#dissolution threshold

In The Dissolution Threshold I made some remarks about the long, slow decline of Mayan civilization. The decline of Mayan civilization did not occur in a vacuum. I take Mayan civilization to be one among the civilizations that constitute what I call the Mesoamerican cluster. Mesoamerica and what is today Mexico were highly productive of civilizations. There were the Olmecs, the Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huastec, Purepecha, the Toltecs, the Maya, and the Aztecs. Possibly there were others as well.

The Maya were among the largest and the longest lasting of these Mesoamerican civilizations of the Mesoamerican cluster, and the only pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas to develop a written language (Quipu was a record keeping device, but not a written language -- an interesting counterfactual would be a civilization that developed elaborate record keeping systems like the Quipu, but to a higher degree of sophistication, without developing a written language; this might have happened in South America if the Europeans had not come). The Olmecs may have had a written script, but the evidence at present is ambiguous; interestingly, Nahuatl became a written language after the Spanish conquest, using Roman characters.

Suppose that the Maya were more isolated, and that they did not appear among a cluster of civilizations, except perhaps for predecessor civilizations. Suppose that the Mayan civilization followed its known trajectory of development and dissolution, but no Aztec civilization arose to the north (or, if it did, it was much further away, so that it was not an immediate influence). Suppose further that Europeans did not arrive when they did, so that the development of civilization in the Americas continued uninterrupted in its indigenous development, at least for another several hundred years, if not for another thousand years.

The Mayan people would have been surrounded by the monumental ruins of their previous civilization -- much as the people of medieval Europe were surrounded by the monumental architecture of the Roman Empire -- though these ruins would have been rapidly overtaken by the tropical rainforest, as in fact they were. Mayan life would have continued on a scale of much lower population density and much less social and technological sophistication.

Suppose, however, that not all of the Mayan civilization were lost. Suppose that the daykeepers continued to keep the Mayan calendar (as in fact they did), and, since no Spanish language would have displaced the native language in this counterfactual scenario, further suppose that the daykeepers continued to keep their record of the Mayan calendar in the Mayan language (as in fact they did not).

Certainly over time the Mayan language would have changed, just as Latin changed from the Latin spoken by the Romans into the Latin spoken by the Catholic church and monks who studied ancient Latin manuscripts, but there would be enough of a continuity that later ages, looking back, would be able to rediscover their link with the past.

If civilization were, under these counter-factual circumstances, to emerge once again in the region, or in a nearby region, also a civilization of the Mayan people (like the earlier Mayan civilization), we would in retrospect be likely to term the period between the end of the first Mayan civilization and the beginnings of the second Mayan civilization a “Dark Age” for Mayan civilization, whereas today we do not identify a Mayan Dark Age because Mayan civilization and the Mayan people have become submerged under a transplanted European civilization.

Moreover, we would recognize a tradition of Mayan civilization that was constituted by more than one Mayan civilization -- distinct civilizations in time, but part of the same tradition, with the later being the inheritor and descendant of the former.

Both the rise of the Aztecs to the north -- which, as part of the Mesoamerican cluster, borrowed from the common cultural stock of the region -- and the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, served as preemption events that, by their presence and their influence, displaced any long-term development of the Maya civilization. This also had the result of “eliminating” a Mayan Dark Age, though whether this elimination is a matter of historiographical interpretation, or has some ontological relevance for Mayan civilization, is another question.

I mentioned in my previous post that most historians today don’t use the term “dark ages” and indeed sedulously avoid it, and that it has, after being abandoned by academics, become a term of “folk historiography.” Yet my previous couple of posts, along with this one, make me realize how useful the concept of dark ages can be. There is a lot of interest today in the topic of civilization collapse, partly made respectable by the study of global catastrophic risk and existential risk, which now has the Oxbridge stamp of approval and no longer need be consigned to Chicken Little Status.

A dark age is what happens after the collapse of a civilization, unless some preemption event occurs to change the course of history. In the event that a global catastrophic risk or an existential risk is realized -- whether in the past, now, or in the future -- the result would be either the extinction of civilization or a dark age for civilization. This is a difference that matters, and it would help if we could talk about dark ages without embarrassment in order to make this crucial distinction.  

Friday 14 March 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 332 A Discussion of the Dissolution Threshold …in which I discuss the demographic, historiographical, and institutional dissolution of industrialized civilizations and whether this constitutes a threshold…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/a-discussion-of-the-dissolution-threshold

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/a-discussion-of-the-dissolution-threshold-e15e6b97a93d

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1jnstp5/a_discussion_of_the_dissolution_threshold/

I often speak of civilizations occurring in clusters, frequently mentioning the West Asian Cluster and the Mesoamerican Cluster. In the Mesoamerican cluster, the presence of multiple overlapping civilizations in one geographical region meant a continuing cultural tradition that was adopted and adapted by successive civilizations. For example, the Mesoamerican ball game was common to many civilizations, as was ritual bloodletting. 

In the West Asian cluster we not only find common cultural traditions that overlap and are passed down from one civilization to another, but also the rapid branching of traditions and rapid adaptation of later civilizations to changed conditions, including the changed conditions of surrounding civilizations, for the West Asian cluster has always been the historical stage of many civilizations engaged in relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict.

In Mass Extinction in the West Asian Cluster I characterized the Late Bronze Age (LBA) collapse as a mass extinction of civilizations in the West Asian cluster -- a collapse only survived by Egypt, and although Egypt survived, it was greatly weakened. Partly Egypt was weakened by the assaults of the mysterious “sea peoples,” whose depredations spelled the end of the other civilizations of the West Asian cluster during the LBA collapse, but I think we can also be confident in posting that Egypt was also weakened by the extinction of the other civilizations that had surrounded it. The extinction of these other civilizations meant the extinction of trade and idea diffusion among civilizations of the West Asian cluster, and it was trade and idea diffusion that contributed to the growth and technological development of the civilizations of this cluster.

By contrast, the Indus Valley civilization, though it was geographically large and consisted of perhaps hundreds of cities, was a much more homogeneous and unified social and cultural entity. While its unity meant that this civilization covered a large geographical area compared to other regional civilizations in this period of Earth’s history, its unity also meant that there was much less cross fertilization of ideas and technologies, and, when the Indus Valley civilization collapsed, there was no remaining refugia of civilization to carry forward the traditions of this civilization. The remains of the Indus Valley civilization were covered over and forgotten until excavated by archaeologists in the twentieth century.   

For all practical purposes, the Indus Valley civilization remained below the dissolution threshold, so that the peoples who once constituted the civilization were able to scatter to return to a subsistence level village agriculture or to nomadism. And, to use Redfieldian terms, the little traditions of the remaining agricultural villages were unable to sustain any remnants or fragments of the great tradition cultivated in the urban centers of this civilization. Because the Indus Valley civilization remained below the dissolution threshold, its extinction was the extinction of a regional civilization.

This was not unique or exclusive to the Indus Valley civilization. Until twentieth century archaeology excavated the palaces of Crete, the Minoan civilization had been lost to history except for legend -- however, the legend of it had remained in folk tradition, which is more than has been the case of some effaced civilizations. The Minoans were at the outer edge of the West Asian cluster, and much more isolated than, for example, the peoples who would become the Greeks of the classical age, or even the many civilizations that succeeded each other in Anatolia.

The historicity of the Trojan War is an example of the greater level of preservation of traditions closer to the heart of the West Asian cluster. The Trojan War was a war of the Greek Dark Ages, i.e., it occurred after the LBA collapse and before literacy returned to the Greek peoples. Enough of the memory of the Trojan War was preserved that the story could later be used to partially reconstruct Greek history during this period, and, most famously, to locate the legendary city of Troy.

The West Asian cluster, then, could be said to have passed the dissolution threshold, at least in part, and the relatively higher level of economic activity, literacy, idea diffusion, and technological innovation within the West Asian Cluster prior to the LBA collapse meant that, when the collapse came, it was not as deep and not as prolonged as would have been the case if the regional civilizations of the West Asian cluster had not passed the dissolution threshold.

In the case of a regional cluster of civilizations in which one or a few survive a regional collapse, I think of those surviving civilizations as bridges of civilization that cross a dark age, and so sometimes in my notes to myself I call them “bridge civilizations.” In the West Asian cluster, Egypt was the bridge civilization that weathered the storm of the LBA collapse and kept the light of civilization burning in the region. With this regional beacon of civilization, the revival of trade and idea diffusion would have been facilitated.

In Counterfactuals about Mayan Civilization I wrote that,

“A dark age is what happens after the collapse of a civilization, unless some preemption event occurs to change the course of history. In the event that a global catastrophic risk or an existential risk is realized – whether in the past, now, or in the future – the result would be either the extinction of civilization or a dark age for civilization. This is a difference that matters, and it would help if we could talk about dark ages without embarrassment in order to make this crucial distinction.”   

I would now state this slightly differently, such that a dark age is is what happens when a civilization fails above the dissolution threshold and no preemption event intervenes. However formulated, the point remains: it would be nice to be able to discuss dark ages without being suspected of scholarly malfeasance.

In a similar vein in Supercivilizations and their Cosmological-Scale Dark Ages I wrote:

 “What is needed is a systematic taxonomy for discussing civilizations in their maturity and their decline — perhaps I even ought to say a scientific taxonomy that is able to put aside past ideas that come with moral associations and to identify the stages and phases of civilization in an objective way.”

For years I’ve been thinking about dark ages and the need to be able to discuss them objectively without the negative connotations of term. My recent posts related to the dissolution threshold are part of my ongoing engagement with the idea of dark ages. To speak in terms of the “dissolution” of a civilization carries fewer of the connotations that “dark ages” carries.

One way to get around the bad odor in which the term “dark age” is held is to instead use “suboptimality,” as in “suboptimal civilizations,” which I have done on several occasions. For example, see my Suboptimal Civilizations in Alternative Biospheres and Counterfactual Suboptimal Civilizations of Planetary Endemism and Suboptimal Civilizations. But “suboptimality” implies a condition of failing to achieve an expected level of achievement, whereas a dark age implies a previous achievement followed by a failure to at least maintain that level of development -- something like what Bostrom calls subsequent ruination.

Another way is to discuss social collapse, as Joseph A. Tainter has done in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which I have quoted in Epistemic Collapse. Tainter’s formulation is explicitly political, and I gave a paraphrase of it in terms of knowledge. Any feature of a human society that could be measured in terms of increasing complexity could be similarly formulated in parallel with Tainter’s conception. Indeed, the idea of a generalized collapse could be characterized as the collapse of multiple forms of complexity within a given society. This would be the social equivalent of what economists call co-movement.  

Tainter’s conception might be further developed by distinguishing between different time frames of collapse occurring, for example:

Rapid Collapse: a collapse over 0-10 years

Slow Collapse: a collapse over 10-100 years

Protracted Collapse: a collapse over 100-1,000 years

In the case of the collapse of an extensive civilization like the civilization of classical antiquity represented by Rome, a detailed analysis would probably reveal that there were particular cities that experienced a rapid collapse, and some that experienced a slow collapse, while Roman political institutions mostly experienced a slow collapse, and the civilization on the whole experienced a protracted collapse.

The scale of a collapse could be represented by a graph with rapidity of collapse as the x axis and number of institutions that collapse as the y axis -- sort of like Bostrom’s qualitative risk categories. Bostrom, in fact, includes “global dark age” on his table to qualitative risk categories as a global catastrophic risk of trans-generational scope and endurable severity.

From the perspective of my recent thoughts on the dissolution threshold (as well as some as yet unpublished thoughts on planetary civilization), the idea of a global dark age is precisely what I would expect in a scenario of catastrophic collapse given the de facto planetary civilization of today -- in other words, the planet is well advanced beyond the dissolution threshold. There’s still a lot to do in terms of formulating an adequate conceptual framework for the scientific study of a global dark age. 

In my post on The Dissolution Threshold I observed that when a civilization fails, the population that filled the cities of that civilization must go somewhere. If the civilization fails over a long period of time, urbanized populations have time to otherwise domicile themselves; if the civilization fails rapidly, these is little to do but flee and hope for the best in the least hopeful of circumstances.

I mentioned in that post the possibility of individuals abandoning cities and returning to a hunter-gatherer way of life. This is the paradigm for civilizational dissolution: little or nothing remains of civilization itself, except for the structures and features of the former urbanized areas, which, over time, become archaeological sites. This paradigmatic form of dissolution is probably rarely realized in fact (if ever).

Probably much more frequently that the abandonment of cities and settlement for hunter-gatherer nomadism is the abandonment of cities for village-scale subsistence agriculture. Civilization represents a condition of social organization significantly more complex than subsistence agriculture, but subsistence agriculture is always there as a fall-back position for a people with some knowledge of agriculture but who have been unable to make the complexities of civilization work for them.

The context in which a civilization arises has a lot to do with how dissolution plays out. In a paradigm case of dissolution, there would be an isolated civilization surrounded by an expansive hinterland that could absorb the entire population of the urban areas of the isolated civilization. Keep in mind that population densities of civilizations are far higher than the population densities of hunter-gathers; stated contrary-wise, hunter-gathers require far more space per person than settled agriculturalists, and urbanized populations of an industrialized civilization are even more dense. For these population densities to be absorbed into an uncultivated hinterland, that hinterland would have to be quite large, not otherwise settled by other peoples, and sufficiently productive of game and gatherable foodstuffs (nuts and berries) to keep the formerly urbanized population alive.

For a civilization in the early stages of its development, in which the urbanized populations have not lost touch with subsistence agriculture or living off the land like hunter-gatherers, this transition would be possible, though still difficult. For an industrialized civilization in which the majority of the urbanized population has completely lost touch with the traditions of living off the land, even in the event of partial dissolution of urban areas, most individuals attempting to make the transition would fail because they possess neither the knowledge nor the skills to survive. The specialized occupation by which they earned a living in an urban area would have had little or nothing to do with surviving either by farming or hunting. Such populations would rapidly die off in an extreme dissolution scenario, which would be highly selective: the few who survived would be the strongest and the most ruthless.

There is a tacit recognition of this in popular culture both as reflected in fictional civilizational collapse scenarios and in the understanding among “preppers” what a post-collapse scenario is likely to look like. None of these scenarios feature urbanized populations making a transition to hunting and gathering, but rather feature increasingly desperate nomads willing to fight and kill over the remaining resources left behind by a now-vanished civilization. This is the fate of civilized populations experiencing failure when well above the dissolution threshold.

In the case of a paradigmatic dissolution, a civilization would be well below the dissolution threshold. In the case of a messy, catastrophic failure, a civilization would be well above the dissolution threshold. In the case in which a civilization hovers at the cusp of the dissolution threshold, then I suspect that it is much more likely that dissolution primarily results in village-scale subsistence agriculture rather than hunter-gatherer nomadism.

This seems to have been the case with the failure of Mayan civilization, which I discussed in Counterfactuals about Mayan Civilization. The long, slow decline of Mayan civilization meant that formerly urbanized populations could abandon urban areas and resume the kind of subsistence agriculture that probably preceded the emergence of civilization in Mesoamerica. As I noted in my post, a couple of Mayan cities were still extant when the Spanish arrived, so that some holdout urban populations managed to keep their civilization alive at a much lower level of complexity and geographical extent. When Mayan civilization failed, then, I would say that it was on the cusp of the dissolution threshold.   

In Opting in and Opting out of Civilization, I mentioned having found a copy of Man’s Rise to Civilization by Peter Farb. When I looked up the book on Amazon I did what I often do with unfamiliar books: I look at the one star reviews. If the one star reviews (if there are any) are simply complaints that the book failed to validate the reviewer’s narrative, or the reviewer is merely spewing ressentiment, there is a good chance that the book is as good as the four star reviews claim it to be. On the other hand, if the one star reviews are intelligent and well written, then the four star reviews are probably shills and true believers and can be safely set aside.

There was a single one-star review of Farb’s book, which read:

Please read Vine Deloria Jr's book Custer Died for Your Sins, chapter 4 to get an understanding of the damage this book has done in its perpetuation of negative stereotypes and misportrayal of indigenous peoples in the U.S. Aka hogwash. (Should be zero stars, but not an option)

While I don’t consider this comment to be especially well-written or well thought out, it does give a specific reference, so, of course, I had to look up Custer Died for your Sins. the full title of which is Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. One would expect that the book that announces itself as a manifesto in its subtitle would be polemical, and perhaps even aggressively polemical. Deloria does not disappoint on this score.

I am interested in Farb’s book for what it says about civilization; Deloria condemns Farb’s book for what it says about Indians, and for what he believes to be the policy implications for Indians of the ideas in Farb’s book. I must admit I’m not really interested in the policy implications of Farb’s book, and I sincerely doubt that there was any such influence. Even if a government bureaucrat read Farb’s book -- even if the entire Department of the Interior read Farb’s book -- the possibility that a scholarly study of the native civilizations of North America would influence US Government policy on Indian reservations or the Bureau of Indian Affairs is ludicrous at best.

Here is a sample of Deloria’s take on Farb:

“Farb's basic assumption is that somehow Indians have risen to civilized heights by being the victims of four centuries of systematic genocide. Under these assumptions the European Jews should be the most civilized people on earth from their graduate course in gas ovens given by Eichmann.”

Needless to say, this is not Farb’s basic assumption. Deloria is closer to the truth, but no less venomous, in this passage:

“Farb continues to use phrases such as ‘test tubes’ and ‘living laboratories’ in describing the development, or rather unfolding, of Indian cultural change. In essence, then, Indian communities exist primarily for people to experiment with. Bureaucratically this means ‘pilot projects.’ Anthropologically, as we have seen, it means the continued treatment of Indian people as objects for observation.”

This is a malicious take on Farb’s approach -- Deloria here is like Santayana’s book Egotism in German Philosophy, published in 1916 during the First World War, when all things German were taken to be euphemisms for barbarism -- but it least it does have some justification.

I must confess I was delighted with Farb’s methodological conceit of viewing North America as a kind of laboratory for civilizations. Farb’s approach was implicitly integral with an intuitive understanding of what I recently called the dissolution theshold: the Native American civilizations of North American all remained below the dissolution threshold, and so the study of civilization in North America is a perfect opportunity to study different permutations of civilization in isolation.

If it sounds cold and bloodless to describe the historical development of the peoples of North America in this way, I assure you that it is no more cold and bloodless than to describe the development of western civilization, or indeed of any civilization, in dispassionate scientific terms. I know from personal experience that when one attempts to be dispassionate in the analysis of what, for someone else, constitutes what Paul Tillich would have called their “ultimate concern,” that such an attitude is not received as being neutral or objective, but is perceived as sacrilege and an attack upon what is seen as due piety. And I have seen this even, if not especially, when one treats the meanings of values of one’s own civilization in this kind of unsentimental way. 

A degree of defarmiliarization is a necessary prerequisite to arriving at a scientific understanding of any object of knowledge; when that necessary defamiliarization means that one must renounce the human, all-too-human that necessarily informs the human sciences, then there is often hell to pay.

Clifford Geertz once said that Foucault was an “anti-humanist human scientist.” Exactly. We should all be anti-humanist human scientists if we aspire to any knowledge in the human sciences. This isn’t going to win friends or influence people, but it will advance the cause of scientific knowledge. If Custer died for our sins, let his death not be in vain.       

It is a source of fascination for many persons, myself included, that there are to be found throughout the world, in almost every climate and every cultural region, abandoned cities from the past. In some few cases we have enough documentation to give as a clear idea of how a great metropolis came to an end, but in most cases urban dissolution is a mystery. I dealt with one particular expression of this mystery some time ago in Why did Roman cities Fail?

When a sufficient number of cities appear within a given region and period, we take this to be a civilization. Archaeologist and prehistorian V. Gordon Childe called this the “urban revolution,” and a famous paper that we wrote about the urban revolution has since come to play an out-sized role in the definition of civilization, because the ten properties that Childe identified with the urban revolution are frequently invoked as marking a civilization.

If the appearance of a sufficient number of cities coincides with the appearance of a civilization, then the disappearance of a sufficient number of cities may coincide with the failure or collapse of a civilization. In the particular case of the failure of urbanization in the western Roman Empire, the period of history that follows has been called the “Dark Ages.”

Most historians no longer use the term “Dark Ages” to refer to the period in Western European history immediately following the collapse of Roman imperial power in the west. One might even say that the term belongs to “folk historiography,” yet despite the term falling out of favor there was some justice in its use. There have been several “dark ages” in planetary history when socio-political institutions have nearly ceased to function and the cultivation of the arts and sciences reached a low ebb.  

Dark ages follow the dissolution of a civilization, but how the dissolution of a civilization comes about is a function of many factors, and so the following dark age is a function (at least in part) of these factors. In my previous post, Opting in and Opting out of Civilization, I mentioned an idea that I call the dissolution threshold. The dissolution threshold is the threshold below which a civilization can fail and be largely effaced from history, and above which a civilization, even if it fails, is propped by neighboring civilizations, or its population is absorbed into neighboring civilizations.

Civilizations below the dissolution threshold can slowly fade back into nature, and very little is changed by the dissolution, whereas civilizations above the dissolution threshold result in traumatic die offs or extreme social disruption if they collapse. In the case of civilizations below the dissolution threshold, we aren’t likely to identify the post-civilizational condition as being a “dark age” because the population has been scattered and has more-or-less successfully returned to a non-civilized state. We tend to think of dark ages when something has been preserved of a failed civilization -- i.e., a civilization that fails at or above the dissolution threshold.

After I posted this about the dissolution threshold in Opting in and Opting out of Civilization, I received a very perceptive comment from Sam Lichtenstein on Google Plus, which read:

The dissolution threshold is a nice idea because (perhaps among other reasons) it seems like it applies on many scales, related to the magnitude of the boundaries that constitute the hinterlands and wilderness, relative to the technological level of the civilizations in question. Scattered bands on hunter-gatherers on an isolated island -> ... -> "civilizations" in the sense of Sid Meier games, when separated by impassible mountain ranges / oceans / linguistic divides / etc -> ...  Eventually you get to stuff with obvious SETI/METI implications.

There are several aspects of the dissolution threshold. The idea first occurred to me when I was thinking about isolated civilizations. Specifically, I was thinking of the Nazca civilization, which is largely isolated by the desert to the east and the ocean to the west, though there was probably some traffic connecting the Nazca to other civilizations in Peru by long distance trade networks.

The Nazca civilization seems to have emerged in the desert, flourished for a time like an isolated flower, and then withered. Given the low population density of the region, and the fact that the Nazca civilization was not all that large, the populations that made up the Nazca civilization could have returned to something like a hunter-gatherer way of life simply by abandoning the Nazca centers and returning to the surrounding wilderness. The Nazca civilization, then, was below a threshold such that its dissolution could be absorbed by the surrounding environment.

One aspect of the dissolution threshold, then, is the ability of a concentrated urban population center to not exceed the carrying capacity of the regional ecology for the number of human beings housed in urban circumstances, should they transition from an urban way of life back to a hunter-gatherer way of life. If an urban area grows to a sufficiently large size, or if region of the civilization in question is surrounded by other civilizations, the population could not disperse to once again adopt a non-civilized mode of life. Or, rather, do to so would come at a cost of a loss of life -- whether a die off, from the surrounding countryside not being able to absorb the urban population, or from conflicts with the peoples of surrounding civilizations, who would not welcome the depredations of refugees from a collapsed civilization.

A somewhat different version of the dissolution threshold was played out further north in the Americas by the Mayans. The Mayans built a tropical civilization in Mesoamerica that consisted of a large number of densely populated urban areas distributed throughout the rainforest. The Maya civilization was long-lived, with a classic period that endured almost a thousand years from about 250 to 900 AD, followed by a very long twilight and decline. Even as the Aztec civilization arose north of the Maya, the Maya continued in their long decline, and there were still a couple of remaining Maya cities when the Spanish arrived.

After the Europeans arrived, of course, many if not most of the Mayan people were killed by virgin soil epidemics, further depleting the Mesoamerican population, but by this time Mesoamerica had already fallen well below the population levels seen at the height of the Mayan civilization. But the Mayan people still exist to this day, even though their distinctive civilization is only a memory. The long, slow collapse of Mayan civilization meant a long, slow dissolution of that civilization as the Mayan people adopted a kind of subsistence agriculture that kept the Mayan people alive but didn’t produce the kind of surplus value that made something like the Mayan civilization possible.

This highlights another aspect of the dissolution threshold: the duration of the dissolution matters for the transition of formerly civilized peoples into a condition of less sophisticated social institutions. This also is illustrated by the decline and fall of Rome, as civic order and institutions waxed and waned over centuries with each recovery being a little less successful than the previous recovery. In the case of Roman civilization, the form of social organization formerly urbanized peoples adopted after they retreated from the urban centers was the rural manorial estate. The hinterlands of Europe at this time were sufficiently sparsely populated that, given this slow decline, the former urban populations of the western Roman Empire could be absorbed into a less sophisticated rural economy.

Planetary civilization today is clearly above the dissolution threshold, and indeed we could define a planetary civilization in terms of a level of integration of formerly regional civilizations that results in raising the population of the intelligent agents responsible for a civilization above the dissolution threshold. This is, at the same time, an existential risk for this population of intelligent agents and its planetary civilization, which finds itself “locked in” to its civilizational project, knowing that it is above the dissolution threshold and cannot turn back without catastrophic consequences. 

The dissolution threshold for spacefaring civilization is much, much higher than the dissolution threshold for planetary civilization. In other words, civilizations that aspire to the scale of spacefaring must become very large and very densely populated indeed before they could not disperse without a trace. Given the high dissolution threshold for spacefaring civilizations, we should expect that whatever spacefaring civilizations there are mostly have disappeared or will disappear without a trace. 

If we were living in a densely populated universe we would know it; prolixity would likely mean diversity, and diversity would mean that a significant minority of civilizations in a densely populated universe would behave as we expect other civilizations to behave, and we would find them or they would find us. Since this has not happened, we live, at best, in a sparsely populated universe. A sparsely populated universe, like a sparsely populated planet, if it hosts civilizations, these civilizations are likely well below the dissolution threshold. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that spacefaring civilizations below the dissolution threshold are effaced from the universe with little or no trace, which would be one way of understanding the Great Silence that is for us the expression of the Fermi paradox. 

Obviously this exposition is a bit confused. Despite having held off of an exposition of the dissolution threshold for several years, since I haven’t actively cultivated the idea, but only kept it in the back of my mind, I haven’t brought it to a level of development that could dispel some of the confusions and conflations in the above comments. Think of it, then, if you can find the charity to do so, as a number of thoughts assembled under the umbrella of the “dissolution threshold,” which further analysis might transform into a workable concept for the study of civilization.

Further Posts on the Dissolution Threshold

Counterfactuals about Mayan Civilization (Tumblr)

On the Cusp of the Dissolution Threshold (Tumblr)

Dark Ages, Suboptimality, and Collapse (Tumblr)

The Dissolution Threshold in the West Asian Cluster (Tumblr)

Civilization and the Dissolution Threshold: How Individuals and Communities Opt Out of the Social Paradigm (Medium)

The Dissolution Threshold: Dark Ages, Thought Experiments, and Counterfactuals (Medium)

The Dissolution Threshold in the West Asian Cluster: Egypt’s Role as a “Bridge Civilization” (Medium)

Throughout my adult life I have visited used book stores not to look for any particular book (though sometimes I do look for a particular book, in addition to browsing) but mostly just to look for interesting books that I haven’t previously heard of. I regard this as a form of “research,” though you will notice that I have put “research” in scare quotes. One can engage in focused research in which one carefully reads the bibliography of a book in order to find references to further books and articles on the same topic, as well as using obvious research tools (like search engines, JSTOR, etc.) to deepen one’s knowledge of a given subject matter. There is also, however, a more freely floating form of research in which one takes whatever comes to hand to see what light it can shed on a topic of interest. Visiting used book stores and browsing through books one has never before seen can serve this function of freely floating research.

On a recent trip to a Goodwill store in Portland -- the one I know has the largest selection of used books at a cheap price -- I was unusually lucky in finding a number of books on civilization previously unknown to me: Man’s Rise to Civilization by Peter Farb, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations edited by Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, and The Threshold of Civilization: An Experiment in Prehistory by Walter A. Fairservis, Jr. (By the way, these books, all paperbacks, cost be $3.99 each.) All of these have proved to be interesting books from which I have already derived ideas that I will put to use, but I want to especially mention the last one, which is arguably the most experimental and speculative of the bunch. 

In the last paragraph of the Introduction to the Fairservis book the author writes:

“Some men achieved civilization in the past and passed it on as a potential for all individuals; it has not, however, been accepted by all individuals, even through paradoxically all individuals live within it.” (p. 9)

This is a powerful idea, and one that could be developed and extrapolated in interesting ways. I have touched upon this without making it as fully explicit, which is probably why the idea spoke to be as it did when I happened to read it.

Prior to the advent of civilization, the natural world was the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) for human beings; since the advent of civilization, and its spread across the planet entire, civilization has been the EEA for subsequent human evolution, although civilization has not yet persisted for a biologically significant period of time. And this is true whether or not one opts in or opts out of civilization. Of course, there are a small few number of persons who seek to opt out of civilization by disappearing into the wilderness, but it is much more common for individuals to opt out of civilization and still continue to live within civilization, which is now virtually omnipresent on Earth.

All individuals (at least, almost all individuals) live within civilization even if they do not accept civilization. It seems fairly obvious to me that there is a continuum of engagement with civilization, from those who are most embedded within it, and whose lives are most constituted by it, followed by degrees of disengagement such that an individual is progressively less embedded in civilization and is less constituted by it.  

Given degrees of engagement with and disengagement from civilization, an individual or a community of individuals might change their degree of engagement over time, either moving away from civilization or drawing closer to civilization, all the while living within civilization because there is very little choice in the matter, given the pervasive presence of civilization today.

While civilization is pervasive, if Fairservis is right about this (and I believe that he is right), it admits of exceptions and ellipses. These exceptions may be as small and insignificant as the individual, or perhaps as small as a single idea entertained by a single individual, or an exception may be as large as a community. If a community (and not merely an individual) increasingly opts out of civilization, and if this community is growing, this exception to civilization can grow to destabilizing dimensions within civilization, and this would be one explanation (though not the only explanation) of civilizational collapse.

In earlier epochs of terrestrial history, when civilization was less pervasive, a growing community that opts out of civilization that occurs within a given civilization might result in the civilization collapsing completely and the populations that previously constituted that civilization scattering into the wilderness of a less populated world. At some point the world becomes increasingly populated by civilizations so that, when one civilization collapses, its refugees can be absorbed by another civilization and the record of the collapsed civilization is not entirely effaced because it lives on in the memory of the individuals who have been absorbed into another civilization.

This latter idea -- a threshold below which the gains of civilization are lost, and above which they are at least partially retained even when that civilization collapses -- I have called the dissolution threshold. I’ve been meaning to write about this for years, but I haven’t until now found the proper opportunity to do so. This does not constitute an adequate or satisfying exposition of the dissolution threshold, but it is at least the first mention I believe I have made of the idea, and hopefully I will have the opportunity to expand upon it if it proves to be a fruitful idea.