Societal collapse

Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline or overshoot, mass migration, incompetent leaders, and sabotage by rival civilizations. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear. Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity. Most never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Some civilizations like ancient Greece have survived indirectly through other civilizations such as the West, while other ancient civilizations like Chinese civilization and Indian civilization have survived continuously to the present day. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental degradation, depletion of resources, costs of rising complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, growing inequality, extractive institutions, long-term decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. Complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication. The influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death. The study of societal collapse, collapsology, is a topic for specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. More recently, they are joined by experts in cliodynamics and study of complex systems.

Concept Joseph Tainter frames societal collapse in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), a seminal and founding work of the academic discipline on societal collapse. He elaborates that 'collapse' is a "broad term", but in the sense of societal collapse, he views it as "a political process". He further narrows societal collapse as a rapid process, within "few decades", of "substantial loss of sociopolitical structure", giving the fall of the Western Roman Empire as "the most widely known instance of collapse" in the Western world. Others, particularly in response to the popular Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond and more recently, have argued that societies discussed as cases of collapse are better understood through resilience and societal transformation, or "reorganization", especially if collapse is understood as a "complete end" of political systems, which according to Shmuel Eisenstadt has not taken place at any point. Eisenstadt also points out that a clear differentiation between total or partial decline and "possibilities of regeneration" is crucial for the preventive purpose of the study of societal collapse. This frame of reference often rejects the term collapse and critiques the notion that cultures simply vanish when the political structures that organize labor for large archaeologically prominent projects do. For example, while the Ancient Maya are often touted as a prime example of collapse, in reality this reorganization was simply the result of the removal of the political system of Divine Kingship largely in the eastern lowlands as many cities in the western highlands of Mesoamerica maintained this system of divine kingship into the 16th century. The Maya continue to maintain cultural and linguistic continuity into the present day.

Societal longevity

The social scientist Luke Kemp analyzed dozens of civilizations, which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure", from 3000 BC to 600 AD and calculated that the average life span of a civilization is close to 340 years. Of them, the most durable were the Kushite Kingdom in Northeast Africa (1,150 years), the Aksumite Empire in East Africa (1,100 years), and the Vedic civilization in South Asia and the Olmecs in Mesoamerica (both 1,000 years), and the shortest-lived were the Nanda Empire in India (24) and the Qin dynasty in China (14). A statistical analysis of empires by complex systems specialist Samuel Arbesman suggests that collapse is generally a random event and does not depend on age. That is analogous to what evolutionary biologists call the Red Queen hypothesis, which asserts that for a species in a harsh ecology, extinction is a persistent possibility. Contemporary discussions about societal collapse are seeking resilience by suggesting societal transformation.

Causes of collapse Because human societies are complex systems, some common factors that may contribute to their decline are economical, environmental, demographic, social and cultural. These factors may cascade into another and build up to the point that could overwhelm any mechanisms that would otherwise maintain stability. Unexpected and abrupt changes, which experts call nonlinearities, are some of the warning signs. In some cases, a natural disaster, such as a tsunami, earthquake, pandemic, massive fire or climate change, may precipitate a collapse. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation, or resource depletion might be contributory factors of collapse, but studies of past societies seem to suggest that those factors did not cause the collapse alone. Significant inequity and exposed corruption may combine with lack of loyalty to established political institutions, and result in an oppressed lower class rising up and seizing power from a smaller wealthy elite in a revolution. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures. Jared Diamond suggests that societies have also collapsed through deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or rising endemic violence. In the case of the Western Roman Empire, some argued that it did not collapse but merely transformed.

Natural disasters and climate change

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