Historians/History

Why Civilizations Decline

by Peter Montague

Dr. Montague is Executive Director of the Environmental Research Foundation.

Some civilizations reach their peak of power and then suddenly collapse and remain in decline or even disappear. Others thrive for thousands of years. What accounts for the difference, and what does it matter to the U.S.?

The year 2005 began with an interesting choice by the editors of the New York Times -- the first op-ed of the year was a long essay by Jared Diamond called "The ends of the world as we know them." Diamond won the Pulitzer prize for his non-fiction book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and later in 2005 he published "Collapse; How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

Diamond's op-ed offers an analysis of why civilizations collapse. It is an essay obviously intended to make us ask, "Does our civilization have what it takes to survive?" In the opening paragraph he says, "In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?"

Diamond goes on: "Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly?"

Diamond tells the stories of a few past civilizations that collapsed and rapidly disappeared -- the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico; the Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean; the Anasazi in the American southwest; the ancient societies of the Fertile Crescent; the Khmer at Angkor Wat; and the Moche society of Peru, among others.

Diamond then offers a long list of other societies that followed a different trajectory and survived for very long periods in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands, and Central and Northwest Europe, among others. So collapse is not inevitable. Collapse is the result of choices.

Diamond asserts that collapse results from 5 inter-woven factors:

The damage that people have inflicted on their environment;

Climate change;

Enemies;

Changes in friendly trading partners;

Society's political, economic, and social responses to those shifts.

After telling the stories of particular societies that collapsed or prospered, Diamond asks pointedly, "What lessons can we draw from history?"

Take environmental problems seriously

He answers bluntly: "The most straightforward [lesson from history]: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today."

The second reasons for collapse is "failure of group decision-making." Diamond then offers three kinds of failure of decision-making:

Decision-making failure #1: "One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society," Diamond writes.

Examples of this in contemporary society might include

The petrochemical industry that reaps mountainous profits by selling products that are heating up the planet, contaminating our bodies with biologically-active industrial poisons, and leaving tens of thousands of chemically-contaminated waste sites for taxpayers to try to deal with.

Another example might be the tobacco industry that is now hawking its cancer-causing wares to unsuspecting children world-wide.

This list could be readily extended because the U.S. pays only lip service to the important principle that "the polluter shall pay." More often than not, in the U.S. the polluter is subsidized by the federal government to evade paying.

Decision-making failure #2: "... [T]he pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend."

We might include in this category: unsustainable logging practices; industrialized agriculture, which depletes topsoil and contaminates water with fertilizer and pesticides; and waste-treatment plants that discharge wastes into waters that must then be cleaned for drinking and other essential purposes.

Decision failure #3: "History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure."

Deep lesson #1: "A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions."

With 10% of the U.S. population owning 71% of all private wealth, we do not have to look far to see this principle at work in the U.S.

The Walmartization of the economy is one example -- getting rid of good, family-sustaining jobs and substituting low-wage jobs with no benefits and no job security. This does not hurt the 10%, but ultimately it weakens the social fabric that sustains the other 90% of us.

The privatization of public services is another example -- depleting the ranks of the civil service that provides continuity and expertise to government from one administration to the next. The firms that run the private prisons, the privatized public schools, the private water-supplies, the private highways, the privatized environmental services -- those firms can make out like bandits but the rest of us stand by helplessly as the capacity of our governmental institutions withers and our common wealth disappears.

The refusal to provide pensions for workers would be a third example -- when a Reagan-appointed judge allows United Airlines to walk away from its pension obligations, it's good for the company's bottom line, and other firms quickly follow suit. Renouncing pension responsibilities is now epidemic. Meanwhile, government -- dominated as it is by the 10% -- is working mightily to cut back Medicare and Medicaid. The 10% do not have to ask who will care for them in their old age, but the other 90% of us do and for many the answer is nothing but an empty question mark.

Deep lesson #2: "The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense."

Here, Jared Diamond provides his own examples of the U.S. clinging to dangerously outmoded ideas:

In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.

But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk -- particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops. [The Iraq war has cost the U.S. $244 billion so far, with no end in sight.--PM]

A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect American lives.

To me the most important point in Jared Diamond's essay is this one:

"A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions." This is surely the case in the United States today.

The remedy for this problem is more democratic decision-making. Decisions should be made with real participation by the people who will be affected. (For information about how this is working now in some places, see here and here).

If this simple principle were practised to a greater extent that it is today, most of the problems that threaten our civilization could be reversed or considerably diminished. On the other hand, if we continue to allow a tiny elite to manage the economy and run the government for their own narrow, selfish purposes, the outlook for long-term success is dim.

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