, but societies who at least cook their food, and practice any form of horticulture), I’m sure it’s only the beginning of the connections were about to make as we let go of our superiority complexes and let the scientists do their work.
Also, exhibit B, the greatest leap in human genetic engineering, the cultivation of Maize. Surely, this sprang out of attempts to create a more complex society, and this was no overnight spring, but generational experimentation to augment the density of the energy of the society that developed maize.
Then there’s the timing, the timing. Things that make spiritual people such as myself resonate would only make me to appear more foolish in an academic battle. Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of time to read, and have been doing a lot of intense study, and am looking forward to reading your response.
I’ll throw my two cents into the complexity issue…
Humans lived happily in Australia for 50,000+ years with little more material complexity than what could fit in one hand. 200 years ago the English showed up with a ton of complex “stuff”. Why would we consider the imported way Australians live today to be more “inherrently human” than way originally created in Australia for Australians to live?
And as a side note, the only myth less useful (as I see it) than that of the “noble savage” is that of the “ignoble savage” (in whatever form it might take).
When comparing the lives of peasants and nobles from the European Middle Ages to the lives of most “savages” (i.e. primitive, nomadic, hunter-gatherers) it wouldn’t be hard to make a case that “savages” had more in common with the nobles than peasants. For example, only noble-men were allowed to hunt and eat meat to any significant degree, take leisure at their whim, or had the freedom to travel. However, I’d say that primitive nomadic hunter gatherers are best classified as “none of the above”.
I may live to be 80… I am indeed a rewilder…
Yes this whole thread is quite interesting.
If civilisation falls in my lifetime, wonderful!
If not, it will be in the process…
If it rebuilds itself in the far off future I will be dead, So why should I care?
The only thing I have to do is live my life,in good relation to the earth,
and teach my children to do so.
Now I must get away from this computer and go live.
-ofthewood
Well, the Aborigines cook their food, so they may not build solar panels or send people to the moon, they still ‘inherited’ some complexity.
But certainly, a good example as to how each culture expresses complexity.
I don’t doubt that people are complex, as is all of life.
However, it seems that some societies are externally more complex, and others are externally more direct or “to-the-source.”
A civilization based on agriculture develops complexity in such a way that we are distracted from the natural (and complex!) processes of life and the living world.
Societies based on hunting-gathering for energy sources might have other ways of redirecting human complexity. Instead of technological complexity, they might have mythological complexity, for example. Many probably have an ever-changing and adapting mythology that responds to the nuances of the ecosystem surrounding them (instead of a more static spiritual worldview such as Christianity). An adaptive mythology, as I see it, would satisfy many cravings of the human intellect.
Every society has some amount of complexity, just as any object has some amount of heat, or some amount of mass. It’s a measure, so without any complexity whatsoever, you just plain don’t have a society.
But in the Holocene, we’ve seen the emergence of human societies with complexity far past the point of diminishing returns, orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen previously. Hunter-gatherers have some elegant and useful forms of complexity, absolutely, but when we talk about “complex societies,” societies that we can characterize first and foremost by their complexity, such an enormous gulf exists between the normal, healthy societies that humans lived in for the first million years of our evolution, versus the complex societies some of us have built up in the most recent sliver of our history, that the title clearly refers to a very recent, very different phenomenon.
To say based on the existence of complexity in all cultures that humans have a hard-wired impulse towards complexity debases the term to simple meaninglessness. Humans have a hard-wired impulse towards society, and all societies have some amount of complexity. But in nearly all times and place, humans have created societies with stable, sustainable levels of complexity. The level of complexity settles. How is that a hard-wired impulse towards complexity?