Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization

okay so since you're the expert i'm just going to jump right in on stuff you know well um so can you tell us and this is again a film for the everyday person so as simply as you can can you tell us what makes civilizations run properly and what are the components of a healthy civilization we can what are the components of a healthy civilization and what makes a civilization run properly we can think of a civilization as the cultural tradition of large complex societies we think of civilizations in such terms as traditions of art and architecture and literature traditions of government manners of speech how people relate to each other but what underlies all of these are the institutions of complex societies uh institutions of government institutions of business informal organizations in which we all participate and these institutions in in civilizations tend to be quite complex what i mean by complex is that they consist of a large number of different parts and the parts are integrated to make a whole so that the whole functions as a coherent entity rather than the parts functioning individually an example would be a business firm where there are departments of finance production innovation marketing sales personnel and so forth that all can cohere together to make a functional whole that make a system a complex system complex institutions exist to achieve things they exist to solve problems and yet the problem with complexity the challenge of complexity is that it always costs we can think of complexity in our own lives and the cost that it imposes on us living in our own complex society the costs include such things as paying taxes filling out forms standing in lines answering email mastering all of the technologies that we each have to master and just the overall congestion of our lives increase in complexity in a society or in any smaller institution always increases costs and so if we talk about a healthy society or a healthy civilization we have to think of it in terms of a balance of benefits to costs and that balance is never static that balance changes over time so if you look historically at how civilizations evolve very often that balance of benefits to costs tends to deteriorate and when it deteriorates uh beyond a certain point this is when societies start to be in trouble is it possible for civilizations to go away to fall and what causes that collapse is it possible for civilizations to go away to fall in what can cause a collapse if we think of civilizations as cultural traditions some parts are always changing some parts remain static for long periods of time different civilizations sometimes exchange elements and behaviors between each other so it's really more interesting to talk about complexity going away if if a civilization is dependent on complex institutions then a collapse is a simplification it's the loss of a level of complexity and this does happen historically i can think of about two dozen cases one of the most common trends in human history has been over the last 12 000 years a seemingly inexorable increase in the complexity of human societies and human institutions and yet this trend is periodically punctuated by instances of collapse where societies simplify over a fairly short period of time often this is accompanied by great loss of life the great traditions of art and architecture and literature are often lost so that subsequently there may be centuries of what are called dark ages can you give us examples of ones that people may know of yeah there are many examples of civilizations or complex societies collapsing perhaps the best known example is the western roman empire which collapsed during the course of the 5th century a.d and plunged europe subsequently into what became known as the dark ages and then there are others as well there's maya civilization of what's now guatemala the central part of guatemala the lowlands which developed over several centuries the people built great pyramids and cities earthworks and waterworks this area supported a very high density of people and yet within a century it all went away their civilization had not only collapsed it largely disappeared there are other examples as well um in ancient greece long before the period of classical greece uh during the bronze age in the late 1200s 1100s bc there was a civilization known as the mycenaeans mycenaean civilization persisted for several centuries and then it too collapsed in what's today iraq what historians refer to as mesopotamia there were at least two collapses one is known as the the third dynasty of ur which collapsed late in the second millennium bc and later on in the late first millennium a.d another civilization an islamic civilization called the abbasid caliphate collapsed and the results of these collapses were so devastating that there are parts of iraq that are still uninhabitable uh because to support their complex societies they had to intensively cultivate the land through irrigation and the result of this was that they terribly salinized their agricultural fields and ultimately agricultural production declined their energy bases went away and the civilizations couldn't be maintained and there are parts of iraq to this day that are still devastated by these events that happened centuries and even millennia before i remember from your book you were counting the ick yes do you mind from the camera just telling for everyone how bad it can get the disintegration of what we know is normal as a human life perhaps an extreme example of collapse is an african people known as the ick who were studied by an anthropologist in the 1960s the ick represent almost the extreme of collapse or complete loss of what we consider human society and human sociability and interdependence in the the icar and atomized society each individual has to fend for him or herself there are almost no social institutions left children are born but at about the age of three they are put out to fend for themselves and those that survive do manage to fend for themselves individuals will not assist each other they won't help each other they don't cooperate ick society has become atomized down to the level of the individual so that there's no cooperation there's no sociability people don't help each other and so this the society as we would consider society really has disappeared it no longer exists and people suffer greatly because of this i want to talk about the loss of complexity a little bit and just to help us understand what that means when you go from a complex structure to a simple structure what are you what about that structure you lose and it makes it go too simple when a society collapses and becomes simpler what are some of the things that are lost well to bring this home to our lives consider the potential future collapse of our own civilization if it were ever to happen we hope that it doesn't but it's possible that it could consider what would be lost simply in terms of our access to health care throughout most of human history the average life expectancy has only been about 48 to 50 years and by the time one was in one's 40s one would be old we have overcome these limits today through industrialized complex medicine that's supported by the energy basis of our society by fossil fuels think of the consequences if we were to lose this this complex institution something that we consider simple today like appendicitis would once again become a gruesome way to die and many people would die from it our life expectancy would decline tremendously which is something that one sees going on in russia today with the demise of the soviet union other institutions also simplify in a collapse generally the government becomes much simpler if there's any government left at all the scale of territories that are incorporated into a single society often shrink knowledge of distant places and distant people goes away many specialties go away producers of art and literature for example suddenly find that there are no more markets for their work and so we find that there are then dark ages these are some of the consequences of a collapse but perhaps the most devastating of all is that collapses usually involve a great loss of population in the case of the maya civilization of the lowlands at one time there were millions of people living there and it was in fact one of the most densely populated areas of the pre-industrial world but within a century approximately 90 percent of those people left or died the population declined by as much as 90 percent how would you describe our current civilization as an american civilization at western civilization who's a part of that civilization who isn't is it global how would i describe our current american civilization is it a western civilization is it global civilizations as i say are cultural traditions and today there's a great deal of sharing in cultural traditions i think it's perhaps more meaningful to talk about the industrial way of life the industrial way of life is something um that has been achieved in in a select group of nations and we can think of the world today as perhaps divided into three groups there are those who were members of this group to varying degrees there are others other nations who would like to be part of it who would like to become part of the wealthy industrial world and then there's an outside group who seem to actively reject it often these people who rejected are cultural or religious conservatives in traditional societies who believe that the influence of westernism and industrialism is corrupting to their societies and there's there's great conflict uh that arises from uh this division of the world between those who have those who want to have and those who reject is if this is would you say that the industrial civilization is global and does it impact does that increase its complexity and thus its survivability is the industrial civilization global and does that affect complexity and survivability the answer is definitely yes and it affects in particular the survivability of local communities i did a study recently in which i was surprised to find two remote areas of the world utterly unconnected to each other that in recent years have gone down very similar paths one area was my the northern part of my home state of new mexico and the other area is appears a remote region mountainous region in the northwest part of greece i was surprised to find when i read about appearance that this remote area went down a path that was very similar to what i've seen happen in northern new mexico local communities lose autonomy they lose their independence communities break up people stop practicing their traditional subsistence they stop maintaining their environment and so the environment deteriorates uh in both of these areas the forests have grown overly dense with woody plants that are prone to fire and yet at the same time there's a great increase in erosion and i wondered how is it that these unrelated places have managed to go down these parallel paths well the reason is globalization what has happened with globalization is that localities and local people in their communities are affected by distant forces that largely they're unaware of by distant economic and political forces that they may never hear about so it's almost as if these sudden these new problems that they confront fall out of the sky they don't understand where these problems come from i've talked about this at a lot of meetings and every time i talk about it someone comes up to me and says yes that's just like the people i study and i think this is a global problem with globalization that as as material goods flow and as the economy broadens and as the globe becomes more integrated the flow of information has not kept up so the people in local communities still live a local life a life of local information rather than understanding the broader processes that are affecting them because we are all becoming interdependent on these material flows does doesn't make us more vulnerable to a collapse because it's it it's that much harder because it is an international system because we're now largely globalized we have a global economy raw materials manufactured goods and money flow around the world does this somehow make us more vulnerable i think that it does as places lose self-sufficiency as a as a nation such as the united states for example no longer manufactures very much in the way of textiles what were to happen if our supply of textiles from the far east for example were to be disrupted for whatever reason and we can think of this problem of disruption of supply of the things that we depend on is being possibly one of the consequences of globalization globalization depends on a fleet of ships out on the sea trying to meet deadlines trying to be in in their ports on time trying to be in their ports on time and this flow of goods really depends on these tight timetables it depends on having adequate energy adequately priced energy and any disruption suddenly leaves a nation unable to import some of the goods on which it suddenly relies but may no longer produce what energy does our civilization depend on and do we have enough of it what civilization does our energy depend on and do we have enough of it well of course we rely primarily on fossil fuels particularly petroleum also coal and natural gas and because we rely on these everything we do is subsidized i can offer a personal anecdote of how these subsidies work my wife and i recently went shopping for some furniture in an ikea store it was the first time i'd been in one of those and i was pleasantly surprised to see the low prices pleasantly surprised to get to the checkout stand and find how low the total bill was and i wondered how they were able to offer nice furniture at such a low price and then i realized that the price was subsidized by centuries of photosynthesis and forest nutrients that subsidize the growing of the forests that are being harvested to produce the furniture in the same way on a larger scale all of us are subsidized in our lives by fossil fuels fossil fuels underlie everything that we do and because of fossil fuels we don't really pay the full price of anything that we consume to a certain extent to a very large extent much of the price was paid millennia ago when fossil fuels were being formed so our civilization depends on fossil fuels our economy depends on them our way of life nearly everything that we do on a daily basis is subsidized by fossil fuels as we've all experienced recently the price of fossil fuels is increasing and it's increasing quite rapidly does this mean that we are soon going to run out of fossil fuels probably not but it's worthwhile to investigate whether we're at a transition point now where fossil fuels are going to continue to become scarcer and to grow more expensive and we have to ask ourselves if that is the case what will be the consequences for our civilization for our way of life for our ability to address our problems what are the substitutes are there substitutes for since it if we are in transition what are we transitioning to do we have time to transition to a technology that would fill the place of oil what are the substitutes for fossil fuels what might we rely upon in the future one possibility is nuclear but it has never fulfilled its potential and it's not clear that it ever will there are grave concerns about nuclear fuels nuclear fusion technology has has not progressed to the point where it's usable or economical and again it's not clear that it ever will so the alternatives appear to be renewables many people favor renewables and there are very good reasons for favoring them but using renewables would also have consequences one of the characteristics of fossil fuels is that they tend to be very high in quality which is to say that they have many calories of potential heating value packed into a fairly small compact package renewable fuels are not the same solar energy is diffuse very little of it falls on any given square meter of land surface what that means is this is that if we have a future dependent on let's say solar energy whether it's solar energy directly our solar energy driving wind to achieve the same level of energy consumption that we have today is going to require a much larger land area than we currently allocate to energy now we think our current way of energy use is very destructive of the environment but it's sobering to realize that a future based on renewable energy sources may actually take in more of the environment than we currently use now possibilities including recreating coastlines to capture wave energy we've already done this to a certain extent by damning many rivers um creating lakes that extend for tens of kilometers sometimes as much as 100 kilometers or more and we've destroyed habitats with this we've disrupted species and we've lost much natural beauty by building hydroelectric dams this i'm afraid is part of the future that we may face that we are going to have to make choices even more severe choices than we make now about how much land area and how much environmental destruction we're willing to tolerate to produce the energy that we need on the other hand i think there are positive aspects to a future based on renewables particularly if the production of renewable energy is not centralized let's envision a future in which renewable energy is produced by individual households perhaps dispersed over the landscape individual households producing solar or wind energy for their own use so that the individuals in those households become cognizant of energy they're aware of where it comes from and how much of it they use they can decide how much to use they can come up with ways of conserving it they can figure out the best use of it and the best ratio of benefits to costs so the problem with the future is that there's no free lunch we have decisions to make about what kind of future we want and there are pluses and minuses to any path that we take so in your opinion what is the state of our civilization now in terms of our complexity and the energy that we're using to maintain the complexity do you do you think about this about where we're headed and if we're in transition what is the state of our civilization now in terms of the energy that we use its complexity whether we're heading for a transition and what is our direction we are clearly the most complex civilization that's existed on earth with the most complex institutions of problem solving and those institutions are also quite effective through industrial production methods and with the use of energy we have solved many of the problems that plagued humanity for all of its existence we've greatly reduced problems of hunger people owned enough clothes there was a time in our fairly recent past when most people would own one pair of clothing today we can't imagine owning only one set of clothes people have access to health care they have education and so we've accomplished great things through our approaches to problem solving but this all depends on having the resources to continue it it all depends on having sources of energy that are abundant and affordable and it appears that sometime within the next century we will probably be going through a transition out of our dependence on fossil fuels and into a new era in which we may be relying on renewable sources of energy do i think that the transition will be graceful or is there a potential for a dark age i'm not sure that i know and i think there is potential for a dark age one of the problems that i see is that so many people who have to individually accept the cost of the transition are unaware that it's coming most of our citizens wake up in the morning and worry about the morning commute and getting the kids to school and paying the mortgage and thinking about a new car or a vacation or whatever and this is simply too narrow a scale of thinking to address the problems that we have we need people to be aware of the global forces that affect their lives and that will increasingly affect their lives in the future if this awareness doesn't develop then i'm afraid the transition will probably be wrenching and by wrenching what do you mean i'm afraid if this awareness doesn't develop then i'm afraid that the transition will probably be abrupt difficult and painful for many of us yes some people believe that our civilization has arrived at a bottleneck you know wilson talks about that in which the carrying capacity of the biosphere is in such a place that humanity we will have to radically change our ways or stand to lose billions of people now i know a lot of what you talk about is as the cause for collapse do you thought think at all about what it means to overshoot your resources as a source of collapse and in terms of the bottleneck do you see us in currently in a bottleneck where we're overshooting our resources are we currently approaching a bottleneck where we're going to overshoot our resources and potentially collapse societies in the past collapsed when they were unable to solve their problems or when they couldn't afford to solve their problems a major challenge that i see for the future is a convergence of problems each of which alone is a very great magnitude and that together may be overwhelming think in terms of all of the problems that are going to converge the very large problems that are going to converge in the next several decades global warming for example what are going to be the consequences the costs of adjusting to global warming how is the world going to absorb let us say half the population of bangladesh if so much of that nation is going to go underwater combine that with the looming problems in industrial societies of funding retirement pensions for the baby boomers the people my age the rising costs of health care the costs of our military spending the cost of rebuilding our infrastructure what i'm afraid i see in the future is a collision of all of these things converging at once and costing enormous amounts of money so how are we going to adjust to this how are we going to pay for it how are we going to have the wealth to solve the environmental problems that that we have created through through industrialism it's possible that there will have to be much higher taxes in the future or in some other way our children and our grandchildren are simply going to have a lower standard of living to pay for all of these problems that are converging it's possible also if one wants to be hopeful that as we transition to new energy sources that we may have bountiful new sources of energy and that the technology of producing these and will and that the technology of producing these will produce a new economic wave a new economic upturn so that we generate the wealth to solve the problems but we hope one hopes that as we go through this transition that we develop a new awareness a new consciousness of how what we do now affects things affects people in the next generation and in the generation after that just as things that happened centuries ago affect us today so in your opinion just to go back to the perfect storm what are the forces that are making up the bottleneck global warming so could you restate them maybe in a full pointless what are the forces that are making up the bottleneck one can see a concatenation of problems emerging global warming is just one of the environmental problems that we are facing our loss of biodiversity our loss of tropical forests erosion loss of sources of clean water all of these are problems that are going to be costly to address and in the future we're going to have to choose whether to address them and decide whether we can afford to we add to these problems that affect some individual nations particularly industrial nations these include such things as funding the retirement pensions of baby boomers such as myself rising costs of health care rising costs of military investment increasing costs of repairing the decaying infrastructure that we see all about us we're going to incur very high costs to address these problems in the future and i think we are going to have to decide whether we can address all of them or whether we may simply decide not to resolve some of them i think there are some societies in the past that were confronted with very high costs for addressing their problems and simply decided not to simply realized that they could not afford to address their problems and accepted almost a voluntary collapse instead what do you think will get us through the bottleneck or what can we do to avoid a collapse is something like this avoidable and are there different kinds of collapse how will we get through this bottleneck can we go down gently are there different types of collapses can we navigate our way through it can the engineers come up with a solution to get us through this these are questions that time will tell to a certain extent we can foresee what the possibilities are but we really don't know how things will turn out what we can say is that we are a species that tends to muddle through we rarely plan long term we tend to encounter problems and develop short-term solutions to get us through the immediate problem without thinking out what are the long-term consequences not only of the problem but of our solution to the problem and sometimes those consequences can ramify out for decades or even centuries if we want to do something more than muddle through i believe we need to expand our educational system so that people become can be taught to be aware of the converging problems and the fact that these problems are distant and long-term and to be curious about the forces that affect their lives but that they don't see around them every day i'd like to see our educational institutions emphasize teaching children to think about things that are distant in time and space and how those things might affect their lives how do problems in indonesia affect the lives of people in los angeles for example how does unrest in china affect our foreign policy and in turn how does unrest in china affect the availability of things that we depend on in our in our markets these are all the kinds of things that children need to be taught to be curious about children also need to be taught to be curious about long-term developments because what happens today is a reflection of things that have been developing over very long periods over historical time generations even several centuries so that we really can't understand our predicament today unless we know how that predicament has come about so i'd like to see our educational system expanded so that children would learn to be curious about things that are distant in time and distant in space and to understand how all of those connect and influence their own lives and if we could develop that awareness in a generation or two of systematic education then we might have a citizenry who are truly involved in understanding environmental issues and issues of problem solving and complexity and are committed to and able to resolve them from an environmental standpoint what is the biggest problem you think we are facing from an environmental standpoint what is the biggest problem that we are facing i think the biggest problem is clearly to develop new sources of clean abundant and affordable energy energy is the key to everything else that we do with abundant and affordable and clean energy we can solve a lot of other problems without it we're not going to be able to solve very many problems at all i would also mention global warming which is producing a scale of changes that humanity has never confronted before we can't even begin to calculate what it's going to cost to adjust to address the problems that are being generated by global change but the first priority has to be energy with abundant energy there's much that we can accomplish and what are we renewables again but what energy is there enough i've read in some other authors to say that um renewable energy just can't work it's not enough and we can't generate enough renewables really to replace oil they're just not it just is not an equivalent do you think about that and what gives you the most what are you most excited about in the clean abundant energy section it's often suggested that renewable energy sources cannot replace oil that they simply cannot produce the level of energy that we're used to consuming today and on one level this is correct energy produced from petroleum is very high in quality which is to say that it has many calories per unit of measure and so you can accomplish a lot of work with it whereas solar energy or other things that we derive from solar energy such as wind energy produce very little energy per unit of surface area let's say per square meter of land and so we are going to be devoting a large part of the earth's land surface to producing energy and this is simply a sacrifice that we're going to have to make if we want to continue to have the level of energy that we're accustomed to today we can hope that as renewable energy sources begin to become established that there will be technical improvements we're almost certain there will be technical improvements that increase their efficiency and that might allow us perhaps to reduce the area of land that has to be allocated to them but if we want to continue our present way of life or something like our present way of life we're probably going to have to make the sacrifice of accepting the allocation of large areas of land to energy production renewable energy production would you advocate changing our lifestyle in order to preserve the environment scaling us down a little bit rather than continuing to deform the planet for sort of our you know consumer based society would i advocate changing our lifestyle so that we have less of let's say an ecological footprint so that we consume less of the earth's resources this is a moral question that i think every individual has to decide for themselves i think that to bring the mass of our citizens along in designing solutions to the future they have to be given hope that they can continue a high quality of life a life that gives them opportunity and fulfillment and health inadequate food and housing i think there's a possibility there are many possibilities for technical improvements to bring this about but there may also need to be a revolution in how we think how we feel a moral revolution one of the greatest challenges that we face in this in our country in regard to planning for the future is simply that our political system is dysfunctional there are too many politicians who benefit personally by frightening people about the future by convincing people that they don't really need to change some of them maybe may actually some of these politicians may actually believe that we don't need to change but others are simply cynical they're simply doing it for their own self-interest without regard for the future it's important that we have regard for the future the future is where our children will live what do we owe future generations what do we owe future generations i believe we owe future generations opportunity it's difficult to know what the future will need people 300 years ago could not possibly have foreseen the way we live today and they could not possibly have planned what kind of earth to leave to us they wouldn't know what kind of earth we would need and so similarly we can't envision really what our descendants 100 years from now will need but what we can try to preserve is as broad a range of opportunities as possible and i think this will emerge from again energy development attempting to restore some of the environmental damage that industrialization has caused and that overpopulation has caused trying to find the many people in the third world more productive ways to live so that they don't need to degrade their farmland as extensively as they're forced to now these are the components of things that we can leave for the future yeah yeah yeah actually i'm working on on overshoot now um and you don't really think it that's a core part of collapse it's more complex well what i'm finding i'm doing a literature synthesis now what i'm finding is that there are actually not very many collapses that seem to be related to overshoot they're related they're related to inability to solve problems on a broader level but not so much related to um to overshoot there are one or two that maybe in fact the mesopotamian ones are very clearly what about overpopulation is the earth overpopulated can we support more people or would we would be better off supporting less clearly if there were fewer people on earth we would have less of an ecological footprint we would be affecting the earth's resources the earth's ecosystems much less than we do now part of the political conflict in our country stems from the tendency of neoclassical economics to think that things to argue that things like population and resources don't matter conservative economists argue that whenever there is scarcity as long as there are incentives something new will be invented to resolve the scarcity so that population and resources don't matter and many of our politicians seize upon the work of neoclassical economists to forestall finding solutions to our problems they argue that the problems that many of us foresee aren't actually problems they will be resolved automatically by market forces this trusts our future to faith i would prefer to trust our future to rationality to plan for the future to try to find ways out of the dilemmas that we can see coming part of the way out of the dilemma has to be that there should be fewer humans on earth and we would like a reduction in human population to come about gently and voluntarily because the alternative is too horrible to think about what do you think happened on easter island what happened on easter island where a colony of perhaps 40 polynesians landed in the middle of the first millennium a.d and found an island forested in great palm trees and other species and they were able to use these forests to build ocean going canoes and fish for deep water fish and sustain themselves in this way over time their population grew and it appears that they were progressively cutting down the forest until finally the time came when there was no forest left anymore and then they were simply stuck on this island their population had grown very large and yet they couldn't get off many people consider this almost a microcosm for planet earth on a larger scale we can think of the earth as as a great easter island where we are consuming its resources and may ultimately be stuck with a degraded environment that allows us no way out easter island is a poignant and interesting and intriguing case i'm not convinced that we know yet what happened there i believe much more archaeological research needs to be done in easter island to find out exactly why these forests were cut down one of the things that intrigues me about easter island is that the island was enmeshed in conflict when europeans arrived conflict drives consumption of resources without any concern for the future if you are in if you are engulfed in a conflict if you're a nation or a small tribe engulfed in a conflict and your alternative is to be defeated or to consume resources you're going to consume the resources and let tomorrow take care of itself and i think it's worth exploring whether this conflict that developed on easter island had anything to do with the deforestation and the ultimate loss of resources on the island how long did just how long did they live on the island after they cut down the last tree oh well they're still there the easter islanders are still there [Music] no no some of them the population got down to some small number 80 90 people something like that and in in the 1840s i think it was the peruvians took a lot of them to the mainland as slaves peruvians are chileans i'm not sure which but then those people came back and and others remained on the island the whole time but it may have had a population of size 10 000 at one point and by the 19th century it was down to maybe 150 people or so um so no they're still there and a lot of them are trying to reconstruct their traditions i mean culturally they're very proud of what their ancestors did did they not knock down the statues what happened to the statues on easter island were they deliberately torn down when a dutch expedition came to easter island in i believe the 1740s they found that the statues were still upright when captain cook came to easter island in the 1790s he found the people timid thin hungry impoverished and many statues had been pulled over and by the middle of the 19th century i believe almost all of the statues had been pulled over and this clearly reflects the conflict that was underway within easter island society this conflict may have persisted for centuries and it continued even into the 19th century even into the devastating conditions in which people lived then did they pull them down out of anger or was it a loss of belief in their gods or ancestors oh yes well as far as they knew they were right yeah as far as they knew they were the only people on earth they're the most remote place in the world and it is the most remote place in the world we've ever developed language in complete isolation yeah yeah they developed their own script in addition to the statues they developed their own script and i think it still can't really be read yeah but but as far as tearing down the statues i suspect it is simply an example of the kind of destruction that happens in war and you you pull down your enemies accomplishments are there civilizations that have undergone massive changes let's say a voluntary simplification unfortunately i know of only one but that one is hopeful because it suggests that it can be done in the 7th century a.d the byzantine empire was nearly overwhelmed by the arabs who had newly converted to islam they were driven out of what's now the holy land judea and syria they were driven out of egypt they were driven back into what's now the area of turkey and at times they were even besieged within their city of constantinople which is now the city of istanbul and it it looked like the byzantine empire was going to fail that it would be overcome by the arabs the solution that they adopted was that they gave up their professional army which was very expensive and they settled soldiers on plots of land across the empire where they became a peasant militia providing for their own sustenance rather than having to be paid by the government when they did this the whole society simplified because the whole economy and society were organized around amassing up the resources to pay for the army so once the army was made to pay for itself the government simplified literacy and numeracy declined the society simplified the aristocracy simplified and the whole society became much less costly what one finds across anatolia what's now the land of turkey at this time is that what had been great cities now contract to fortified hilltops and the peasant soldiers suddenly began fighting better because they were fighting for their own land and they were fighting for their own families so they had more incentive to fight so when they instituted this change about the 660s a.d all of a sudden the byzantines started to rebound they stopped losing land so quickly and in another century they were on the offensive and began reconquering lands that they had previously lost and within 200 years by about a thousand a.d they had reconquered much of the land that they had lost and they were now the premier power of europe in the near east and it's an accomplishment that they won by simplifying by reducing the complexity and the costliness of their problem-solving institutions in energetic terms one of the things that they did was that they simplified their energy flows one can think of this in energy terms in energy terms that the byzantine empire was a solar energy based empire and the way it ran was that solar energy would fall on cultivated fields through photosynthesis crops were produced the crops were harvested peasants paid taxes the taxes went to constantinople the government took its share and then sent the money back out to the provinces to pay soldiers all of a sudden all of those intermediate steps are eliminated which greatly eliminates the cost because at each intermediate step there's some loss there's a cost to the transaction so now solar energy falls on the land photosynthesis takes place and the peasant soldiers harvest their crop and pay themselves immediately and the government is much less involved it is a it was a simplification that worked regrettably it's the only large complex society i know of that systematically and deliberately simplified in this way but it gives us some hope for the future that it can be done ways can be found i have one last question for our time capsule which is you know if you were gonna somehow there was energy to play this message in a hundred years and the technology can be ready people understand the language what would you like them to know what would you like to say to them knowing what you what would i like to say to people perhaps 100 years from now well this will include some of my own descendants i hope as well as the descendants of all the rest of us i think you'll be going through a transition i hope it will not be an excessively difficult transition but transitions are never easy i hope you will live in a world in which your educators take care to make you curious about how things connect to each other and affect your lives to make you want to know how things that happen on the other side of your country on the other side of the world connect to influence the way you live and affect whether your lives are positive or negative i hope that your educators will teach you to think historically to think long term about the processes that take generations up to centuries to develop and yet affect your lives today we're very concerned at this time about the future many of us are we're concerned about energy supplies we're concerned about the state of the environment we're concerned about the complexity of our societies and whether our societies will continue to be effective in solving problems those are all processes that develop beyond the lifetime of an individual one needs historical knowledge to understand these things i hope that in the future humanity will have this expanded scale of thinking and if you do you'll be better positioned to understand and solve problems than we are today

Channel: TreeTV / N2K Need to Know

Views: 58,612

Keywords:

Id: JsT9V3WQiNA

Length: 49min 43sec (2983 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/catsonprozac]

Submission statement: Joseph Tainter discusses energy consumption, production, management, ecological, political and cultural causes of the collapse of human civilizations in the past and how we may mitigate or even avoid a harsh collapse

[u/[deleted]]

Brilliant. What bothered me was that he was not well read on Catton's Overshoot at the time. I would hope these folks would have been long beer buddies.

[u/sennalvera]

That was fascinating. Thank you for posting it. (I then tried to discuss it with my roommate only to be met with a wall of denial featuring 'cold fusion energy' and 'science will save us'. Alas.)

[u/Beep_Boop_Bort]

I wonder what we could simplify in society today to achieve the similar results to the Byzantines?

[u/TheSentientPurpleGoo]

tldw. anything over 5 minutes— i'd rather read.

[u/fandorf]

Good book, would recommend reading it. Bit heavy on marginal analysis in my opinion, but that was all the rage in the 1970s

[u/[deleted]]

You best get your submission statement in before this is taken down.

Tainter is best as a lecturer/teacher. His classic Collapse of Complex Societies is a difficult read.

Tainter is such a great educator. Repeats the question before providing an answer.