I was reading Wimsey's economic model (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=303065) and fantasizing about a slightly more realistic version of civ. I was thinking about how the rise and fall of civilizations might be incorporated. By this I mean an ancient civ could grow massive, thrive for a few centuries, and then collapse in on itself for reasons other than being invaded by a rival civ; while other civs might appear much later in the game but then hit a golden age where they start advancing very rapidly to the point where they've overtaken much older civs.

So before going into how this might be simulated in a game, I was wondering if it was even possible to summarize the key dynamics behind the rise and fall of civilizations in real-life history. Or is every case too particular for any generalizations to be made?

Maybe a monumental list of every civilization that has risen and fallen and the key factors behind that rise and fall would be helpful :)

Pretty big question! Without even attempting to go into specific details, it might be worth breaking it down into the following categories

Economic
Environmental
Military
Political
Demographic
Cultural/Social

A serious problem in any one of those categories on its own can cause a collapse

A serious problem in any one of those categories on its own can cause a collapse

It generally takes a bunch of factors acting in tandem to bring down a civilization. They also tend to need to fall relatively close together, with each event setting of the next in a 'cascade' which overwhelms the internal mechanisms of the state. Gradual decline into oblivion isn't all that common either - you generally need to be pushed and pulled in all directions for complete collapse to happen.

It generally takes a bunch of factors acting in tandem to bring down a civilization. They also tend to need to fall relatively close together, with each event setting of the next in a 'cascade' which overwhelms the internal mechanisms of the state. Gradual decline into oblivion isn't all that common either - you generally need to be pushed and pulled in all directions for complete collapse to happen.

But one triggers the others, generally speaking. An economic collapse will leave you with little military to defend yourself, can cause huge demographic problems and lead to political crisis. A Political crisis will cause economic problems. A serious military defeat will cause political crisis, etc. One will generally bring on the others. Environmental collapse will make everything else irrelevant.

There are a ridiculously low number of civilizations that have collapsed from environmental factors, and a greater number that sustained serious environmental threats without undergoing collapse.

Besides, while it is true that one overarching problem in one sphere can lead to disasters in others, more frequently civilizations - insofar as civilizations exist/can be defined (do we just mean polities here?) - are able to solve single problems before they spin out of control. If serious military defeat leads to a political crisis that actually ends up hurting a state, that state almost always had preexisting political problems that helped spur that crisis in the first place. If economic problems lead to military downsizing on such an order that the military is unable to prevent the total collapse of the state, that military probably already had problems too. Stuff like that.

Anyway, I never was much a fan of macrohistorical analysis and junk like that, so I'm unwilling to try to identify overarching factors. The devil's in the details.

I agree Dachs, none of that really contradicts what I said. We should probably define 'collapse' and 'civilisation' though. Does fall of the USSR count, or does this have to be an Easter Island type event?

The most convincing argument for the downfall of civilizations was made in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Diamond asserts that civilizations bring themselves down by overexploiting their resources, and being unable and often unwilling to modify their economic, political, and social systems to adjust to changing demands. By the time trouble is realized, the civilization has already expanded its population to the point where it may be impossible to adjust, thereby causing a rapid and catastrophic collapse.

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.

So if you had to plot a course for a civilization, it would go as follows. First, a civilization gains some advantage which allows it to rapidly expand and perhaps even conquer its neighbors. It then reaches a functional maximum, based on its economic and social paradigms, at which time it tries to maintain the same way of life. Eventually, this proves to be untenable, and it is unable to realize the underlying cause of the problem. It collapses in a rather short period of time, due to over-expansion of the population and power base beyond the means to maintain it.

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.


Never read the book but heard Mark Steyn paraphrase it for me. (Mark Styen argues that demographics cause civilization collapse)
First the author's curious choices of civilizations, the Mayans, Easter Island.
And these "civilizations" all collapsed because they cut down all their trees.
Overexploitation of resources is not something I believe to be a cause of civilization collapse.
But if it falls under economic problems, then yes, economics can cause a civilization to collapse. Like Ottoman Empire's weak farming structure causes its decline and overtaxation of poor people in OTTOMAN empire.

I disagree with Diamond, or rather disagree that overexploitation of the environment is the primary or even single most common cause of civilizational collapse, which I believe Diamond does not himself advocate. In general, before the modern era, the primary problem facing civilizations in competitive environments is lack of population, not excessive population. War, disease, and the social impact of things like laws regulating inheritance all serve to limit population growth, often driving it into negative. Sure, you have places like Easter Island where the environment is particularly vulnerable, and the situation is not conducive to either war or disease, but there are numerous examples of the exact opposite. There's a reason the Byzantines launched campaigns into the Slavic Balkans to round up tribals for resettlement in Anatolia. It weakens the enemy's economic and military base while bolstering your own. When the State broke down, it was because of too few military settlers and too much land lying fallow leading to too small a tax base to support a sufficient defense rather than insufficient land or natural resources. You see the same situation in Imperial China, where the Histories invariably mention population growth and the reclaiming of fallow land as preceding a period of prosperity. More peasants means more land under cultivation, more workers for economic and military projects, more military settlers/soldiers, a lower tax burden per capita, more wealth for the cities, etc. Sure, that kind of growth can't be sustained indefinitely, but there's always a barbarian invasion, civil war, plague, or natural disaster around the corner to whittle down the population and weaken the state, which subsequently makes it more vulnerable to more of the same.

Does fall of the USSR count, or does this have to be an Easter Island type event?

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

Those were the usual paths - the Waikato and Bay of Plenty Maori followed (1) while the Samoans had this annoying tendency to follow (2) whenever they looked like they were going to do something interesting. Easter Island fell into a retarded mix of the two, it couldn't manage a decisive victory and neither could it come a workable comprimise thus the whole cycle of conflict was perpetuated again and again and again. The only reason Europeans have some regard for the thing - and not for the far more interesting Maori Wars or the whole bunch of wars in and between Samoa, Fiji and Tonga - was that they had a long gap between contacts to try and explain. Which they did poorly.

There ain't anything unusually about Polynesian populations rising and falling - New Zealand Maori must have fought a particularly violent conflict in the early days of settlement because there isn't all that much genetic diversity on the male side. And you can be sure that like most Polynesian immigrations it was top heavy with young men with nothing else to do. So it only stands to reason that something happened - like say, a fight over women. Most Islands have seen population movements during their histories of 30-50% at some time due to constant tribal conflict which existed quite independent of environmental considerations. If scarce resources were a major cause of conflict, why did Maori fight all the time, there was more land than you could shake a stick at? It was simply a part of Polynesian society to fight all the time. Europeans did exactly the same thing on a much larger and slightly less personal scale for most of their history as well. So meh.

The most convincing argument for the downfall of civilizations was made in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Diamond asserts that civilizations bring themselves down by overexploiting their resources, and being unable and often unwilling to modify their economic, political, and social systems to adjust to changing demands. By the time trouble is realized, the civilization has already expanded its population to the point where it may be impossible to adjust, thereby causing a rapid and catastrophic collapse.

Diamond could come up with only a handful of examples to support that supposition. None of them were particularly good ones, either. (Ref: above).

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.

He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.

So if you had to plot a course for a civilization, it would go as follows. First, a civilization gains some advantage which allows it to rapidly expand and perhaps even conquer its neighbors. It then reaches a functional maximum, based on its economic and social paradigms, at which time it tries to maintain the same way of life. Eventually, this proves to be untenable, and it is unable to realize the underlying cause of the problem. It collapses in a rather short period of time, due to over-expansion of the population and power base beyond the means to maintain it.

I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

I agree Dachs, none of that really contradicts what I said.
Environmental collapse will make everything else irrelevant.
There are [sic] a ridiculously low number of civilizations that have collapsed from environmental factors, and a greater number that sustained serious environmental threats without undergoing collapse.
]But one triggers the others, generally speaking. An economic collapse will leave you with little military to defend yourself, can cause huge demographic problems and lead to political crisis. A Political crisis will cause economic problems. A serious military defeat will cause political crisis, etc. One will generally bring on the others.
Besides, while it is true that one overarching problem in one sphere can lead to disasters in others, more frequently civilizations - insofar as civilizations exist/can be defined (do we just mean polities here?) - are able to solve single problems before they spin out of control. If serious military defeat leads to a political crisis that actually ends up hurting a state, that state almost always had preexisting political problems that helped spur that crisis in the first place. If economic problems lead to military downsizing on such an order that the military is unable to prevent the total collapse of the state, that military probably already had problems too. Stuff like that.
:confused:

To make things more black and white, I claim that, contra your first post, civilizations - or polities or whatever, the argument is already almost impossible without definitions - do not merely collapse if they are faced with a single "serious" problem. It is almost always due to other factors acting in tandem, with divergent origins.

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.
Exactly. The main reason the Easter Island collapse is so well-known is that it happened after the Europeans arrived, and in a shorter time than usual. Of course, the estimates of the pre-existing population that the Dutch made could also be way off, meaning it was no better or worse than any other Polynesian collapse.

Demography - if you are having 1.1 children per generation which means the population halfs a generation and than on the other side of the world the fertility rate is 5 your already losing, already at a disadvantage. And when that woman on the other side of the world becomes your neighbour and continues having 5 times more children than you and refuses to intergrate than you have a massive problem. This is the current problem in the West bar USA which just about manges intergration. The WEST is having a civilisation problem at the moment we have lost the confidance in our culture and superioty of our way of life - to put it frankly we've lost our balls. We've replaced our obvious best culture and replaced it with fluffy bunny multiculturalism. The social democratic states of Western Europe and the Communist malaise thoughout Eastern Europe have sucked out the initiative, self-reliance and independece our of the general population. More people now rely on the state for everything and have become more like client-citizens than free citizens.

So in order for Western Europe to continue lavishing its citizens on the welfare state it must maintain a worker-pensioner ratio which means we can actually support that population. Problem is naturally we can't do this and so we import others baby maker skills from the most hostile places on Earth to Western values: the Muslim world. If you cannot even sustain your own population and need others to fill it up for you that is a massive structural deficit right their. Of course these new immigrants haven't had political correctness agenda forced down their necks they have some faith in the superioty of their way of life so when they arrive in Britain or France where their is no overriding british culture or french culture (that would be racist) hes offered with "multiculturalism" or he can stick with his old way of life as their is an Iman around the corner because he can choose to live in a Muslim area or not. Amazingly instead of choosing to live a Western way of life, working till your 48 and than deciding to have 1 designer baby he marries at 20 and has 5!

Demography was 1 of the causes of the Roman Empire's collapse. Christians became a large part of the population because didn't abort their children like the Pagan Romans did they believed in life.
Another roman failure was when the Goths were allowed into the Empire in 376 AD and a few years later revolted and killed the Emperor.

Demography - if you are having 1.1 children per generation which means the population halfs a generation and than on the other side of the world the fertility rate is 5 your already losing, already at a disadvantage. And when that woman on the other side of the world becomes your neighbour and continues having 5 times more children than you and refuses to intergrate than you have a massive problem. This is the current problem in the West bar USA which just about manges intergration. The WEST is having a civilisation problem at the moment we have lost the confidance in our culture and superioty of our way of life - to put it frankly we've lost our balls. We've replaced our obvious best culture and replaced it with fluffy bunny multiculturalism. The social democratic states of Western Europe and the Communist malaise thoughout Eastern Europe have sucked out the initiative, self-reliance and independece our of the general population. More people now rely on the state for everything and have become more like client-citizens than free citizens.
[rant continues...]


Tell me, did you read Spengler's famous book, or did you arrive independently at the same stupid conclusions?

Never read the book but heard Mark Steyn paraphrase it for me. (Mark Styen argues that demographics cause civilization collapse)
First the author's curious choices of civilizations, the Mayans, Easter Island.
And these "civilizations" all collapsed because they cut down all their trees.
Overexploitation of resources is not something I believe to be a cause of civilization collapse.
But if it falls under economic problems, then yes, economics can cause a civilization to collapse. Like Ottoman Empire's weak farming structure causes its decline and overtaxation of poor people in OTTOMAN empire.

Don't criticize a book you've never read. Going by what a critic told you it says is useless because he could have biases. Why is it "curious" to choose Easter Island? Is it because it's just a bunch of primitives on a Pacific island? Dare I say, is it because of "rasism"? :)

As a matter of fact, it makes perfect sense, because it was an isolated society that could be studied without confounding variables.

And what exactly is the difference between economic decline and decline in resources? Either way, you have a scarcity of resources.

I disagree with Diamond, or rather disagree that overexploitation of the environment is the primary or even single most common cause of civilizational collapse, which I believe Diamond does not himself advocate. In general, before the modern era, the primary problem facing civilizations in competitive environments is lack of population, not excessive population. War, disease, and the social impact of things like laws regulating inheritance all serve to limit population growth, often driving it into negative. Sure, you have places like Easter Island where the environment is particularly vulnerable, and the situation is not conducive to either war or disease, but there are numerous examples of the exact opposite. There's a reason the Byzantines launched campaigns into the Slavic Balkans to round up tribals for resettlement in Anatolia. It weakens the enemy's economic and military base while bolstering your own. When the State broke down, it was because of too few military settlers and too much land lying fallow leading to too small a tax base to support a sufficient defense rather than insufficient land or natural resources. You see the same situation in Imperial China, where the Histories invariably mention population growth and the reclaiming of fallow land as preceding a period of prosperity. More peasants means more land under cultivation, more workers for economic and military projects, more military settlers/soldiers, a lower tax burden per capita, more wealth for the cities, etc. Sure, that kind of growth can't be sustained indefinitely, but there's always a barbarian invasion, civil war, plague, or natural disaster around the corner to whittle down the population and weaken the state, which subsequently makes it more vulnerable to more of the same.

The Byzantine Empire collapsed due to conquest.

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

I'm no scholar of Pacific Island civilizations, but I prefer to shave with Occam's razor.

He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.

Which part of this should impress me, the part about "scholarly" or "40 years"?


I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

Well, I find Diamond's explanation (and he's not the first to propose it) the most convincing. Maybe it can't always be boiled down to common themes, but it seems it can often enough.

How about the assertion that civilizations are complex enough entities that coming up with a generic "collapse formula" may be impossible?

The Byzantine Empire collapsed due to conquest.


What's your point? Nearly every civilization in a competitive environment have collapsed due to conquest, and as such, it is a meaningless classification, except for the few cases where a truely overwhelming enemy arrives, like the Mongols for example. Nations are conquered because their military capacity falls. The Byzantine collapse that led the loss of all Asian/African holdings outside of Anatolia was due to the demographic collapse following decades of war with Persia. The final collapse of the empire was in the wake of yet another demographic decline. In neither case, nor all the examples in between could it be claimed that overpopulation hurt the empire.

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

Those were the usual paths - the Waikato and Bay of Plenty Maori followed (1) while the Samoans had this annoying tendency to follow (2) whenever they looked like they were going to do something interesting. Easter Island fell into a retarded mix of the two, it couldn't manage a decisive victory and neither could it come a workable comprimise thus the whole cycle of conflict was perpetuated again and again and again. The only reason Europeans have some regard for the thing - and not for the far more interesting Maori Wars or the whole bunch of wars in and between Samoa, Fiji and Tonga - was that they had a long gap between contacts to try and explain. Which they did poorly.

There ain't anything unusually about Polynesian populations rising and falling - New Zealand Maori must have fought a particularly violent conflict in the early days of settlement because there isn't all that much genetic diversity on the male side. And you can be sure that like most Polynesian immigrations it was top heavy with young men with nothing else to do. So it only stands to reason that something happened - like say, a fight over women. Most Islands have seen population movements during their histories of 30-50% at some time due to constant tribal conflict which existed quite independent of environmental considerations. If scarce resources were a major cause of conflict, why did Maori fight all the time, there was more land than you could shake a stick at? It was simply a part of Polynesian society to fight all the time. Europeans did exactly the same thing on a much larger and slightly less personal scale for most of their history as well. So meh.



Diamond could come up with only a handful of examples to support that supposition. None of them were particularly good ones, either. (Ref: above).



He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.



I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

So are you positing that Easter island's collapse had nothing to do with the fact that they completely deforested the island and it was merely political? Let's not forget that deforestation not only deprives people of firewood and building material but also leads to severe water and wind caused soil erosion and can cause draught in some instances. The Easter Islanders were unable to fish in the open sea after they destroyed all their boat building material and crop yields were severely diminished due to erosion.

Competition for dwindling resources will no doubt cause political and social strain (especially during particularly dry years) that will lead to the political factors you described above. He also explains why Easter Island was more susceptible to deforestation than other pacific islands: less naturally fertile soil, comparably less rainfall, remoteness from active volcanoes and Asian continental windblown dust (which helps renew fertility on other pacific islands).

I am halfway through Collapse right now so I will refrain from giving my complete assessment of Diamond's points. But I see he applies his hypothesis to many other places such as modern Montana, other Polynesian islands, the Maya, the Anasazi, the Viking colonies of the north Atlantic, Japan, Rwanda, the Dominican Rep., Haiti, China, and modern Australia (of course a couple of these examples are not of societies that have collapsed, but they are affected by environmental factors that may shape their destiny).
There certainly are many more civilizations that collapsed that had very little to do with environmental factors, and Diamond makes no such claim that they play a role in every collapse. But, environmental factors can certainly affect any society.

I also think some of his points could be applied to other areas not covered in his book such as the Fertile Crecent, and the empires of Western Africa, but I will not give a detailed analysis until I'm finished with the book and do a little more research.

I think being the first to arise from the azure main at Heaven's command contributes to the rise of a civilization.

So are you positing that Easter island's collapse had nothing to do with the fact that they completely deforested the island and it was merely political? Let's not forget that deforestation not only deprives people of firewood and building material but also leads to severe water and wind caused soil erosion and can cause draught in some instances. The Easter Islanders were unable to fish in the open sea after they destroyed all their boat building material and crop yields were severely diminished due to erosion.

Competition for dwindling resources will no doubt cause political and social strain (especially during particularly dry years) that will lead to the political factors you described above. He also explains why Easter Island was more susceptible to deforestation than other pacific islands: less naturally fertile soil, comparably less rainfall, remoteness from active volcanoes and Asian continental windblown dust (which helps renew fertility on other pacific islands).

I am halfway through Collapse right now so I will refrain from giving my complete assessment of Diamond's points. But I see he applies his hypothesis to many other places such as modern Montana, other Polynesian islands, the Maya, the Anasazi, the Viking colonies of the north Atlantic, Japan, Rwanda, the Dominican Rep., Haiti, China, and modern Australia (of course a couple of these examples are not of societies that have collapsed, but they are affected by environmental factors that may shape their destiny).
There certainly are many more civilizations that collapsed that had very little to do with environmental factors, and Diamond makes no such claim that they play a role in every collapse. But, environmental factors can certainly affect any society.

I also think some of his points could be applied to other areas not covered in his book such as the Fertile Crecent, and the empires of Western Africa, but I will not give a detailed analysis until I'm finished with the book and do a little more research.
The Easter Islanders deforested the land in response to their political and economic turmoil, not the other way around. Those trees were used to make weapons, houses, fortifications, etc., not just for farmland. Undoubtedly, chopping down all the trees meant that they would never recover to their former heights, but they could still have recovered.

I'm no scholar of Pacific Island civilizations, but I prefer to shave with Occam's razor.

I prefer the prevailing scholarly opinion which shaves far more closely with Occam's razor to anything Diamond has ever said. The simplest explanation would seem to be the one that is most broadly commiserate with the experiences of the other Pacific Islands and not the one that doesn't .

Which part of this should impress me, the part about "scholarly" or "40 years"?

Do you regularly go into other fields and ignore research?

Well, I find Diamond's explanation (and he's not the first to propose it) the most convincing. Maybe it can't always be boiled down to common themes, but it seems it can often enough.

Fallacy of the single cause?

So are you positing that Easter island's collapse had nothing to do with the fact that they completely deforested the island and it was merely political?

I've suggested that the deforestation is given far to much weighting and that politics is the most likely explanation for 'collapse' if one happened. But for the moment I'll just hammer your interpretation of events, because why mine is plausible can be more or less inferred from these refutations. In addition, your question is not only a loaded one but is peppered with inaccurate preconceptions. The first is the assumption that "they"[the Rapa Nui Islanders] completely "deforested the island." At best that is a gross simplification of events and at worst that is an out and out misrepresentation of the facts. There are a number of theories explaining the deforestation, McCall (1993) and Orliac and Orliac (1998) favor respectively Little Ice-Age and El Nifio/Southern Oscillation induced droughts as the prime medium for Rapa Nui palm destruction. Hunter-Anderson (1998) goes even further suggesting that many of the suppositions upon which the 'humans as a medium of deforestation theory' rests are out and out wrong:


She draws upon existing ethnographic surveys to show that agro-forestry and the corresponding management of the resource was a consistent feature of Polynesian society.
Using the same studies she demonstrates that Pacific Islanders were at pains not to use palms for canoes, going so far as to use driftwood in other islands - a situation which would seem to be mirrored by the Rapa Nui experience.
She also maintains that the supposition that Moai construction took up large amounts of timber is absurd. In the first instance, she argues that the logs were storable and reusable. In the second, she finds that the incidences of Moai construction and the time between them would seem to suggest that the number of logs required annually, was in all likelihood, less than two.
She assets that the chosen model for the Rapa Nui Palm, the Jubaea chilensis a Chilean palm was not a good choice and that the Juan australis due to its far more similar environment on the Juan Fernandez Islands is a far better choice.
In addition she notes that rats, another medium for forest destruction, are known to help germination of the Jubaea chilensis.
She goes on to note that there is significant evidence for environmental change beginning in 1000BC long before the arrival of humans.


While there are theories that explain the deforestation as primarily the result of human contact, very few go so far as to suggest that they were the sole or even the most important factor. Rats are usually accorded that responsibility and while there is evidence that they may have contributed to problems in other islands, there is nothing to suggest that they ever contributed to something of that size and magnitude. Until there is evidence of a reason why Rapa Nui should buck the trend, I'm frankly not inclined to believe it. But in any case, the supposition that they cut down the forests is frankly unlikely and is not supported by the majority of the scholarly community.

Let's not forget that deforestation not only deprives people of firewood and building material but also leads to severe water and wind caused soil erosion and can cause draught in some instances.

It does deprive people of firewood and building material, but whether or not that is the result of humans or otherwise is neither here nor there. In the second instance, it can, but deforestation and land modification was extremely common in Polynesian societies and while there might have been negative effects the positive ones typically outweighed the negative ones. In any case, there is considerable evidence that the limitations of Rapa Nui were overcome. Diamond actually elucidates on some of the coping mechanisms - including for instance the placing of rocks on fields and the enlargement of pre-existent gravel depressions to provide windbreaks. So while your generalizations may be valid to some extent in the general sense, they are not in the least bit helpful in the specific instance we are discussing. (Also, stone was the primary medium for construction even before the deforestation).

The Easter Islanders were unable to fish in the open sea after they destroyed all their boat building material

There's little evidence of that Easter Islanders actually used palm canoes in sufficient numbers to cause deforestation and there isn't much evidence that they actually used them in the first place. Besides, there is a body of evidence that suggests that fish might have disappeared from the midden heaps simply because the bones were fed to the chickens. This has analogues in other Pacific Islands where its used to increase the chickens laying capacity by boosting its calcium intake.

crop yields were severely diminished due to erosion.

There's not much evidence for that happening - there is evidence of land being taken out of tillage, but whether or not that is the result of environmental considerations is unclear it could just as easily have been the result of natural population movements. The evidence that directly points at soil erosion can't be taken to be representative of the whole island. And I can't for the life of my figure out how the crop yields were calculated - they weren't but that isn't made clear.

Competition for dwindling resources will no doubt cause political and social strain (especially during particularly dry years) that will lead to the political factors you described above.

I don't see how you can assume that.

He also explains why Easter Island was more susceptible to deforestation than other pacific islands: less naturally fertile soil, comparably less rainfall, remoteness from active volcanoes and Asian continental windblown dust (which helps renew fertility on other pacific islands).

That doesn't really mean all that much. How does that make it more susceptible to deforestation, I suspect you mean that it made it more susceptible to the effects of deforestation.

There certainly are many more civilizations that collapsed that had very little to do with environmental factors, and Diamond makes no such claim that they play a role in every collapse. But, environmental factors can certainly affect any society.

That's a fair approximation even if I don't agree with you on this particular example.

The Easter Islanders deforested the land in response to their political and economic turmoil, not the other way around. Those trees were used to make weapons, houses, fortifications, etc., not just for farmland. Undoubtedly, chopping down all the trees meant that they would never recover to their former heights, but they could still have recovered.

Correct. They were certainly valuable and were actively propagated by the population alongside fields. Why then did they suddenly vanish? I don't believe the explanation that the population just decided to alter practices which had been working for 500 years makes any sense. Something happened - I believe it was probably political in nature and we can see the reverberations continuing for the next three hundred years.

:confused:

To make things more black and white, I claim that, contra your first post, civilizations - or polities or whatever, the argument is already almost impossible without definitions - do not merely collapse if they are faced with a single "serious" problem. It is almost always due to other factors acting in tandem, with divergent origins.

How could any civilisation survive a total crisis in any of the categories I have mentioned?

I wonder (a) why people still usually refer to "Occam's razor" when the standard modern spelling is "Ockham", (b) whether any of these people know what Ockham actually said and meant by it, and (c) why it is so commonly assumed that whatever it was Ockham said, he was right.

I disagree with Diamond, or rather disagree that overexploitation of the environment is the primary or even single most common cause of civilizational collapse, which I believe Diamond does not himself advocate.

That's right. Diamond repeatedly says in his book that environmental problems themselves have never killed any human civilization. It was the failure of civilizations to recognize the problems and take action to deal with them (adapt) what caused their demise.

Diamond also haven't said that all collapses are related to the environment, on the contrary. The societies which collapsed had the disadvantage of existing in a fragile environment.

It's funny how many people criticize this particular book without really knowing what's in it :) It's especially funny to see the reactions of some historians who are obviously annoyed by the very fact that someone not trained in history dares to write a book about history and suggests a new direction for future research :D

What's your point? Nearly every civilization in a competitive environment have collapsed due to conquest, and as such, it is a meaningless classification, except for the few cases where a truely overwhelming enemy arrives, like the Mongols for example. Nations are conquered because their military capacity falls. The Byzantine collapse that led the loss of all Asian/African holdings outside of Anatolia was due to the demographic collapse following decades of war with Persia. The final collapse of the empire was in the wake of yet another demographic decline. In neither case, nor all the examples in between could it be claimed that overpopulation hurt the empire.

My point is that it was hyperanalysis to figure out the cause of the Byzantine collapse, as it was simply outcompeted by neighbors.

How could any civilisation survive a total crisis in any of the categories I have mentioned?
Describe a "total crisis" in any of the aforementioned categories and offer an example of one occurring historically, inducing the collapse of a polity. :)
My point is that it was hyperanalysis to figure out the cause of the Byzantine collapse, as it was simply outcompeted by neighbors.
It also had very serious internal problems. The worst of these were: the inability to resolve serious religious disputes strongly associated with sectionalist tendencies; the failure to suppress the interests of certain large Anatolian (and later, Thracian) landowners; and the failure to effectively modify the thematic system in the face of altered military and domestic circumstances.

That combined with the foibles and errors of certain individual rulers, and the ever-present specter of tyche, induced collapse.

My point is that it was hyperanalysis to figure out the cause of the Byzantine collapse, as it was simply outcompeted by neighbors.

And my point was that every civ in a competitive environment collapses because it was outcompeted by its neighbors. That gives you nothing, and so is meaningless.

I can't think of a single premodern civ in a competitive environment whose collapse can even vaguely be traced to overpopulation, and many that are exactly the opposite. I think that pretty much disproves any notion that overpopulation is a major contributing factor to collapse before modern times, unless you can come up with some examples.

The Easter Islanders deforested the land in response to their political and economic turmoil, not the other way around. Those trees were used to make weapons, houses, fortifications, etc., not just for farmland. Undoubtedly, chopping down all the trees meant that they would never recover to their former heights, but they could still have recovered.

There is much scientific and archaeological evidence that refutes this timeline.
Using the science of palynology (the study of pollen) to study pollen found in sediment cores taken from Easter Island; and dated with radiocarbon-dating, scientists can deduce what trees were growing on Easter Island and when they disappeared. Radiocarbon-dated palm nut remnants, as well as charcoal found in fire pits and middens (garbage dumps) also are great sources for the same evidence.
What can be discerned is that Easter Island's trees began to slowly disappear from the arrival of humans ca. 900 a.d. to a peak around 1400/1500 a.d. and were severely decimated by the 1600s (Jacob Roggeveen, the first documented European visitor in 1722 described the complete absense of trees except scrubs, ferns, and bushes, and the 7 ft toromiro "tree").

There is no strong evidence prior to the peak period of deforestation of social or political strife. In fact quite the contrary, the period of the building of ahu (large statue platforms) and moai (statues) is evidence of considerable economic and political cooperation between the dozen or so clan territories that divided the island.
We can infer this cooperation because of resources that can only be obtained in one clan territory are spread throughout the island. An example being the tuff from Rano Raraku crater, a stone used for most moai (≈834 out of 887 moai) which was found only in Tongariki territory, but moai made of Rano Raraku tuff are found in every other territory. They were carved in the quarry and then moved.
In order to transport these moai; which average 10 tons and the heaviest being 87 tons, the chief bringing the moai to his territory would no doubt have to secure a right of passage with the other territories the moai would be traversing through. Also worth noting besides the transportation of the moai is the many stones obtained throughout the island that went into building the ahu platforms as well as the 12 ton red scoria Pukao headpeices for some statues. The largest ahu consisted of 9,000 tons of stones.

Dating the building of ahu and moai can be difficult because you can't carbon-date stone. There are nonetheless methods to get rough dates: carbon-dated charcoal found in ahu, obsidian hydration dating from cleaved obsidian in ahu and tools, carbon-dating coral filing tools, and the coral used for the statues' eyes. Other evidence comes from the carbon dating of algae found in the plazas in front of the ahu; which I will admit I don't really understand how this works with algae being biodegradable among other questions. These methods coupled with archaeologists' inferences from the evolution of styles of the statues, it is deduced that they were built from 1000 a.d. to the last one described as being erected in 1620. We are not dealing with precise dates here, but it seems curious that the building of ahu and moai seems to be contemporary with deforestation.
I would not blame the building of these monuments as the sole reason of deforestation.
It is not known exactly how these statues were transported from the stone quarries over several miles (with nothing but human muscle power) but chances are it used a good amount of wood and rope from trees.

I suppose you could construe the spread of resources throughout the island to war plunder, but it seems absurd that the inhabitants of Easter Island would be engaging in any serious war with each other while simultaneously erecting these massive monuments, especially when we are dealing with a society whose population is estimated around 15,000. The erection of the statues and their platforms must have required a massive ammount of manpower. Not to mention the massive amount of food that would be needed to feed everyone involved.

It is after this period of monument building and deforestation that we begin to see strong signs of strife. The number of house sites decline by 70% from 1600 to 1700 a.d.. We have archaeological evidence of people living in caves long term, presumable for safety. There is a proliferation of obsidian spear heads dated with obsidian hydration-dating from this period. There is evidence of cannabilism occuring from carbon-dated human bones cracked to extract marrow found in middens, as well as oral traditons of cannibalism among surviving natives. Lastly we have a precise record of a coup occuring in 1680 where Matatoa (military leaders) overthrew the chiefs and priests and established the cult of Makemake. The final example of the breakdown of Easter Island is the toppling of the moai and the dismantling of the ahu; which is recorded by European visitors who noticed more moai were toppled in each subsequent visit starting in the 1700s. The standing statues you see today were restored in modern times.

This scientific and archaeolical evidence stongly suggests that political and social unrest anteceded deforestation and not the other way around. There is no absolute proof that deforestation caused the strife of the 1600-1700s, but I think it is fair to say the timeline suggests a strong correlation.

I've suggested that the deforestation is given far to much weighting and that politics is the most likely explanation for 'collapse' if one happened. But for the moment I'll just hammer your interpretation of events, because why mine is plausible can be more or less inferred from these refutations. In addition, your question is not only a loaded one but is peppered with inaccurate preconceptions. The first is the assumption that "they"[the Rapa Nui Islanders] completely "deforested the island." At best that is a gross simplification of events and at worst that is an out and out misrepresentation of the facts. There are a number of theories explaining the deforestation, McCall (1993) and Orliac and Orliac (1998) favor respectively Little Ice-Age and El Nifio/Southern Oscillation induced droughts as the prime medium for Rapa Nui palm destruction. Hunter-Anderson (1998) goes even further suggesting that many of the suppositions upon which the 'humans as a medium of deforestation theory' rests are out and out wrong:


She draws upon existing ethnographic surveys to show that agro-forestry and the corresponding management of the resource was a consistent feature of Polynesian society.
Using the same studies she demonstrates that Pacific Islanders were at pains not to use palms for canoes, going so far as to use driftwood in other islands - a situation which would seem to be mirrored by the Rapa Nui experience.
She also maintains that the supposition that Moai construction took up large amounts of timber is absurd. In the first instance, she argues that the logs were storable and reusable. In the second, she finds that the incidences of Moai construction and the time between them would seem to suggest that the number of logs required annually, was in all likelihood, less than two.
She assets that the chosen model for the Rapa Nui Palm, the Jubaea chilensis a Chilean palm was not a good choice and that the Juan australis due to its far more similar environment on the Juan Fernandez Islands is a far better choice.
In addition she notes that rats, another medium for forest destruction, are known to help germination of the Jubaea chilensis.
She goes on to note that there is significant evidence for environmental change beginning in 1000BC long before the arrival of humans.


Diamond's intention is not the make the Easter Islanders look like fools for intentionally destroying their forests. They may not have acted anymore irresponsibly than any other Polynesian society, they just lived in an area with a far less robust environment coupled with it's isolation that contributed to the collapse. Climate fluctuations certainly could have played a factor and I would be very open to such factors; however, there is no smoking gun. I also think that it is curious that deforestation seemed to have occured during the height of Easter Island's population. I find it suspicious to think that trees that had been growing on Easter Island for hundreds of thousands of years during probably many climate changes, would coincidentally happen to go extinct right when Easter Island's population was at it's pinnacle.

1.)The Easter Islanders may have managed their forests like their distant cousins on other islands; however, Easter Island's comparably cooler climate and lower rainfalls with fragile soil fertility meant that Easter Island's forests had a far lesser degree of regeneration. In really wet hot climates of the Pacific 20 ft trees can grow in a year, which makes forest management far easier. Islands of fairly similar location like Mangavera also encountered similar deforestation, albeit not as severe as Easter.

2.)There are also countless examples of Polynesians building large canoes. It's pretty obvious when your talking about a group of people who colonized every habitable scrap of land across thousands of miles of ocean. I feel you seem to think that Easter Islanders are going to act exactly like similar societies (in different environments no less) they have been completely isolated from for hundreds of years. There also is very good evidence that they did build seaworthy canoes, which, I will discuss below in relation to another one of your points.

3.)The exact way that all those stones were moved from the quarries isn't fully known.
Not to refute my above statement about Easter Islanders being unique, but their are examples in Polynesia and elsewhere of large canoes being slid along wooden rails resembling runged ladders. Diamond cites a mile long rail he saw in New Guinea. Of course we are talking about stones around 10 tons here, some of them being carried 15 miles from the quarry. The Easter Islanders would certainly have required quite a bit of rope to drag and possibly hoist the stones. They also may have had used wooden levers. It is not inconceivable that all the stones in the ahu and the moai may have required a lot of wood to transport and set up.
Wood was also used for fires, cremation (quite unique for Polynesia), bark tapa cloth from the paper mulberry tree, wooden tools and building material and possibly even wooden statues, not to mention forests being cleared for agriculture.

4.)I'm not sure what your point is here. A better choice for what? I think she may be saying the large extinct Palm trees of Easter were closer to the Juan australis than the Jubaea chilensis. What difference does it make for Easter Island?

5.)Every recovered palm nut on Easter Island has rat tooth markings. Rats gnawing on palm nuts inhibits germination. Rats probably played a part in supressing the growth of new palms. Rats also had the effect of wiping out bird species through predation, further lessening a food source for humans. Humans also were certainly a reason for the extinction of birds on Easter (much like the Moa or the Do-Do on other islands). At the same time rats would become a greater source of food for people as other food sources lessened. We also should note that rats came to Easter Island as stowaways on Polynesian canoes.

6.)This point doesn't help your argument. If the trees of Rapa Nui were able to withstand climate change 2000 years before human arrival, why would they coincidentally go extinct during the peak of human occupation

Once again Diamond's goal is not to judge the people of Easter Island. I agree you can not flat out prove people played the biggest part, it just looks like the correlation of humans playing a major part in deforestation is too strong to ignore. Perhaps it isn't politically correct to look like your blaming the native people, when the common conception is only the white man destroys the environment.

It does deprive people of firewood and building material, but whether or not that is the result of humans or otherwise is neither here nor there. In the second instance, it can, but deforestation and land modification was extremely common in Polynesian societies and while there might have been negative effects the positive ones typically outweighed the negative ones. In any case, there is considerable evidence that the limitations of Rapa Nui were overcome. Diamond actually elucidates on some of the coping mechanisms - including for instance the placing of rocks on fields and the enlargement of pre-existent gravel depressions to provide windbreaks. So while your generalizations may be valid to some extent in the general sense, they are not in the least bit helpful in the specific instance we are discussing. (Also, stone was the primary medium for construction even before the deforestation).

Of course land modification is common, but we are talking about islands with the benefit of being hot and wet often with rich volcanic soil (Easter Island being volcanic itself but too old to be practical), or close to volcanic fallout or continental winds carying nutrients in dust, or islands with ideal access to fishing. The islands of Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson; which are the closest to Easter Island encountered similar problems because of their fairly similar location.
Many islands of Polynesia also had the advantage of having some contact with other islands. There is evidence of a trade network throughout Polynesia. Even Mangareva, Pitcairn and Henderson were involved in a trade network. There is no evidence of any significant contact with Easter Island and any other island prior to European contact.

There's little evidence of that Easter Islanders actually used palm canoes in sufficient numbers to cause deforestation and there isn't much evidence that they actually used them in the first place. Besides, there is a body of evidence that suggests that fish might have disappeared from the midden heaps simply because the bones were fed to the chickens. This has analogues in other Pacific Islands where its used to increase the chickens laying capacity by boosting its calcium intake.

They probably didn't use palm canoes at first. The pollen in core samples shows that there were two trees ideal for canoes: the Alphitonia cf. Zizyphoides and the Elaeocarpus cf. Rarotongensis, which are used elsewhere in Polynesia, but these trees "mysteriously" went extinct during the human occupation of Rapa Nui.
They certainly did use canoes fit to operate in the open seas. In the early history of Easter Island tuna and common dolphin are found extensively in middens. In fact dolphins constituted 1/3 of the bones in these early middens. Common dolphins and tuna can only be hunted on the open ocean. By 1500 a.d. tuna and dolphins had completely disappeared from middens. When Jacob Roggeveen visited the island in 1722 he described the natives' leaky watercraft as unfit for the open ocean.
Easter Island is a poor place for fishing from ashore or close offshore. There are no reefs and the coast is rugged with large drop offs. There are only a couple of good beaches to the north. Even at it's height fishing was never as important to Easter Island as it is to the majority of Pacific islands, but the inability to fish in the open sea sounds like a better reason for this decrease in fish and dolphin bones than people feeding chickens dolphin and fish bones, not to mention mollusk shells, which decreased as well.

There's not much evidence for that happening - there is evidence of land being taken out of tillage, but whether or not that is the result of environmental considerations is unclear it could just as easily have been the result of natural population movements. The evidence that directly points at soil erosion can't be taken to be representative of the whole island. And I can't for the life of my figure out how the crop yields were calculated - they weren't but that isn't made clear.

It is universal that deforestation causes erosion anywhere it occurs, especially on an island as windy as Easter Island no matter how many stone wind breakers they built.
But, if that is not enough there is strong evidence of erosion from the fact that ahu and buildings dowhill were buried in soil that came from uphill areas where the farms were located. Also the huge quantity of soil derived metal ions found in sediment cores taken from low areas and swamps point to obvious erosion. The fact that even today Easter Island soil is still leached of nutrients and only suitable for very small scale sheep grazing is really good evidence of erosion even with modern attempts at reforestaton. The destruction of trees also meant fewer material for compost.
I think it's safe to assume this led to a decrease in crop productivity on a large scale.
I don't see how you can assume that.

I don't see what isn't logical that a reduction of resources and food among a group of people wouldn't create tension. We have a pretty big macro-example with oil in our modern world. Signs of social unrest coincide with the end period of deforestation.

That doesn't really mean all that much. How does that make it more susceptible to deforestation, I suspect you mean that it made it more susceptible to the effects of deforestation.

Just semantics here, both are true, however.

Off course read "Collapse" and it's cited sources for greater detail. Once again I'm not trying to be judgemental towards the people of Easter Island, chances are it would have happened to any group of people in the same situation.

Guns, germs and steel and how a civilization interacts with them. (Amongst other things)

Describe a "total crisis" in any of the aforementioned categories and offer an example of one occurring historically, inducing the collapse of a polity. :)

USSR collapsed in 1991 as a result of a collapse of their political system.

Why is it "curious" to choose Easter Island? Is it because it's just a bunch of primitives on a Pacific island? Dare I say, is it because of "rasism"? :)
Because it's generous to say poorly documented, a subject of little scholarly consensus, a very minute "civilization" if you want to call it that (though how much it was that or an outpost of Polynesian civilization is a question in and of itself), and in short, reeks of Cherry Picking. Why WOULD you pick the Easter Islanders?

I see a lot of criticism on the particulars of Diamond's Collapse, but personally, I found it (and also his earlier Guns, Germs and Steel) made some very good points and were thought-provoking enough that I remember the gist of his arguments now, years after reading them.
Whatever the case with Easter Island, he looked at other civilizations/cultures as well and I find his conclusions well-reasoned, as long as you keep in mind that the collapse of a civilization is unlikely to be mono-causal. I particularly liked his example of the rise and fall of the Maya.
What I seldom see repeated is one very important facet of his theory: namely, that a civilizations collapse through overuse of it's resources can be deferred by exploiting other regions resources (colonialism, anyone?). That was the very reason he looked at regionally isolated examples, such as Easter Island, the Maya and the Greenland Vikings. The conclusion to be gained is rather frightening: that in today's globalized civilization a collapse due to resource depletion (Oil peak for instance) would also be global, since there is no place else from which to import the critical resources.

I don't buy it in the sense of an unavoidable doom, but certainly in the sense of a very real danger to be watched and mitigated.

As to the rest, it seems that while the forests were cut down around 1400, the last trees were not cut down till sometime before 1600. While the wild caught stock was destroyed there is evidence that the trees were domesticated, planted and used alongside Rapa Nui farms for a variety of purposes. So why then did they cut down the trees? I'm going to side with Orlianic and ask the question: "Why the hell do you just cut down trees you've taken special care to plant next to your fields. Especially ones which had such obvious economic benefits."

Diamond's intention is not the make the Easter Islanders look like fools for intentionally destroying their forests.

Having quickly re-read him, I'm inclined to agree. I happened to remember he drew extensively upon Bahn and Flenley (1992) and tarred him with the same brush. Bahn and Flenley did blame the Rapu Nui, as this shows rather succinctly:

One could stand on the summit and see almost every point on the island. The person who felled the last tree could see it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind's covetousness is so boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn. Selfishness leads to survival. Altruism leads to death. The selfish gene wins....

Luckily he redeems himself by quoting Orlianic which I didn't remember. Even if he doesn't seem to quite understand why she objects so strongly to Bahn and Flenley.

They may not have acted anymore irresponsibly than any other Polynesian society, they just lived in an area with a far less robust environment coupled with it's isolation that contributed to the collapse.

I don't find this explanation all that persuasive.

Climate fluctuations certainly could have played a factor and I would be very open to such factors; however, there is no smoking gun.

Sure, there isn't much evidence to the contrary.

I also think that it is curious that deforestation seemed to have occured during the height of Easter Island's population. I find it suspicious to think that trees that had been growing on Easter Island for hundreds of thousands of years during probably many climate changes, would coincidentally happen to go extinct right when Easter Island's population was at it's pinnacle.

It had however been occurring long before Rapu Nui was populated and we can't even be sure when the island was first inhabited, let alone what the actual population was at any given stage of history. Its a coincidence and not a particularly strong one either considering the circumstances. There is also a body of evidence which shows that climatic conditions changed quite markedly around the period commonly inferred to be the 'height' of Rapu Nui civilization. I'm still not sold on either as a definitive explanation.

1.)The Easter Islanders may have managed their forests like their distant cousins on other islands; however, Easter Island's comparably cooler climate and lower rainfalls with fragile soil fertility meant that Easter Island's forests had a far lesser degree of regeneration. In really wet hot climates of the Pacific 20 ft trees can grow in a year, which makes forest management far easier. Islands of fairly similar location like Mangavera also encountered similar deforestation, albeit not as severe as Easter.

There's no reason to suppose that they couldn't have managed. Besides, there's not much evidence that the trees were cut down.

2.)There are also countless examples of Polynesians building large canoes.

There are also numerous counter-examples. Most canoes were only about 8 foot in length, anything large rapidly becomes unusable for the following reasons (1) they become increasingly difficult to turn, (2) they become prone to capsizing, (3) they get exponentially slower, (5) they become increasingly vulnerable to having their backs broken when they move between two waves and (4) there is no practical use for them. You might get a 20 footer if the timber was available but that represented a massive investment in capital with no real return. My own ancestors made probably the largest canoe in Polynesian history purely as a means of demonstrating their military capacity, it worked, but the resulting product could only move in a straight line in a calm bay with no waves. The moment they rowed out of the bay it sunk - thankfully, out of the view of the bystanders.

It's pretty obvious when your talking about a group of people who colonized every habitable scrap of land across thousands of miles of ocean.

It was done on double riggers about 12 foot in length. Besides, I don't see what this has to do with Rapu Nui, lots of islands made do with small skiffs made out of driftwood - not only were they cheap but they were simpler to construct, easier to repair and correspondingly tended to last longer - a canoe in constant use depending on the wood might only have a lifespan measured in months. Correspondingly, you avoided building them if you possible could.

I feel you seem to think that Easter Islanders are going to act exactly like similar societies (in different environments no less) they have been completely isolated from for hundreds of years.

That doesn't matter, they didn't arrive Tabula Rasa and there is no reason to suppose that they didn't bring all the requisite knoweldge.

[QUOTE=dannyshenanigan]There also is very good evidence that they did build seaworthy canoes, which, I will discuss below in relation to another one of your points.

I'm aware of that, I even mentioned it.

3.)The exact way that all those stones were moved from the quarries isn't fully known.

That made my argument about ten times easier. Rollers as the prime explanation of deforestation begone!

Not to refute my above statement about Easter Islanders being unique, but their are examples in Polynesia and elsewhere of large canoes being slid along wooden rails resembling runged ladders. Diamond cites a mile long rail he saw in New Guinea.

I'm aware of that, I could see the remains of a similar run where I used to live. In any case, Papuans are Austronesian and not Polynesians.

Of course we are talking about stones around 10 tons here, some of them being carried 15 miles from the quarry. The Easter Islanders would certainly have required quite a bit of rope to drag and possibly hoist the stones. They also may have had used wooden levers. It is not inconceivable that all the stones in the ahu and the moai may have required a lot of wood to transport and set up.

Yes, but as was so delightfully shown by Hunter-Anderson high levels of wood usage are simply not required for the following reasons, (1) the wood was movable, (2) it was storable, (3) there weren't all that moai and (4) the known chronology would strongly imply that re-use was practical.

Because it's generous to say poorly documented, a subject of little scholarly consensus, a very minute "civilization" if you want to call it that (though how much it was that or an outpost of Polynesian civilization is a question in and of itself), and in short, reeks of Cherry Picking. Why WOULD you pick the Easter Islanders?

Thank you. This is more or less the reason why I find myself drawn into this all the time.

Why is it "curious" to choose Easter Island? Is it because it's just a bunch of primitives on a Pacific island? Dare I say, is it because of "rasism"?

On that note, I've been called an honest to god racist for questioning this, which is kind of curious considering I'm a freaking Polynesian. And I'll give much the same answer as ParkCungHee, there are simply to many unknowns to make any kind of definitive conclusion.

It could be any number of things, but it all comes down to an inability or unwillingness to adapt to changing conditions.

USSR collapsed in 1991 as a result of a collapse of their political system.
I was always under the impression that it was a combination of political fractures, severe ethnic tensions, human agency/errors, preexisting economic problems, and a weakened military.

But I'll be the first to admit that I'm not all that familiar with the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the USSR.

I was always under the impression that it was a combination of political fractures, severe ethnic tensions, human agency/errors, preexisting economic problems, and a weakened military.

But I'll be the first to admit that I'm not all that familiar with the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the USSR.

Well, all of those, bar the weakened military (actually I'm not sure what you mean by that, the red army wasn't weak around the time of collapse), had been around for some time and none of them caused a collapse. The political crisis, on the other hand, did cause a rapid and spectacular collapse.

Well, all of those, bar the weakened military (actually I'm not sure what you mean by that, the red army wasn't weak around the time of collapse), had been around for some time and none of them caused a collapse. The political crisis, on the other hand, did cause a rapid and spectacular collapse.
Bolded is the important part. Of course they didn't cause the collapse by themselves, but the failure or inability of the state to solve those problems made the political shocks, when they did come, much more devastating.

As for the Red Army bit, I was referring to Afghanistan, which certainly didn't erode the overall combat power of the military but it certainly undermined confidence in the state; as well, the mostly unrelated problem of the Red Army being either unwilling or unable to prevent its own fragmentation in the Baltic States and the Caucasus. Its disintegration there allowed the escalation of Azeri-Armenian conflict especially.

Bolded is the important part. Of course they didn't cause the collapse by themselves, but the failure or inability of the state to solve those problems made the political shocks, when they did come, much more devastating.

Agreed. But I dont buy into the whole "the USSR was inherently unviable BS". Viktor Grishin takes over after Chernenko, everything goes differently. It can easily be argued that without the political crisis, those problems likely would not have led to the collapse.

As for the Red Army bit, I was referring to Afghanistan, which certainly didn't erode the overall combat power of the military but it certainly undermined confidence in the state; as well, the mostly unrelated problem of the Red Army being either unwilling or unable to prevent its own fragmentation in the Baltic States and the Caucasus. Its disintegration there allowed the escalation of Azeri-Armenian conflict especially.

It didnt help, but it was a tiny factor in the collapse, and would likely be long forgotten now if it hadnt happened reasonably closely to the end.

Agreed. But I dont buy into the whole "the USSR was inherently unviable BS". Viktor Grishin takes over after Chernenko, everything goes differently. It can easily be argued that without the political crisis, those problems likely would not have led to the collapse.
I agree with everything you just said except for the Viktor Grishin thing because I barely know who he was so I'm not qualified to say whether he was an adequate leader. :)

I agree with everything you just said except for the Viktor Grishin thing because I barely know who he was so I'm not qualified to say whether he was an adequate leader. :)

I don't know that much about him either, save he was probably going to be leader if it wasn't for Gorbachov, he was hardline and apparently ruthless beyond belief. But very old, so maybe he would have only been around for a year or two, as was the style of the time.

Hard work...and Self Respect, and most of All integrity, with your self... before others..

Agreed. But I dont buy into the whole "the USSR was inherently unviable BS". Viktor Grishin takes over after Chernenko, everything goes differently. It can easily be argued that without the political crisis, those problems likely would not have led to the collapse.


The Soviet Union as a superpower counterpart to the United States was unviable. No matter what, they would have to lose the Warsaw Pact and significantly reduce military expenditures to turn their economy around. That, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, was inevitable.

It didnt help, but it was a tiny factor in the collapse, and would likely be long forgotten now if it hadnt happened reasonably closely to the end.

Among other things, it demonstrated the worthlessness of non-Russian elements of the Soviet Army, a problem that would have taken vast amounts of money and time to fix. The Central Asian divisions that they tried to initially use for the campaign proved themselves utterly incapable of any operation more complex than roadbuilding, and had to be replaced with Russian units, who weren't that great either, entire divisions getting lost in the invasion of Hungary for example.

Tell me, did you read Spengler's famous book, or did you arrive independently at the same stupid conclusions?

I did not read his book. But I have just Google'd his name and identified the book he wrote.

I have actually thought about demographic destruction of the West relatively recently. Than I picked up these modern books: "Death of the West" and "America Alone" - which basically filled me up on detail and facts.

Why are they stupid conclusions? What is wrong with them? They seem so accurate and reliable that you couldn't even counter them - you just did a lazy smear :D

I did not read his book. But I have just Google'd his name and identified the book he wrote.

I have actually thought about demographic destruction of the West relatively recently. Than I picked up these modern books: "Death of the West" and "America Alone" - which basically filled me up on detail and facts.

Why are they stupid conclusions? What is wrong with them? They seem so accurate and reliable that you couldn't even counter them - you just did a lazy smear :D

Honesty I never read the whole book - I had had enough of that style from a modern derivative (minus pessimism) by Huntington. Just enough to see that his method did not made sense.
Spengler's fault was in attempting to paint world history has a war between civilizations - only it that contexts could it make sense to warn about an impending "decline of the west". As this was the basis for his book, the whole thing is garbage. The "civilizations" of the world are far more intertwined that Spengler and the others lime him believed. I could easily argue that "the west" has influenced so much the rest of the world that now there is a single civilization, with some traditionalist pockets resisting on marginal locations - the "old west" ("old Europe", as some have called it :lol:) lost relevance because it is no longer unique, lost that uniqueness through its own success in converting others. But even that is wrong, because there never was one "western civilization".

To be fair, Spengler's work was a lot better then his fan's make it out to be, and a touch more complicated then you're giving him credit for.
He was still wrong, but he was just too hopped up on Hegelianism. If you really asked Spengeler why he thought Civilizations collapsed, he'd say they don't collapse, they die and they die because they're organic.
And in fact Demography and the like wouldn't really factor into his picture for him, these are simply symptoms of the bigger picture. If I could summarize Spengler's view very shortly, he would say that Civilizations are basically ideas, and ideas begin to loose their appeal after they've been thoroughly explored. For example, according to him we've taken the Principle Idea of Western Civilization which is sort of a spiritual reaching out into endless space, and gone just about as far as we can go with that.

Why are they stupid conclusions? What is wrong with them?

If these are the same conclusions as the opinions you expressed in this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=338422), then it's already been thoroughly explained what's wrong with them there, principally in this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8547160&postcount=88).

Ultimately, however, these sorts of views are not simply mistaken but fundamentally stupid, not to mention immoral, for the reasons that innonimatu alluded to: they involve thinking that "civilisations" and "cultures" are real, concrete things that are actually involved in some kind of life-or-death struggle, and that their survival matters. Which is absurd when you give it the slightest thought - these things are pure abstractions and have no reality or significance beyond those which individual human beings give them in their own heads. The sooner human beings learn to stop reifying their own opinions and acting as if they have some kind of objective existence, the sooner they'll stop turning them into ideals and killing each other over them.

If these are the same conclusions as the opinions you expressed in this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=338422), then it's already been thoroughly explained what's wrong with them there, principally in this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8547160&postcount=88).

Ultimately, however, these sorts of views are not simply mistaken but fundamentally stupid, not to mention immoral, for the reasons that innonimatu alluded to: they involve thinking that "civilisations" and "cultures" are real, concrete things that are actually involved in some kind of life-or-death struggle, and that their survival matters. Which is absurd when you give it the slightest thought - these things are pure abstractions and have no reality or significance beyond those which individual human beings give them in their own heads. The sooner human beings learn to stop reifying their own opinions and acting as if they have some kind of objective existence, the sooner they'll stop turning them into ideals and killing each other over them.

Yes well you may believe that cultures, identities and civizations are "just in the heads of people" that may be ok for you a avoved rootless cosmopolitan. But when a significant amount of the population believe in their own superioty of their civilisation - they don't want to go down your nihilist hedonistic lifestyle of pic and mix culture. Who are the masses going to follow? Someone who doesn't believe in anything "all cultures, identies and civilisations are all equal" or someone who says "I belive in this IAM RIGHT" - who are people going to follow? The weak horse or the strong horse? People will go to the strong horse.

Yes well you may believe that cultures, identities and civizations are "just in the heads of people" that may be ok for you a avoved rootless cosmopolitan. But when a significant amount of the population believe in their own superioty of their civilisation - they don't want to go down your nihilist hedonistic lifestyle of pic and mix culture. Who are the masses going to follow? Someone who doesn't believe in anything "all cultures, identies and civilisations are all equal" or someone who says "I belive in this IAM RIGHT" - who are people going to follow? The weak horse or the strong horse? People will go to the strong horse.

Well then, you have nothing to worry about, do you?

Rise:
1. Increase in food supply---due to a paradigm shift, resulting increase in population
2. Improvement in military technology/tactics

Fall:
2. Lack of political will to survive
2. Successive \ critical military defeats
3. Subjugated peoples experience their own rise

Yes well you may believe that cultures, identities and civizations are "just in the heads of people" that may be ok for you a avoved rootless cosmopolitan. But when a significant amount of the population believe in their own superioty of their civilisation - they don't want to go down your nihilist hedonistic lifestyle of pic and mix culture. Who are the masses going to follow? Someone who doesn't believe in anything "all cultures, identies and civilisations are all equal" or someone who says "I belive in this IAM RIGHT" - who are people going to follow? The weak horse or the strong horse? People will go to the strong horse.

This isn't a demagoguery competition, you know. Whether "the masses" are going to "follow" me isn't relevant to whether I'm right or not. Also, shouting louder, or pandering to people's prejudices, doesn't make someone stronger any more than it makes them more right.

Your comment just illustrates what I said, though. You didn't take in my point at all. I didn't say all cultures are equal. I don't believe that. What I said is that cultures aren't things at all, that "culture" is an abstraction, and that whether a "culture" persists or not is of no importance at all. That doesn't mean I think they're all equal. You seem to think that someone who doesn't believe that a culture is a concrete thing must, in virtue of that fact, be a nihilist. You obviously didn't notice that I called this belief in cultures immoral, which a nihilist could never say. A nihilist holds no values at all. I hold plenty of values. And among those values is the belief that following a non-existent thing, and making that non-existent thing into an ideal, is simply idolatry. It is wrong because it makes a fabricated thing, a creature of the mind, into something that is more important than people and their welfare. Surely the history of the twentieth century shows us where this belief in one culture versus another, or one civilisation versus another, or indeed one race versus another, takes us.

Plus, of course, it leads to absurdity, such as your apparent belief (I may be wrong in attributing this to you, but it is hard to follow what you said) that everyone should believe their own culture to be superior to everyone else's. The irrationality of that is self-evident.

Also, I can't think why you call me a hedonist, or - come to that - what would be wrong with it if I were.

Well, Sociologist know people are prone to define themselves and their immediate surroundings. And they are prone to group themselves. And a civilization can be one of definitions and groupings.

Of course, Romans and Greeks didn't think of themselves as of civilization, but you know they were very interested in disassociating themselves from Barbarians. And what individuals think is very important. I wouldn't underestimate sense of ˝belonging˝. And sense of being part of a larger group in members of that group can make that group organic. Because as individuals change their minds so can groups (basically all members of the group change their minds on a similar way, for instance: French hated Germans pre WWII, then they've changed their mind and now they hate Americans).

I haven't really expressed myself well. But I disagree with Plotinus's statement: ...these things are pure abstractions and have no reality or significance... What happens in people's heads may play an important role in history.

I do agree, that word Civilization is somewhat of an idiom and that itself is an modern invention. Nevertheless, Romans regarded themselves as Romans and that played a tremendous role in their history. On the other hand, Slovenians never regarded themselves as Slovenians (until late 19th century) and that also played tremendous role in our history.

I haven't really expressed myself well. But I disagree with Plotinus's statement: ...these things are pure abstractions and have no reality or significance... What happens in people's heads may play an important role in history.

I do agree, that word Civilization is somewhat of an idiom and that itself is an modern invention. Nevertheless, Romans regarded themselves as Romans and that played a tremendous role in their history. On the other hand, Slovenians never regarded themselves as Slovenians (until late 19th century) and that also played tremendous role in our history.

Then the significant thing is the belief (or lack of it), isn't it? Not the abstraction itself. There's no contradiction in saying that something isn't real while also acknowledging that belief in it affects history. Joan of Arc's belief in God was an important factor in history, but that's so even if God himself doesn't exist. Similarly, the Nazis' belief in the superiority of the Aryan race was an important factor in history, but that doesn't mean that the Aryan race is really superior (or even that it exists). The same goes for the nationalist sentiments you mention.

Ultimately, however, these sorts of views are not simply mistaken but fundamentally stupid, not to mention immoral, for the reasons that innonimatu alluded to: they involve thinking that "civilisations" and "cultures" are real, concrete things that are actually involved in some kind of life-or-death struggle, and that their survival matters. Which is absurd when you give it the slightest thought - these things are pure abstractions and have no reality or significance beyond those which individual human beings give them in their own heads. The sooner human beings learn to stop reifying their own opinions and acting as if they have some kind of objective existence, the sooner they'll stop turning them into ideals and killing each other over them.

Marxism ftw :goodjob:

I hold plenty of values. And among those values is the belief that following a non-existent thing, and making that non-existent thing into an ideal, is simply idolatry.

What an interesting statement! How far do you really take this? Couldn't the same thing be said about ideals in themselves? I would argue that they're even less "real" than civilizations, cultures and nations. At least cultural groups are composed of patterns of behavior and belief that have a demonstrable reality. There's no way you can demonstrate the reality of a human right. Even the concept of 'welfare' is an extremely amorphous idea.

On a more mundane level, do you think supporting a football team, feeling a kinship with your family or having a sense of belonging to a particular circle of friends are forms of idolotry? If not, why are football teams or families a friendship groups any less real than other kinds of cultural identity?

Is our own personhood even 'real'? To have a coherent sense of self we need to create a narrative and believe in ourselves as continuous entities stretching from birth to death, even though virtually all the physical molecules which compose us will be different, our personalities will have utterly changed and our memories are unreliable and prone to reinvention.

Personally I don't think humans can even conceive of each other or anything worthwhile without valuing abstractions. We can't make sense of the world without abstractions.

In our time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrfease of the population, owning to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics....For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice and indolence that they did not wish to marry,or if married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew -- Polybius

This was the state of Greece circa 150BC and is the condition of most parts of Western civilisation today only areas of USA and Australia are for now immune to this death process. The main differance now is that we have tons of Muslim immigrants who after living in the West for decades have tasted it and found out they do not like it and reacted to it by metamorphasising into insular Muslim conservative self sustaining communites. That is our future.

What an interesting statement! How far do you really take this? Couldn't the same thing be said about ideals in themselves? I would argue that they're even less "real" than civilizations, cultures and nations. At least cultural groups are composed of patterns of behavior and belief that have a demonstrable reality. There's no way you can demonstrate the reality of a human right. Even the concept of 'welfare' is an extremely amorphous idea.

On a more mundane level, do you think supporting a football team, feeling a kinship with your family or having a sense of belonging to a particular circle of friends are forms of idolotry? If not, why are football teams or families a friendship groups any less real than other kinds of cultural identity?

Is our own personhood even 'real'? To have a coherent sense of self we need to create a narrative and believe in ourselves as continuous entities stretching from birth to death, even though virtually all the physical molecules which compose us will be different, our personalities will have utterly changed and our memories are unreliable and prone to reinvention.

Personally I don't think humans can even conceive of each other or anything worthwhile without valuing abstractions. We can't make sense of the world without abstractions.

There's a difference between making observations that humans tend to behave in certain ways and accommodating such behaviour in your thinking, and making such observations and then drawing unnecessary conclusions based on the assumption that the observations have a basis in objective rules without there being sufficient proof of that.

What an interesting statement! How far do you really take this? Couldn't the same thing be said about ideals in themselves? I would argue that they're even less "real" than civilizations, cultures and nations. At least cultural groups are composed of patterns of behavior and belief that have a demonstrable reality. There's no way you can demonstrate the reality of a human right. Even the concept of 'welfare' is an extremely amorphous idea.

I do think that ideals are at best meaningless and at worst an active impediment to morality if they cannot be cashed out in concrete terms. The notion of "human rights" that you mention is a good example. There's no such thing as a "right" if we take that to mean a thing in itself. However, the language of "rights" gains its meaning and its moral force from the fact that it is really verbal shorthand for obligations: to say that you have a right to something is to say that other people have an obligation to give it to you or not to prevent you from having it. And these general obligations themselves must ultimately come down to particular obligations to do or refrain from doing particular actions. Personally I think that any ideal that is worthwhile at all must ultimately be about improving people's lives or preventing them from getting worse, because I think that some kind of act consequentialism is the only kind of morality that can really be rationally defended in a satisfactory way. And so I think that ideals that can't be cashed out in such a way are indeed misguided.

On a more mundane level, do you think supporting a football team, feeling a kinship with your family or having a sense of belonging to a particular circle of friends are forms of idolotry? If not, why are football teams or families a friendship groups any less real than other kinds of cultural identity?

What are "supporting", "feeling kinship", and "a sense of belonging", though? At least in the case of one's personal relations to immediate families or friends there is personal contact, shared experience, and similar concrete things. Talk of "kinship" or "belonging" are just rather abstract ways of referring to these particular experiences, histories, or feelings. Perhaps something similar could be said for supporting a football team, to the extent that one has some actual connection to that team, although it's not a notion I really comprehend at the best of times. What I would regard as idolatrous in the broad sense I indicated above are forms of "identity" that break free from personal connection and appeal instead to vaguer supposed links, such as tribal or national affiliations. Those are cases where there isn't really any real connection between members of the supposed group, but the group is nevertheless treated as if it is a real thing, and in extreme cases is regarded as something of moral worth in its own right - perhaps of even greater moral worth than actual people. When the group in question is a nation, that's what we call fascism, and I don't see treating other groups in the same way as morally distinct from that.

Is our own personhood even 'real'? To have a coherent sense of self we need to create a narrative and believe in ourselves as continuous entities stretching from birth to death, even though virtually all the physical molecules which compose us will be different, our personalities will have utterly changed and our memories are unreliable and prone to reinvention.

That's a very different issue. We do not arbitrarily think that somebody today is the same person they were yesterday or ten years ago despite all the changes you mention; as long as there are substantial and psychological continuities to some degree we non-arbitrarily treat them as the same individual. Philosophers have spilled much ink over trying to establish precisely what criteria we do use. But this isn't really to the point: there's no denying that a given individual is an individual (in some sense at least). An individual person is not an abstract entity in the same way that a club or a nation is.

Besides, I'm not sure how your example is supposed to counter what I'm saying. It sounds to me like you're agreeing with me that things we often talk about as if they were real are not actually real after all. In which case I have no argument with you.

Personally I don't think humans can even conceive of each other or anything worthwhile without valuing abstractions. We can't make sense of the world without abstractions.

Your second sentence doesn't support your first. It is no doubt true that the way we perceive and conceive of the world and its contents relies heavily upon abstraction. That's been a non-controversial philosophical tenet at least since Aristotle. But it doesn't follow that we are obliged to value those abstractions in a moral way. It may be, for example, that for me to recognise the difference between a bald man and a hirsute man, I must at some mental level create and use abstract concepts such as "baldness" or "hirsuteness". Perhaps I have to create mental objects such as "bald men in general" or "hirsute men in general". But even if all that is true, it wouldn't follow that I must think the groups "all bald men" or "all hirsute men" have moral value. I wouldn't have to start thinking that bald men are superior to hirsute men or vice versa. I wouldn't even have to think that these groups have any existence outside my mind's categorising activities. To use an abstraction is not to suppose that it has objective existence, any more than dreaming up stories about dragons is to suppose that they exist. Once you start thinking that these mental conveniences and playthings have existence in their own right, not only have you become deluded about the way the world is put together, but you are halfway down the road to giving these things moral weight - and that's when people start to lose any sense of right and wrong.

What are "supporting", "feeling kinship", and "a sense of belonging", though? At least in the case of one's personal relations to immediate families or friends there is personal contact, shared experience, and similar concrete things. Talk of "kinship" or "belonging" are just rather abstract ways of referring to these particular experiences, histories, or feelings. Perhaps something similar could be said for supporting a football team, to the extent that one has some actual connection to that team, although it's not a notion I really comprehend at the best of times. What I would regard as idolatrous in the broad sense I indicated above are forms of "identity" that break free from personal connection and appeal instead to vaguer supposed links, such as tribal or national affiliations. Those are cases where there isn't really any real connection between members of the supposed group, but the group is nevertheless treated as if it is a real thing

On what grounds do you believe that a concept of a group whose members you have a personal connection is not idolatrous while a concept of group whose members you don't have a personal connection with is idolatrous? Why does personal connectedness determine the extent of the reality of a descriptive term? You wouldn't say the terms "the trees in Shepherds Bush" and "the trees in Nottinghamshire" refer to concepts more or less real simply because I can have a personal experience of the composing members of one but not the other, why should it be different for the terms we use to describe groups of people?

An individual person is not an abstract entity in the same way that a club or a nation is.

Why? Let's say I describe a rabbit I saw yesterday. Then I describe a group of rabbits I saw yesterday. I don't see why the rabbit is any less abstract than the rabbits. One term refers to something with a single consciousness and one refers to a number of somethings with separate consciousnesses. I don't see how the term 'rabbits' is more abstract than the term 'rabbit'. I think the difficulty comes if I start to talk of the interests of the rabbits since to talk of the interest of something that has no single consciousness is highly problematic. However the existence of that 'interest' is not the same thing as the existence of the group itself.

Your second sentence doesn't support your first.

I meant that our concept of an individual human being is so fused with abstract concepts that our relationships with others and even our concept of ourselves are themselves abstract concepts. If we didn't value abstract concepts we wouldn't be able to place any value on who we are and how we relate to others, i.e. we wouldn't have any moral values.

Why I think identity and relationships are abstract concepts: (ignore if you don't need persuading)
First of all there is no way we can comprehend the overhwhelming vastness and multi-faceted complexity of a person, so we have to ignore huge amounts of what we might possibly perceive. Secondly, we can't make sense of a person without viewing them as part of a story, with beginnings, middles and ends (populated with abstract concepts like 'lost', 'purposeful', 'victorious', 'curious') and relationships (similarly populated by social constructs like 'ally', 'enemy', 'son', 'comrade', 'superior', 'equal', 'lover', 'victim', 'lost', 'purposeful').


It may be, for example, that for me to recognise the difference between a bald man and a hirsute man, I must at some mental level create and use abstract concepts such as "baldness" or "hirsuteness". Perhaps I have to create mental objects such as "bald men in general" or "hirsute men in general"... I wouldn't even have to think that these groups have any existence outside my mind's categorising activities.

But bald men and hirsute men do exist. It's a logical category describing specific real characteristics. If bald men and hirsute men don't exist, what can we possibly describe as genuinely existing?

Besides, I'm not sure how your example is supposed to counter what I'm saying. It sounds to me like you're agreeing with me that things we often talk about as if they were real are not actually real after all. In which case I have no argument with you.

I just don't think it's possible to have a moral theory that is based on only valuing 'real things' (which is what I understood you to be saying) because I don't think it's possible for humans to directly experience reality. That reality is completely inhuman anyway. The world of motivation and values is necessarily built with imaginary building blocks.

This was the state of Greece circa 150BC and is the condition of most parts of Western civilisation today only areas of USA and Australia are for now immune to this death process. The main differance now is that we have tons of Muslim immigrants who after living in the West for decades have tasted it and found out they do not like it and reacted to it by metamorphasising into insular Muslim conservative self sustaining communites. That is our future.
Yeah, because Polybios wasn't a biased observer trying to justify collaborationism with the Romans or anything, and so exaggerating the problems within a Greece bereft of Rome's guiding hand. Totally. :rolleyes:

This isn't a demagoguery competition, you know. Whether "the masses" are going to "follow" me isn't relevant to whether I'm right or not. Also, shouting louder, or pandering to people's prejudices, doesn't make someone stronger any more than it makes them more right.

Your comment just illustrates what I said, though. You didn't take in my point at all. I didn't say all cultures are equal. I don't believe that. What I said is that cultures aren't things at all, that "culture" is an abstraction, and that whether a "culture" persists or not is of no importance at all. That doesn't mean I think they're all equal. You seem to think that someone who doesn't believe that a culture is a concrete thing must, in virtue of that fact, be a nihilist. You obviously didn't notice that I called this belief in cultures immoral, which a nihilist could never say. A nihilist holds no values at all. I hold plenty of values. And among those values is the belief that following a non-existent thing, and making that non-existent thing into an ideal, is simply idolatry. It is wrong because it makes a fabricated thing, a creature of the mind, into something that is more important than people and their welfare. Surely the history of the twentieth century shows us where this belief in one culture versus another, or one civilisation versus another, or indeed one race versus another, takes us.

Plus, of course, it leads to absurdity, such as your apparent belief (I may be wrong in attributing this to you, but it is hard to follow what you said) that everyone should believe their own culture to be superior to everyone else's. The irrationality of that is self-evident.

Also, I can't think why you call me a hedonist, or - come to that - what would be wrong with it if I were.

Well unfortunately for you cultures and civilisations do exist and may not fit into your view of "Ohhh why don't we just all get along"? Left-wing pacifist pathetic view.

The future, as layed out in that book, is a clash of civilisations and culture as had been the past. The idealogical battleground of the 20th century was just ashort blip in the ultimate battle between cultures and religions of man. But at the moment in the West we have weakness, we do not assert the dominance of our values - like freedom and democracy which are patently superior to any alternative any other human has other came up with. To say that cultures are in the mind is stupid you go London and than you go to Baghdad you'll see the differance. The people their of differant culture and faith have manifested those beliefs into tangible buildings and archeticture - the spiralling minarets compared to the classical archways of the West. This is truly where civilisations are defined by, quite simply their buildings. To simply say that this rivalry between differant man is wrong it is invalid - if one nation unilaterally gives up their beliefes (as we have done) in favor of something called multiculturalism you end up with a moral vacumn into this moral vacumn will draw into the general public fed up with moral relativism and weakness into something more certain and confidant in the West this had led us to Islam. George Osborne the shadow chancelor's Brother has converted to Islam to marry a Muslim - this just reveals the strength of that lifestyle compared to ours. Basically you may believe culture is a pile of shite but they do not - you may not want them to be a part of your world but they definitly consider you a part of theirs and they will thrive to dominate and exploit our cultural weaknesses.

I was reading Wimsey's economic model (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=303065) and fantasizing about a slightly more realistic version of civ. I was thinking about how the rise and fall of civilizations might be incorporated. By this I mean an ancient civ could grow massive, thrive for a few centuries, and then collapse in on itself for reasons other than being invaded by a rival civ; while other civs might appear much later in the game but then hit a golden age where they start advancing very rapidly to the point where they've overtaken much older civs.

So before going into how this might be simulated in a game, I was wondering if it was even possible to summarize the key dynamics behind the rise and fall of civilizations in real-life history. Or is every case too particular for any generalizations to be made?

Maybe a monumental list of every civilization that has risen and fallen and the key factors behind that rise and fall would be helpful :)

Hm. That sounds a lot like Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (RFC). But to the the main question - and I apologize for not incorporating any recent posts into this - in the 19th century there emerged the theory of the state as a body (consider such terms as head of state, military arm and state organs). Now, if this analogy is correct all states must both begin (birth) and end (death) - although drastic measures might prevent an early demise. For instance, the division of the Roman Empire into East and West administratively did little to aid the West (since the East was richer, although adding a second capital might have taken off some of the imperial stress that was Rome as a metropolis; the cost of maintaining an increasingly burdened military - exarcabated by invasions and internal divisions ultimately proved too much for an empire whose taxation system burdened the poor rather than the rich (who profited mostly from it). But, to sum up, I don't think economic considerations are the only deciding factor - albeit a primal one.

Hm. That sounds a lot like Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (RFC).

Indeed, but the factors affecting the rise and the fall of civs in RFC are mostly not attempts to represent the underlying forces of change. For example, civ's (wildly unrealistic) economic system is based on land-ownership. So to make sure the European civs rise rapidly they're given a huge number of inherent bonuses and Europe is disproportionately large. The factors leading to collapse somewhat more realistic but include things like causing civs to become unstable if they colonized an area of Earth they didn't in history. I was wondering what a realistic rise and fall dynamic would look like.

Well unfortunately for you cultures and civilisations do exist and may not fit into your view of "Ohhh why don't we just all get along"? Left-wing pacifist pathetic view.

The future, as layed out in that book, is a clash of civilisations and culture as had been the past. The idealogical battleground of the 20th century was just ashort blip in the ultimate battle between cultures and religions of man. But at the moment in the West we have weakness, we do not assert the dominance of our values - like freedom and democracy which are patently superior to any alternative any other human has other came up with. To say that cultures are in the mind is stupid you go London and than you go to Baghdad you'll see the differance. The people their of differant culture and faith have manifested those beliefs into tangible buildings and archeticture - the spiralling minarets compared to the classical archways of the West. This is truly where civilisations are defined by, quite simply their buildings. To simply say that this rivalry between differant man is wrong it is invalid - if one nation unilaterally gives up their beliefes (as we have done) in favor of something called multiculturalism you end up with a moral vacumn into this moral vacumn will draw into the general public fed up with moral relativism and weakness into something more certain and confidant in the West this had led us to Islam. George Osborne the shadow chancelor's Brother has converted to Islam to marry a Muslim - this just reveals the strength of that lifestyle compared to ours. Basically you may believe culture is a pile of shite but they do not - you may not want them to be a part of your world but they definitly consider you a part of theirs and they will thrive to dominate and exploit our cultural weaknesses.

So where is the boundary between cultures? Is Birmingham a different culture ot London? Is Ireland to England or are we both 'western' culture? Is Turkey a different culture than Serbia? Both originally strongly infulenced by Alexander the Great and then the Ottomans... is Golder's Green a different culture to Chiswick or are they both British?

On what grounds do you believe that a concept of a group whose members you have a personal connection is not idolatrous while a concept of group whose members you don't have a personal connection with is idolatrous? Why does personal connectedness determine the extent of the reality of a descriptive term? You wouldn't say the terms "the trees in Shepherds Bush" and "the trees in Nottinghamshire" refer to concepts more or less real simply because I can have a personal experience of the composing members of one but not the other, why should it be different for the terms we use to describe groups of people?

Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. I don't think that personal connectedness makes a group noun refer to anything real. So I don't think that "my family" is any more real, as a thing, than "my country". The difference between them is that in the case of the group with personal connections, one has connections to the other members of the group. Those are real because they are actual individual experiences and relationships. The group itself, of course, is not a real thing. It is legitimate and reasonable to feel connections to the other members of the group, and I think that in these cases that is what people actually feel. If I am friends with someone, it is the friend that I care about, not some abstract entity called "the group" to which we both belong. Now if I did, somehow, start to believe in and care about that entity as something distinct from its members, then that would be both foolish and wrong. In the same way, if someone thinks that "the family" is more important than the actual individuals who are members of that family, then something has gone wrong. The point I'm trying to make is that in the case of these personal groups, our loyalties are to the members, and once we start reifying the groups themselves, we've misunderstood their nature and have headed down the path of caring more about these abstractions than we do about people. In the case of the larger and broader groups such as tribes and nations, it seems to me that people's loyalties start off by being to the abstractions rather than to the members, because they don't actually know the other members - there are no personal connections at all. So there's nothing to care about there. So if people who believe in these things care about anything in connection to them, it's the abstractions themselves that they care about, and that's what I think is wrong.

Why? Let's say I describe a rabbit I saw yesterday. Then I describe a group of rabbits I saw yesterday. I don't see why the rabbit is any less abstract than the rabbits. One term refers to something with a single consciousness and one refers to a number of somethings with separate consciousnesses. I don't see how the term 'rabbits' is more abstract than the term 'rabbit'. I think the difficulty comes if I start to talk of the interests of the rabbits since to talk of the interest of something that has no single consciousness is highly problematic. However the existence of that 'interest' is not the same thing as the existence of the group itself.

I don't see what "consciousness" has got to do with it; it would be no different if you were talking about stones rather than rabbits. At any rate the individual rabbit is not abstract in the way that a group of them is for the very simple reason that it is a concrete individual - so it cannot be abstract, since pretty much the definition of abstracta is that they are not concrete individuals! The rabbit may instantiate various abstracta, such as "rabbitness", but it itself is an individual. You can see it and touch it. Whereas a group of rabbits is not a concrete individual. If you were listing the objects in your garden, you might list "Rabbit 1, Rabbit 2..." and so on, but you wouldn't then add "Group of rabbits" as if it were another thing. That would be to make a category mistake. The group of rabbits is nothing other than Rabbit 1, Rabbit 2, and so on, and it's just your mind that thinks of the collection of them as a thing in some sense.

I expect you'll retort that an individual rabbit itself is nothing but a group, because it's a group of body parts, or cells, or even atoms. But one can still distinguish between a composite individual and a mere aggregate or even a mereological sum. A mereological sum is just a list of different individuals. An aggregate is a bunch of individuals that happen to be near each other. A composite individual is something that has parts, but these parts are organised to function together as a single organism. An individual rabbit is a composite individual, and the fact that it functions as an individual organism means that it is not just a mereological sum or an aggregate of rabbit-bits. A group of rabbits might be considered an aggregate (if the rabbits are near each other) or a mereological sum (if they are not), but either way, it is not an individual in the way that a rabbit itself is.

I meant that our concept of an individual human being is so fused with abstract concepts that our relationships with others and even our concept of ourselves are themselves abstract concepts. If we didn't value abstract concepts we wouldn't be able to place any value on who we are and how we relate to others, i.e. we wouldn't have any moral values.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it seems you want all concepts to be abstract. But in that case the term "abstract" ceases to have any meaning. If everything is abstract then it means nothing to say that anything is. But even if we grant that an individual person is an abstraction at some level - I suppose if we hold some kind of Humean bundle theory of personal identity or something of that kind - then we must accept that there are different levels of abstraction. Even if a human being is an abstraction, it is not as much of an abstraction as, say, jealousy. If you think that "abstraction" means exactly the same thing in these cases then it seems to me it can't mean very much.

Why I think identity and relationships are abstract concepts: (ignore if you don't need persuading)
First of all there is no way we can comprehend the overhwhelming vastness and multi-faceted complexity of a person, so we have to ignore huge amounts of what we might possibly perceive. Secondly, we can't make sense of a person without viewing them as part of a story, with beginnings, middles and ends (populated with abstract concepts like 'lost', 'purposeful', 'victorious', 'curious') and relationships (similarly populated by social constructs like 'ally', 'enemy', 'son', 'comrade', 'superior', 'equal', 'lover', 'victim', 'lost', 'purposeful').


I think you're confusing how things are with how we perceive them. Even if my concept of something is an abstraction, it doesn't follow that the thing itself is an abstraction. Just because my concept of (say) Caesar involves lots of abstract concepts, one may conclude that my concept of Caesar is itself abstract in some sense, but it doesn't follow from that that Caesar himself is abstract!

But bald men and hirsute men do exist. It's a logical category describing specific real characteristics. If bald men and hirsute men don't exist, what can we possibly describe as genuinely existing?

The men exist, of course. But the group "bald men" has no existence except as a mental category into which we sort individual bald men. All that exists is this bald man, and that bald man, and this other bald man, and so on. You add nothing to reality by adding "the group of bald men". Now some people think that such a set is actually identical to its members (so the group of all bald men just is all the bald men), but there are problems with this view - not least that it would mean that sets with no members don't exist at all, raising the problem of how we can talk about them. That is why it makes more sense to see them as mental abstractions, distinct from their members, but having no real existence.

I just don't think it's possible to have a moral theory that is based on only valuing 'real things' (which is what I understood you to be saying) because I don't think it's possible for humans to directly experience reality. That reality is completely inhuman anyway. The world of motivation and values is necessarily built with imaginary building blocks.

Well, I certainly disagree with that. But that, perhaps, is a discussion for another place.

<some stuff>

I see that you don't bother to engage with what I actually said or the reasons I gave for thinking it, so I don't think I'm really obliged to extend the same courtesy to you - even though I have done plenty of times in the past and you have never reciprocated in kind.

I would, though, say that it seems odd to me that everything you've said on this topic makes it clear that you have nothing but contempt for western culture. You accuse it of being weak and feeble and think it can be destroyed by a few immigrants with big families. You criticise me for what you call a "left-wing pacifist pathetic view", but all I've expressed is traditional tolerant liberalism - you know, that thing that the British invented and which is an essential part of the "freedom and democracy" that you claim to think is so great? It seems that you despise what western culture actually is. You speak in tones of admiration of Islam and Middle Eastern culture and how you want to copy its "strength" and the way its members "assert the dominance of their values". It seems that you're the one who wants to adopt exactly the values of that other culture, or at least, the values that you think it has, and destroy the values of western culture that make it distinctive. You are the true moral relativist: you don't believe in right and wrong, only in strength. All you care about is that your team should beat the other team. That is not morality.

And in all your rants on this subject you've never said why any of it matters in the slightest. So George Osborne's brother converted to Islam? Why on earth shouldn't he? That doesn't say anything about the "strength" of "that lifestyle" - there are plenty of devout Christians who would also not accept marrying someone who doesn't share their religion (Catholicism strongly discourages it, for example). All that shows is that his wife comes from a devout family, not that there's anything "strong" about Islam. More importantly, is anyone forcing you to become a Muslim or to live in a house covered in minarets? Is anyone being forced to do those things? So what business is it of yours how other people choose to live their lives? You believe against all the evidence that in the future Britain will be populated exclusively by Muslims. Well, if those future people want to be Muslim, what harm does that do to you or to anyone else? As long as no-one is forced to convert, there's no problem. And no-one is forced to convert, which is more than can be said for when Christianity came to the country. So stop complaining about what other people choose to do and learn to live with it. The fact that they don't choose to live the way you do doesn't affect you, and it is none of your concern.

As I've told you before, there have been people like you in every single generation in Britain for centuries, complaining about how hordes of foreigners are invading the country with foreign ideas and how British culture is under siege and how the weak, feeble-minded authorities are letting them do it and selling everyone out. And in every succeeding generation these people turn out to have been completely wrong, and their children complain about the next set of horrible foreigners instead, unaware that their fears are just the same old fears with a different face. That's why I don't really expect you to change or ever to admit that you are wrong. People like that never do, because their concerns are based not on reason but on fear, and fear isn't interested in evidence.

This forum, however, is the History Forum, and the study of history is about the weighing of evidence and the search for the most reasonable explanation of it.

So where is the boundary between cultures? Is Birmingham a different culture ot London? Is Ireland to England or are we both 'western' culture? Is Turkey a different culture than Serbia? Both originally strongly infulenced by Alexander the Great and then the Ottomans... is Golder's Green a different culture to Chiswick or are they both British?

I consider North American, Much of Europe, Australisia as the "West". I think Ireland and UK are probably the most similiar countries in the world without being formally together. I'm not an expert on the history of the Balkans I dunno. Golder's Green is a part of Western culture just - they are a non-threatening, non-prostyltising religion who are bi-lingual in English although they may not use it as a first langauge this is very important as it allows them to feel apart of the larger culture of the nation.

I consider North American, Much of Europe, Australisia as the "West". I think Ireland and UK are probably the most similiar countries in the world without being formally together. I'm not an expert on the history of the Balkans I dunno. Golder's Green is a part of Western culture just - they are a non-threatening, non-prostyltising religion who are bi-lingual in English although they may not use it as a first langauge this is very important as it allows them to feel apart of the larger culture of the nation.

I think what you mean by culture is really a political and ideological worldview, as opposed to what most people mean by it.

Indeed, but the factors affecting the rise and the fall of civs in RFC are mostly not attempts to represent the underlying forces of change. For example, civ's (wildly unrealistic) economic system is based on land-ownership. So to make sure the European civs rise rapidly they're given a huge number of inherent bonuses and Europe is disproportionately large. The factors leading to collapse somewhat more realistic but include things like causing civs to become unstable if they colonized an area of Earth they didn't in history. I was wondering what a realistic rise and fall dynamic would look like.

I see. (Although I'd be more interested in a response to my post after my offhand remark...)

I think what you mean by culture is really a political and ideological worldview, as opposed to what most people mean by it.

I view political systems as a manifestation of that particular nation's culture. For instance in the Muslim world democracy is almost untenable because it demands a wall between church and state which in Islam is impossible. Whilst democracy in South Korea and Japan has flourished even though their is no history of it is because of their religion: Confuncuism which is rather similiar to protestant strains of christianity like Calvinism made democracy easier to settle in.

How do you account for wildly different opinions within a culture or country? It seems obvious that you and I, for example, have totally different values and opinions about pretty much everything. And it is also obvious that you and I would favour completely different political systems too. Yet we are both English. Doesn't that prove that Englishness doesn't really mean much at all beyond the bare fact of geographical origin, and that "English culture" is an incredibly vague and shapeless concept? It's nothing more than a convenient verbal shorthand for a whole range of viewpoints, which are changing all the time.

I prefer to shave with Occam's razor

Occam's razor has zero meaning in scholarship outside of philosophical speculations.

Things are always complicated in history. To ignore those complexities in favor of some oversimplified mishmash is irresponsible and disloyal to the truth.

How do you account for wildly different opinions within a culture or country? It seems obvious that you and I, for example, have totally different values and opinions about pretty much everything. And it is also obvious that you and I would favour completely different political systems too. Yet we are both English. Doesn't that prove that Englishness doesn't really mean much at all beyond the bare fact of geographical origin, and that "English culture" is an incredibly vague and shapeless concept? It's nothing more than a convenient verbal shorthand for a whole range of viewpoints, which are changing all the time.

Their is a wide range of opinions but you'll notice as they get more extreme their numbers dwindle down to insignificant minroties which is just a result of any democratic system. Whilst the vast majority of political debate happens within two mainstream parties with large memberships that is where the common nation is similiar - a good example of this is post-war UK where each party had huge memberships and was genuine choice. I'm unsure how you would run your perfect system although from the impressions I get from your posts it would probably be derived from that 1849 pamphlet written by a German economic/philospher :lol:. Whilst mine would be slightly altered parliamentary system very similiar to our current one.
Being English does reflect to a certain extent a similiar political culture to others as I mentioned earlier the more away from this you get the less people are inclined to support those positions. I say that your probably so far to the radical left-wing that your anti-western agenda skews your understanding of English political similarites in contrast to the more social democratic culture within celtic areas of our nations. ;)

Right - a "culture" consists of lots of different viewpoints. Certainly some are more mainstream than others, but if you admit the fact of diversity you must also admit that "culture" is just a label we use to cover all those viewpoints. It's an abstraction - what really exists is the people themselves. And that means that the "culture" is ephemeral, not set in stone. Some viewpoints come and some go, as people change their minds, new cultural trends emerge, and completely new people arrive. To want to keep "culture" the same is like trying to freeze a river.

By the way, I don't know why you say I'm anti-western - I haven't said anything remotely anti-western here. On the contrary, I have tried to defend the core western values of liberalism and tolerance. You have expressed your contempt for these values and your admiration for the values you think Islam embodies, namely strength and intolerance. How that makes me anti-western, I can't think. I also don't know why you call me radically left-wing. I haven't said anything particularly left-wing here. I certainly haven't said anything remotely Marxist, which makes me wonder if you know what Marxism actually is. I might with far more justification say that your comments here - particularly your post 48 in this thread - appear to be derived from a 1925-1926 book by a certain Austrian lance-corporal. Do you really think that this sort of thing is the best western culture can do?

Well unfortunately for you cultures and civilisations do exist and may not fit into your view of "Ohhh why don't we just all get along"? Left-wing pacifist pathetic view.

The future, as layed out in that book, is a clash of civilisations and culture as had been the past. The idealogical battleground of the 20th century was just ashort blip in the ultimate battle between cultures and religions of man. But at the moment in the West we have weakness, we do not assert the dominance of our values - like freedom and democracy which are patently superior to any alternative any other human has other came up with. To say that cultures are in the mind is stupid you go London and than you go to Baghdad you'll see the differance. The people their of differant culture and faith have manifested those beliefs into tangible buildings and archeticture - the spiralling minarets compared to the classical archways of the West. This is truly where civilisations are defined by, quite simply their buildings. To simply say that this rivalry between differant man is wrong it is invalid - if one nation unilaterally gives up their beliefes (as we have done) in favor of something called multiculturalism you end up with a moral vacumn into this moral vacumn will draw into the general public fed up with moral relativism and weakness into something more certain and confidant in the West this had led us to Islam. George Osborne the shadow chancelor's Brother has converted to Islam to marry a Muslim - this just reveals the strength of that lifestyle compared to ours. Basically you may believe culture is a pile of shite but they do not - you may not want them to be a part of your world but they definitly consider you a part of theirs and they will thrive to dominate and exploit our cultural weaknesses.

Omigod, for a moment there I thought I was reading Mein Kampf! You know, by a certain Adolf Hitler?
You talk about 'freedom and democracy', but that freedom doesn't seem to incorporate choosing your cultural patterns and religion as you like?


...
I might with far more justification say that your comments here - particularly your post 48 in this thread - appear to be derived from a 1925-1926 book by a certain Austrian lance-corporal. Do you really think that this sort of thing is the best western culture can do?

I see you made the same association.. :D

Godwin's law has been achieved I HAVE WON THE THREAD :banana::beer::banana:

I'm more concerned about the likes of Samuel Huntington that Adolf Hitler...

For this thread to have any sort of practical coherence, we need to define what a "civilization" is. Were the Soviet Union and Austria-Hungary "civilizations", or were they political unions of various civilizations, or are they both parts of the greater subset of "western civilization"?

This was the state of Greece circa 150BC and is the condition of most parts of Western civilisation today only areas of USA and Australia are for now immune to this death process. The main differance now is that we have tons of Muslim immigrants who after living in the West for decades have tasted it and found out they do not like it and reacted to it by metamorphasising into insular Muslim conservative self sustaining communites. That is our future.

The proportion of foreign-born people in Australia is 25%, twice as high as the UK. China is now the largest source of migrants and Islam and Buddhism the fastest growing religions. Migration is likely a significant reason Australia's birthrate is slightly higher than the Western European average and the settlement of millions of people over the last 20+ years could have even been a supporting factor to our mostly invincible economy over that time period.

So if we are manifestly not dying, why are we "immune" to this mass-migration you fear so much?

Now if I did, somehow, start to believe in and care about that entity as something distinct from its members, then that would be both foolish and wrong. In the same way, if someone thinks that "the family" is more important than the actual individuals who are members of that family, then something has gone wrong. The point I'm trying to make is that in the case of these personal groups, our loyalties are to the members, and once we start reifying the groups themselves, we've misunderstood their nature and have headed down the path of caring more about these abstractions than we do about people. In the case of the larger and broader groups such as tribes and nations, it seems to me that people's loyalties start off by being to the abstractions rather than to the members, because they don't actually know the other members - there are no personal connections at all. So there's nothing to care about there. So if people who believe in these things care about anything in connection to them, it's the abstractions themselves that they care about, and that's what I think is wrong.



Interesting. Most of countries have laws punishing burning national flags and similar insults against country's honor. According to you that is a bad thing?

Personally I could not care less about somebody burning Slovenia's flag. But Croatians have arrested three Slovenian youngsters accused of burning Croatian flag. So, I feel save to assume that people do feel strongly about such ˝abstractions˝ as country, community, etc... And those feelings have played a major role in history. What do we think about them is slightly irrelevant in History Forum.

What do we need to establish is, is a concept of civilization real? Is that an abstraction people have feelings about. Do they define themselves as part of certain civilization? And more importantly, have they defined themselves as part of any civilization in anytime in history?

Interesting. Most of countries have laws punishing burning national flags and similar insults against country's honor. According to you that is a bad thing?

Absolutely. Can there be any emptier and more meaningless phrase than "insulting a country's honour"?

Absolutely. Can there be any emptier and more meaningless phrase than "insulting a country's honour"?

Personally I agree. But logic of most legal systems goes like this: person's honour and good name is important and has to be protected (defamation). It goes the same for corporations. And, ultimately, for governments and states. So, if persons and corporations should be protected, so should countries.

I never really bought that logic. But so it goes.

Also, I want to comment on this business of "it wasn't X that caused the downfall of civilization Y but their inability to respond to it."

I mean, if a meteor came tomorrow and wiped out the human race, would it be fair to say "it wasn't a fiery apocalypse that destroyed humanity but our inability to prevent it"? Yes, you could, but that's rather semantic. Sensibly speaking, you could extend any logical statement from "X, therefore Y" to "~(~X), therefore Y," but that's pointless.

I'm calling strawman.

Given that meteors are specks of dust, we are unlikely to be in much danger from one. It's meteorites that do damage.

(I'd add that you seem to be confusing "semantic" with "syntactic", but that's neither here nor there really.)

Well, I sure feel better now that all those nits are gone.

I believe my point still stands though.

That is fair enough. Perhaps I was being a tad picky. I have to admit that the "meteor" thing really does annoy me.

Absolutely. Can there be any emptier and more meaningless phrase than "insulting a country's honour"?

Try replacing 'country' with 'religion'. (The phrase may be just as empty, but it sure gets a lot of people aroused.)

BTW, are we still discussing what's in the OP?

I don't think insulting a country's or a religion's honor is meaningless since they stopped being a mere abstraction when we collectively agreed that it is an object. You can't deny reality.

I don't think insulting a country's or a religion's honor is meaningless since they stopped being a mere abstraction when we collectively agreed that it is an object. You can't deny reality.

Even when the reality denies reality?

Book "On the plurality of civilizations" by Koneczny (in English):

http://sci.pam.szczecin.pl/~fasting/files/download/Koneczny/strona.htm

Wiki article about the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliks_Koneczny

Why are you advertising for this guy in multiple old threads?

Since this thread I have also read "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter, another important work of societal collapse. Tainter uses thermoeconomic models to represent societal collapse. He states that all civilizations try to convert energy into useful work until they reach a point of diminishing returns. To maintain the same energy production, civilizations invest in increasing centralization. This puts more pressure on the working class to work harder to maintain the state for its own sake, rather than for their own benefit. Eventually, the stress becomes untenable and the civilization collapses, often in a very brief period. I found his case studies, including the Roman Empire, particularly intriguing, because the model he presents is very predictable. I highly recommend it.

If you read about the Fall of Rome there was this perfect storm of problems that eventually led to its downfall. Most historians argue that the Romans created their own nemesis by bringing the military advances of the empire to the barbarians. People often think of the barbarians as unorganized ruffians wielding axes but in the latter days of the empire their military units were well equipped and organized. The barbarians being more numerous and hungry for good lands and riches took advantage of Rome being in a weakened state. It fell into a weakened state because of disease, famine, greed, internal conflict, external pressures, political divisions and lack of good leadership. Towards the end, competent generals were hard to find and they didn't live long when they were found.

Aetius and his rival general Felix are a point against this - although their rivalry caused Rome´s loss of Africa to the Vandals.

Since this thread I have also read "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter, another important work of societal collapse. Tainter uses thermoeconomic models to represent societal collapse. He states that all civilizations try to convert energy into useful work until they reach a point of diminishing returns. To maintain the same energy production, civilizations invest in increasing centralization. This puts more pressure on the working class to work harder to maintain the state for its own sake, rather than for their own benefit. Eventually, the stress becomes untenable and the civilization collapses, often in a very brief period. I found his case studies, including the Roman Empire, particularly intriguing, because the model he presents is very predictable. I highly recommend it.

I don´t see how this model would explain the wax and wane of the Mongols, though. (It would be interesting if this model could be applied to China, which has an actual repeating cycle of rise and decline.)

Book "On the plurality of civilizations" by Koneczny (in English):

http://sci.pam.szczecin.pl/~fasting/files/download/Koneczny/strona.htm

Wiki article about the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliks_Koneczny

Two things wrong with this post:

1. Unnecessary necro, especially considering how many spats on this topic there are in the OT

2. Links to crackpot historian.

Most historians argue that the Romans created their own nemesis by bringing the military advances of the empire to the barbarians.

Nah, the barbarians were a symptom of fratricidal civil war, the ultimate cause of the collapse of the Western Empire, and not the cause.

The barbarians being more numerous and hungry for good lands and riches took advantage of Rome being in a weakened state.

More numerous? Not in a meaningful sense. The total number of troops in the highest estimates for 'barbarian' armies are about 20,000 to 30,000 men, no real increase on the past. Even the unprecedented Gothic crossing of the Danube in 378 had perhaps just 15,000 to 20,000 men. The over-watch force that Valens deployed was 20,000 to 30,000 strong. The total strength of the Empire was about 400,000 troops.

Even a major Roman loss to the barbarians as happened at Adrianopole wasn't crippling. It cost Valens and 10,000 to 20,000 of his men their lives. That didn't stop Theodosius crushing the Goths by 383. Interestingly, while Adrianopole is made into something of a barbarian milestone for Roman killing, far more common Roman-on-Roman violence like the Battle of the Frigidus aren't given a whit as much ink. And there was no shortage of Roman blood spilled in the Theodosian campaigns in the West and the six years of war against the usurper Magnus Maximus.

It fell into a weakened state because of disease, famine, greed, internal conflict, external pressures, political divisions and lack of good leadership. Towards the end, competent generals were hard to find and they didn't live long when they were found.

That's not the case. Disease, famine and greed had little to do with Roman defeat. External pressure had next-to-nothing to do with it. And there was no shortage of good leaders. Stilicho has already been mentioned. But Theodosius, Aetius, Constantius III, Majorian, Ricimer and Anthemius were all capable leaders.

I was reading Wimsey's economic model (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=303065) and fantasizing about a slightly more realistic version of civ. I was thinking about how the rise and fall of civilizations might be incorporated. By this I mean an ancient civ could grow massive, thrive for a few centuries, and then collapse in on itself for reasons other than being invaded by a rival civ; while other civs might appear much later in the game but then hit a golden age where they start advancing very rapidly to the point where they've overtaken much older civs.

So before going into how this might be simulated in a game, I was wondering if it was even possible to summarize the key dynamics behind the rise and fall of civilizations in real-life history. Or is every case too particular for any generalizations to be made?

Maybe a monumental list of every civilization that has risen and fallen and the key factors behind that rise and fall would be helpful :)

If you regard civilizations as complex systems (which imo is quite reasonable) then systems dynamics can be a useful tool for understanding how civilizations rise and fall. I have posted (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=446672) some suggestions for enhancing the role of system dynamics in Civ6 in order to better simulate the rise and fall of civilizations.

If however your aim is to understand the trajectories of historical civilizations, then as others have said it is useful to first establish a clear definition of the term "civilization". Past Civ games may not initially appear to be very helpful in this regard, as they have featured a broad variety of "civilizations" ranging from specific geopolitical entities (e.g. the USA) to broad ethnic groups (e.g. the Native Americans) and all sorts of things in between (e.g. China).

However this haziness is useful in that it demonstrates that civilizations are largely abstract entities: they exist by mutual consent of a group of people who agree that they either exist or existed in the past. Once that group of people starts to believe that a civilization no longer exists at some point history, or stops identifying themselves as members of a particular culture/empire/nation/whatever, then that civilization effectively ceases to exist just as a currency in which everyone has lost faith stops being used.

Rome is an instructive example: if we regard it as a civilization, then when did it cease to exist as a civilization? With the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the AD400s or the fall of the Eastern/ Byzantine Empire about 1000 years later? For that matter can Roman civilization truly be said to have ever fallen at all, considering how much of an impact its culture has continued to have on humanity up to the present day?

This brings me to the other key concept in your question, that of "rise and fall". This concept also begs for a clear definition, and I propose that this definition might be closely intertwined with the definition of civilization. What I mean by that is if we take away our subjective classifications of what is and isn't a civilization, but still look at the historical events which often lead people to say that a certain civilization "rose" or "fell", then what we find is changes in societal complexity and integration across different regions through the course of history.

When a region experience an increase in societal complexity we tend to see in that region an increase in the number, variety and complexity of professions, man-made physical artefacts, and written documents; we also see an increase in monument building, population, trade, overall prosperity levels, education, innovation, agricultural activity and environmental pressures. When a region experiences a decrease in societal complexity we tend to see in that region a notable decrease or reversal in these things.

Again the Western Roman Empire is an instructive example. All of the things I described above increased during the time that we would generally recognise as the "rise" of Roman Civilization in western Europe. All of these things then correspondingly declined during the time that we would generally recongise as the "fall" of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages. There were still people living settled agricultural lifestyles in towns in western Europe during the Dark Ages, but they weren't living in societies as elaborate as those of Roman times. So the "rise" of a civilization is really just the increase in societal complexity and integration in a given region, while the "fall" of a civilization is a decrease in societal complexity and integration in a given region.

So to find out what causes civilizations to rise and fall, we have to look at the factors which affect the dynamics of societal complexity and integration. These factors can be environmental, economic, political, military, or cultural. These factors tend to be closely interrelated particularly for highly complex societies: a change in one factor may be triggered by -and in turn trigger - changes in various others, and changes in these others can in turn trigger changes in others still, and so on in a complex dynamic interplay which can experience peaks and troughs in terms of activity level but never completely resolves itself until perhaps the extinction of humanity itself.

Nah, the barbarians were a symptom of fratricidal civil war, the ultimate cause of the collapse of the Western Empire, and not the cause.

Civil wars started in the 1st century BC, so that seems like a mighty slow ´cause´. Contact with barbarians however continued all through Roman times, and ultimately led to the Roman military losing their edge. The resulting incursions (again, nothing new for the Romans, as the first dates to 500 BC), started a cycle of loss of territory and declining tax returns, while military demands were increasing. Instead of invading barbarians being a ´symptom´ of civil war (whatever that means), they were as endemic to the rise of the Roman empire as to its fall, the first symptons of which can actually be seen in the giving up of border regions such as Dacia and, more importantly, the Germanian limes; instead of Rome pushing back barbarians it shows barbarians pushing back Rome. The increasing pressure on the Western Roman frontiers also coincided with the rise of a new superpower in the East, the Sassanid empire.

Civil wars started in the 1st century BC, so that seems like a mighty slow ´cause´.

I'm not talking in general terms, I'm referring to specific historical events like Magnus Maximus' abortive usurpation. That alone calved off Britiania and Gaul including the whole Gallic field army, the largest force in the West, which is a bigger achievement than even the most ambitious 'barbarians' managed.The whole affair was cleaned up only after Theodosius intervened. This suggests that the balance of forces in the West were close, which is a problem when the West had about 250,000 - 300,000 troops under arms. It also guaranteed that whoever won - Rome would lose - and as it turned out it was the Gallic field armies that got broken the hell up at the Battle of the Save. This was just the first of Theodosius' interventions, the other was even more destructive and ripped up much of the remaining strength of the Western field armies.

The net result of all this was that Britain and northern Gaul, stripped of troops to fight in the Civil Wars, were effectively abandoned after 388. There just weren't the troops needed to go around, and both were peripheral territories anyway. In this, barbarians played no role. There was no external pressure. The frontier even survived without troops, more or less whole, until the 408 irruption. Literally the only Imperial effort to restore the frontier between 388 and 408 was Stilicho's flag waving effort in 395, the intent of which was to hammer out new treaties to keep the peace. It worked till 408 when other groups not party to the treaties 'forced' their way across a frontier the Romans weren't defending into a grey-zone that hadn't seen centralised control for two decades.

2. Links to crackpot historian.

You already finished reading his book? So quickly after I posted the link to it?

Nah, the barbarians were a symptom of fratricidal civil war, the ultimate cause of the collapse of the Western Empire, and not the cause.



More numerous? Not in a meaningful sense. The total number of troops in the highest estimates for 'barbarian' armies are about 20,000 to 30,000 men, no real increase on the past. Even the unprecedented Gothic crossing of the Danube in 378 had perhaps just 15,000 to 20,000 men. The over-watch force that Valens deployed was 20,000 to 30,000 strong. The total strength of the Empire was about 400,000 troops.

Even a major Roman loss to the barbarians as happened at Adrianopole wasn't crippling. It cost Valens and 10,000 to 20,000 of his men their lives. That didn't stop Theodosius crushing the Goths by 383. Interestingly, while Adrianopole is made into something of a barbarian milestone for Roman killing, far more common Roman-on-Roman violence like the Battle of the Frigidus aren't given a whit as much ink. And there was no shortage of Roman blood spilled in the Theodosian campaigns in the West and the six years of war against the usurper Magnus Maximus.



That's not the case. Disease, famine and greed had little to do with Roman defeat. External pressure had next-to-nothing to do with it. And there was no shortage of good leaders. Stilicho has already been mentioned. But Theodosius, Aetius, Constantius III, Majorian, Ricimer and Anthemius were all capable leaders.

So there was no instance when the rich bought their way out of paying taxes? There were no slave revolts? No Sassanid empire to the east? No sack of Rome by barbarians? No Vandal Kingdom in North Africa? As I recall Stilicho was betrayed and killed along with many of the other leaders of the time.

So there was no instance when the rich bought their way out of paying taxes?

The Western Roman Empire's tax base fell because of civil war and a few generations of constant conflict between Romans. It didn't fall because rich people refused to pay their taxes.

There were no slave revolts?

Slavery was all but gone in the late Empire.

No Sassanid empire to the east?

Peace was signed in 384, it lasted until 421; it was renewed again in 422 and lasted until 441; where it was on again renewed in 442 and lasted through to 502. That covers the relevant period. So, no. The Sassanid's had nothing to do with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

No sack of Rome by barbarians?

That was after the events I described and it arose as a direct result of a Civil War in the East. Put simply, Alaric had ensconced himself in the Balkans under the tutelage of the Eastern regent Eutropius, who got himself killed. Left without a friend at court and about to lose his position - he was the magister militum of Illyricum, a senior Roman officer - he decided to try his luck in the West. The first attempt failed, Stilicho dealt it to him. The second attempts success was the result of Constantine III's usurpation and the death of Stilicho. Also, Stilicho was fighting the East during all this, that might help to explain why Alaric was an Eastern appointed magister militum of a Western province.

No Vandal Kingdom in North Africa?

After the events and a direct result of the denudation of the Gallic frontier of troops to fight the Civil Wars in the 370s and 380s. The Vandals walked in to Gaul, swept aside the weak Roman forces in Hispania, cannibalised for Civil Wars (!) and crossed into the diocese of Africa almost unopposed. Kind of sucks but that's what happens when the frontiers are left untended for two decades (388 - 408).

As I recall Stilicho was betrayed and killed along with many of the other leaders of the time.

There's nothing unusual about that.

The Western Roman Empire's tax base fell because of civil war and a few generations of constant conflict between Romans. It didn't fall because rich people refused to pay their taxes.

Except that the wealthy Senatorial class was exempt from taxation so it fell to the middle class and the poor to pay it.
Exempted senatorial class from taxation. The descendants of anyone who had served in the Roman Senate (a body that was restricted to the noble and wealthy) continued to hold hereditary senatorial status. Immune from taxation and many other expenses, the senatorial class held vast estates and were the richest class in Roman society. This meant that the full weight of the property tax fell on the small farmers and middle-class businessmen and artisans. The farmers who could not pay their taxes could be enslaved (along with their wives and children) and so gave their lands and their persons to local members of the senatorial class. In this way, they avoided taxes but lost their freedom, becoming tenant-farmers (coloni)
http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/late_roman_empire.html



Slavery was all but gone in the late Empire.


It was a period of transition from Ancient Slavery to Medieval Serfdom. I'm not sure the people working the plantations notice much of a difference though.


Peace was signed in 384, it lasted until 421; it was renewed again in 422 and lasted until 441; where it was on again renewed in 442 and lasted through to 502. That covers the relevant period. So, no. The Sassanid's had nothing to do with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.


The threat was still there so some troops had to be assign to defend the eastern front.


That was after the events I described and it arose as a direct result of a Civil War in the East. Put simply, Alaric had ensconced himself in the Balkans under the tutelage of the Eastern regent Eutropius, who got himself killed. Left without a friend at court and about to lose his position - he was the magister militum of Illyricum, a senior Roman officer - he decided to try his luck in the West. The first attempt failed, Stilicho dealt it to him. The second attempts success was the result of Constantine III's usurpation and the death of Stilicho. Also, Stilicho was fighting the East during all this, that might help to explain why Alaric was an Eastern appointed magister militum of a Western province.


So it backs up what I said earlier. Alaric took advantage of the weak state of Rome's defenses because of the civil war.


After the events and a direct result of the denudation of the Gallic frontier of troops to fight the Civil Wars in the 370s and 380s. The Vandals walked in to Gaul, swept aside the weak Roman forces in Hispania, cannibalised for Civil Wars (!) and crossed into the diocese of Africa almost unopposed. Kind of sucks but that's what happens when the frontiers are left untended for two decades (388 - 408).


So the western fronts were in a weak defensive state because of the civil war too.


There's nothing unusual about that.

Which proves the point about not being able to keep good leaders around long enough to fight off all the threats from the invaders.

I don´t see how this model would explain the wax and wane of the Mongols, though. (It would be interesting if this model could be applied to China, which has an actual repeating cycle of rise and decline.)

Technically, the Mongol civilization never collapsed. It's still around today, just much smaller in size. But the most expedient way to explain this is that the Mongols expanded until they reached a point where the increasing gains of conquest gave diminishing returns due to the vast size required to maintain it. Other civilizations counter such diminishing returns by centralizing their power, and the wiser ones try to solve the inherent inefficiencies. China seems to be the later. The Mongols appear to have done the opposite of centralizing by dividing the empire up into mini-empires, such as the Ilkhanate, the Chagatai Khanate, etc. The Chinese dynasties kept having new problems as they resurged, but each new dynasty seemed to solve a problem that the old hadn't.


Except that the wealthy Senatorial class was exempt from taxation so it fell to the middle class and the poor to pay it.

True, and one of the things I found shocking when I read about it. Until the later empire, Senators were exempt from all taxes except inheritance tax. The "job" of the provinces was to provide Roman citizens with opulent wealth and a fabulous lifestyle, with the bulk going to the Senatorial order and the scraps left for the middle and lower classes.

That shouldn´t be shocking though: most pre-modern societies´ tax base was agrarian, i.e. the farmers paid the bulk of taxes. (The idea of a more progressive tax system is really modern - and even today the wealthiest people look for ways of evading perceived massive taxes.)

As for Mongols vs China: both civilizations never disappeared, but the Mongols only rose and fell once.

Except that the wealthy Senatorial class was exempt from taxation so it fell to the middle class and the poor to pay it.

The old Senatorial class didn't survive into the Late Empire. What survived was a rank, Senator, that was bestowed for services rendered. It was a mark of social distinction like a medal and no longer the mark of a different class. We know because people like Sidonius Apollinaris tells us this; he despite being a big Gallic landowner was made a Senator only in 469.

It was a period of transition from Ancient Slavery to Medieval Serfdom. I'm not sure the people working the plantations notice much of a difference though.

Right, that's a glib assertion to make. You better provide some evidence for these slave revolts, then I guess.

The threat was still there so some troops had to be assign to defend the eastern front.

How is that relevant to the state of the West? Consider that the West was at war with the East when Alaric was running around.

So it backs up what I said earlier. Alaric took advantage of the weak state of Rome's defenses because of the civil war.

You threw out half a dozen factors in a list. Just one has been shown to be relevant. That's not a good hit rate. And it's outright insulting to claim a victory here when you challenged my original assertion:

Nah, the barbarians were a symptom of fratricidal civil war, the ultimate cause of the collapse of the Western Empire, and not the cause.

So the western fronts were in a weak defensive state because of the civil war too.

Three which had nothing to do with barbarians, disease, famine, greed, external pressure or the lack of good leadership.

Which proves the point about not being able to keep good leaders around long enough to fight off all the threats from the invaders.

We might as well blame disease for that. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantius_III)

Book "On the plurality of civilizations" by Koneczny (in English):

http://sci.pam.szczecin.pl/~fasting/files/download/Koneczny/strona.htm

Wiki article about the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliks_Koneczny
So... unmaterialistic... :twitch:

It was a period of transition from Ancient Slavery to Medieval Serfdom. I'm not sure the people working the plantations notice much of a difference though.
I don't think that you can really draw a straight line between "ancient slavery" and "medieval serfdom" like that. Serfdom was a legal form, not a social form, which is to say, it was a particular set of legal fetters placed upon peasant populations, it did not define the social character of the peasants themselves. (Some peasant populations were never enserfed, such as those of Norway.) So what you're looking for is the development of the peasantry, rather than the development of serfdom (which is not to say that the two can be historically separated, but that one is more fundamental than the other), and there are very few contemporary historians who would accept that the peasants represented any sort of collective successor to the slaves.

That shouldn´t be shocking though: most pre-modern societies´ tax base was agrarian, i.e. the farmers paid the bulk of taxes. (The idea of a more progressive tax system is really modern - and even today the wealthiest people look for ways of evading perceived massive taxes.)

That was the Senators' source of income as well. They owned vast plantations.

If you traveled the empire during its later days, you would've been struck by the desolation of so much arable land. Many farmers had become so burdened by taxes that they simply abandoned them.

Christ, you people are a bunch of faff asses. I leave for a month and a half and this forum goes to hell. ;)

...well, except Masada, I guess.
That was the Senators' source of income as well. They owned vast plantations.

If you traveled the empire during its later days, you would've been struck by the desolation of so much arable land. Many farmers had become so burdened by taxes that they simply abandoned them.
The hell are you talking about? The agri deserti?

The agri deserti wasn't arable land that used to be worked, but no longer was; it was just land that wasn't being worked. Inference that agricultural production was dropping is baseless, especially given the lack of a comparison of the territories that were agri deserti with previously-worked land.

The agri deserti wasn't arable land that used to be worked, but no longer was; it was just land that wasn't being worked. Inference that agricultural production was dropping is baseless, especially given the lack of a comparison of the territories that were agri deserti with previously-worked land.

Indeed. Also, although disease was endemic to the pre-modern world at large, famine was rare in the Roman world, and there are insufficient data to support that economic decline had anything to do with the fall of the West.

As far as the claim that inter-empire civil war (if that´s meant with fratricidal civil war, a term I´ve not before encountered with recourse to the Roman empire), was the cause of its fall, that remains highly dubious; as mentioned civil war (even on a grand scale) was nothing new. What was new however, was the appearance of larger conglomerates of German tribes at its borders. The 4th century sees a whole range of new peoples´ names appearing, a good deal of which had been before referred to as mere tribes. So while the East had been presented with one new superpower (the adjustment to which placed a huge strain on the imperial structure), all along the Rhine-Danube front, numerous larger local powers emerged, whose military were all a par with the Romans. The most well-known example of what might happen next is ofcourse Attila´s Hun-confederacy (for the most part made up of Germanic ´peoples´ - which is clear from the fact alone that after Attila´s demise, it wasn´t the Huns that were causing further trouble, but these no longer subjugated Germanic ´peoples´), which had no trouble besieging walled Roman cities. So what happened in fact was that Rome´s age-old divide-and-rule principle no longer worked on a large part of its borders. Again, the resulting invasions were nothing new, but they now were no longer being countered; instead whole tribes were allowed within the Roman empire, without them being incorporated, as had been the custom before. Instead of being incorporated within the military, they were now allowed to occupy their own land within the empire and under their own leaders. They no longer effectively became romanized then, and after a while, as it turned out, they were in fact germanicizing the areas they occupied - to a degree, that is, as these ´peoples´ were never that numerous as to reverse what the Romans had done for centuries. But they did cut in on the Roman taxbase, as huge tracts of, indeed, arable land, no longer payed its surplus to the imperial treasury. So, in a way, the Romans were paying for their own demise. Now it might be argued that all of these ´peoples movements´ were simply too much for the Roman military, and there one might have a point; it was simply a novel situation. Before Roman superior tactics and patron-client relations defined (and secured) its borders, but these ´new´ barbarians used Roman tactics (and, to a large extent, weapons). It might be said that Roman acculturation - which always exceeded beyond its de facto borders - now turned on itself. Had these primarily German tribes before only had leaders in times of war, there now seemed to have developed a permanent warrior class, whose leaders no longer fought primarily against fellow Germanic tribes, but instead posed a real danger to the integrity of Rome´s frontiers. And the Western empire failed to produce the same reply as the East had been able to in response to the Sassanids - who, by the way, always remained a threat, right until the Arab explosion on the scene. (Intervention in the West, for instance, was only possible when at peace with Persia.)

As to ´fratricidal civil war´ leading to these events, I don´t see any proof for this, nor has it been effectively presented. Yes, the East intervened in the West, but this was a matter of dynastic policy usually, and yes, there was intrigue in Rome, in Constantinople, and in the military, but this also might be termed as endemic to the Roman polity since the early days of the res publica.

Hell with it. I don't have the energy to construct a coherent argument to refute a semicoherent argument at this time of the morning with this much alcohol in me.
(collection of half-truths, Accepted Wisdom, and outright falsehoods)
Yeesh.

The notion that the western empire faced a serious, crippling military threat from outside its territory really ought to die. The WRE's army won almost every single recorded field engagement it fought against external enemies per Elton (1998), a proportion that increases if groups like Alareiks' "Goths" are included as "Romans" (which they were).

Even the most migrationist, barbarian-invasion-pushing historian would agree that the WRE underwent a series of very serious systemic civil wars between Gallic and imperial interests from the 380s to about 420. I mean, this is basically indisputable. There's some difference on what the cause was (some prefer to locate it at Gratianus' movement of the capital back to Italy, the explanation I prefer), but no differentiation on what actually happened. Peter Heather will say that the WRE was embroiled in an unusually bad series of civil wars that pretty much shafted the army just in time for lolbarbs. Guy Halsall will say that the WRE was embroiled in an unusually bad series of civil wars that pretty much shafted the army just in time for local interests to begin providing for their own security needs independent of central control. Neither of them would disagree on the extent of the civil conflict or its importance in setting the stage for what happened next; both of them would agree that external forces played some role in the subsequent events. Heather gives them agency and primacy in the follow-on events; Halsall gives them agency but a massively reduced role, and argues that most of the forces that Heather classes as 'external' are in fact 'internal'.

I mean, the central events to a migrationist, the crossing of the Rhine in 405/6, depended almost entirely and directly on Roman internecine conflict. Sources like Olympiodoros explicitly note that there were basically no imperial forces around to stop them because they were all either in the army of the usurper Constantinus "III" (representing Gallic interests) or in the imperial army, much of which had been moved to the south to fight the ERE over Illyricum and Greece and much of the rest of which was, surprise surprise, fighting Constantinus "III". The Asdings, Silings, Alans, and Suebi crossed the river basically unmolested save for, apparently, Frankish resistance on the eastern side. And Constantinus, who controlled most of Gaul at that point, more or less ignored the invaders and continued to focus on fighting the imperial government around Arelatum. Even during the imperial counteroffensive under Constantius III in the 410s, Constantinus was the primary target; the imperials only rounded on the invaders after he and his successors were dead.

That's probably the biggest of the holes in your post (which would've invited a comparison to Swiss cheese if only it had something between the holes to make up the cheese part), and I'm too drunk, lazy, and tired to not let Masada get the rest.

I will throw in my two cents that from what I've seen and heard from following these threads, that there's no more evidence of a crippling military threat in Germany then there was in Britain.
While I'm making the comparison because it's the only one I've got, but I don't think it's an entirely useless one.
In the case of Britain we see a culture that has made no significant relevant political, technological or military improvements in the century prior to invasion. Like most of Rome, we see a series of civil wars, followed by a collapse of Imperial support. So at the very least, we know it didn't take anything more then Civil War and distracted troops for small, disorganized, ill equipped military forces to run roughshod over Imperial Territory. We've got enough Oghams all over the place to demonstrate this.
In the absence of any real evidence of the development of new power structures east of the Danube where previously there had been just "tribes" I see no reason that we shouldn't just assume no such transformation did occur.

The sole piece of hard evidence for the supposed transformation of the frontier polities - well, polity is too strong a word, but 'people' sounds a bit too nationalist - is the Alamannic kingship in the late 350s, described by Ammianus as part of his narrative of the Battle of Argentoratum. Ammianus basically said that there were different tiers of Alamannic kings. That's it. From such humble beginnings, certain historians, most of whom are/were German, have extrapolated elaborate constitutional systems for this Alamannic 'state', with kings and sub-kings and sub-sub-kings and whatnot. The more sensible explanation of the relevant passage is that some tribes of the Alamanni were more powerful than others at this stage of the game and were at least temporarily able to lord it over them. No constitution necessary: a totally normal relationship, no different than Arminius' temporary ability to force the Heruskoz into action against Rome in 9.

And anyway, even if you accept the Alamannic 'constitutional' explanations in toto, you are left with the rather anticlimactic result that the Alamanni lost the Battle of Argentoratum, and that by the subsequent decade they were extremely badly beaten in war (first against Iulianus and then against Valentinianus I) such that any semblance of formal hierarchical political structures can be safely said to have ceased. They subsequently played a very small role in the fifth century events, overshadowed even by the lowly Burgundiones.

All other 'evidence' cited in favor of political and economic development external to Rome is either fabricated - e.g. in Heather's case, he assumes this development occurred simply because it had to have done, according to him, presumably by the Inevitable March of Civilization Without Regard to Malthus - or archaeologically spotty, as in the case of turning weapons finds in Danish bogs into elaborate formulas for the military power of the extra-Roman world.

most of whom are/were German, have extrapolated elaborate constitutional systems for this Alamannic 'state',
That's not entirely fair. Some of them were English Whigs nattering on about traditional Saxon liberties.

That's not entirely fair. Some of them were English Whigs nattering on about traditional Saxon liberties.
Nah, I'm talking about "in the last thirty years". Herwig Wolfram and his ilk.

Nah, I'm talking about "in the last thirty years".
What? No, get out of here. Shut up. No. This, this only happened in like the 18th century. I refuse to believe otherwise. It makes no sense.

Here´s a list of Germanic tribes from the early empire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_peoples

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Augusto_30aC_-_6dC_55%25CS_jpg.JPG

Most of these tribes simply ´disappear´ between then and, say, 350 AD.

And then this happens:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Invasions_of_the_Roman_Empire_1.png

Of these only the Goths are already mentioned in early Roman sources. So these other tribes simply spontaneously emerged out of nowhere? Or perhaps they were formed from previously unknown federations?

As per German ´constitution´ - I don´t recall me mentioning any such anachronism; I specifically referred to Germanic tribes adopting Roman military methods and weapons, nothing else. All of which are attested.

The WRE's army won almost every single recorded field engagement it fought against external enemies per Elton (1998), a proportion that increases if groups like Alareiks' "Goths" are included as "Romans" (which they were).

Interesting. Yet these ´defeated´ barbarians established their own kingdoms on former Roman territory. Odd result there. And the (Visi-)Goths weren´t Romans - although very briefly they were recognized as foederati. (And there were ofcourse Goth slaves - being slave to a Roman doesn´t make you a Roman though.)

Even the most migrationist, barbarian-invasion-pushing historian would agree that the WRE underwent a series of very serious systemic civil wars between Gallic and imperial interests from the 380s to about 420. I mean, this is basically indisputable. There's some difference on what the cause was (some prefer to locate it at Gratianus' movement of the capital back to Italy, the explanation I prefer), but no differentiation on what actually happened. Peter Heather will say that the WRE was embroiled in an unusually bad series of civil wars that pretty much shafted the army just in time for lolbarbs. Guy Halsall will say that the WRE was embroiled in an unusually bad series of civil wars that pretty much shafted the army just in time for local interests to begin providing for their own security needs independent of central control. Neither of them would disagree on the extent of the civil conflict or its importance in setting the stage for what happened next; both of them would agree that external forces played some role in the subsequent events. Heather gives them agency and primacy in the follow-on events; Halsall gives them agency but a massively reduced role, and argues that most of the forces that Heather classes as 'external' are in fact 'internal'.

I mean, the central events to a migrationist, the crossing of the Rhine in 405/6, depended almost entirely and directly on Roman internecine conflict. Sources like Olympiodoros explicitly note that there were basically no imperial forces around to stop them because they were all either in the army of the usurper Constantinus "III" (representing Gallic interests) or in the imperial army, much of which had been moved to the south to fight the ERE over Illyricum and Greece and much of the rest of which was, surprise surprise, fighting Constantinus "III". The Asdings, Silings, Alans, and Suebi crossed the river basically unmolested save for, apparently, Frankish resistance on the eastern side. And Constantinus, who controlled most of Gaul at that point, more or less ignored the invaders and continued to focus on fighting the imperial government around Arelatum. Even during the imperial counteroffensive under Constantius III in the 410s, Constantinus was the primary target; the imperials only rounded on the invaders after he and his successors were dead.

Which clearly suggests that the imperial military was still able to do so after these supposedly lethal internal struggles - effectively undermining the point you try to make...

As per

Originally Posted by JEELEN http://forums.civfanatics.com/images/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=11223734#post11223734)
[I](collection of half-truths, ... and outright falsehoods)

Then you should have no trouble pointing out [I]one.

As for Mongols vs China: both civilizations never disappeared, but the Mongols only rose and fell once.

Not quite true. The Mongols managed several resurrections under Altan Khan et al, just not outside Central Asia.

We might as well blame disease for that. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantius_III)

You have good points so I won't argue against every counter you made. I have an interest in history but I don't claim to be an expert.

Disease was indeed a problem. There were plagues and epidemics. There was trade with Asia that brought in the disease and the living conditions were also prone to spreading disease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Disease

I supposed it wasn't so much famine as simply not working the workable lands because of lack of available slaves or peasantry. Perhaps is it wrong to infer that slave revolts contributed to the decline. That's not to say there were none, though. I'm sure there were groups of people who fled the plantations to make a new start someplace else and fought to keep their freedom when they had to.

You already finished reading his book? So quickly after I posted the link to it?

Sorry, I don't consider a civilization-level analysis relevant to rigorous history. Conceiving of Europe as "a battlefield between three types of civilization: Latin, Turan and Jewish," does not inspire confidence in me that his work gets beyond the nationalism and racism of his time.

Disease was indeed a problem. There were plagues and epidemics. There was trade with Asia that brought in the disease and the living conditions were also prone to spreading disease.

He died of pleurisy.

Of these only the Goths are already mentioned in early Roman sources. So these other tribes simply spontaneously emerged out of nowhere? Or perhaps they were formed from previously unknown federations?
That's a rather ridiculous way to look at things. These are tribal structures. They have little to no permanence. Elements of the group leave and join almost constantly; new groups form and old groups cease to be. Political continuity in the extra-Roman world did not, to all intents and purposes, exist, unless you're really charitable about the Boii (and even then, they didn't have continuity for very long).

Long-extant groups like the Yancai or Sweboz, if they actually were politically continuous (see below), were so not because of some sort of institutionalized political structures but because of contingent events.

Further complicating things is the Roman tendency to anachronistically classicize references to everything. Historians referring to Attila's armies, for instance, mentioned legit groups that had decent chances of taking part in the fighting (e.g. Goths, Sciri, Burgundiones) and also groups that had ceased to exist centuries before (Bastarna, Bructeri, Bellonoti).

It suffices to say that taking Greco-Roman ethnography at face value is foolish.
As per German ´constitution´ - I don´t recall me mentioning any such anachronism; I specifically referred to Germanic tribes adopting Roman military methods and weapons, nothing else. All of which are attested.
I apologize. It was a mistake to attribute to you an internally consistent position held by reputable historians (admittedly ones with whom I disagree).
Interesting. Yet these ´defeated´ barbarians established their own kingdoms on former Roman territory. Odd result there. And the (Visi-)Goths weren´t Romans - although very briefly they were recognized as foederati. (And there were ofcourse Goth slaves - being slave to a Roman doesn´t make you a Roman though.)
You cannot speak of 'kingdoms' established on Roman soil until the 460s, by which point the empire's Italian field army had virtually ceased to exist and the other field armies in Gaul, Spain, etc. had decided to strike out for themselves. For instance, the Frankish state of the Merovingians descended from the Roman field army on the Loire River, whose soldiers were mostly Roman but which seem to have included some people of Frankish descent. The 'Frankish' ethnicity that the soldiers adopted was a constructed identity and had no relationship to ancestry or where the soldiers had actually lived before they joined up with Rome. Even a cursory look at the Salian Frankish law code will show that the definition of a Frank had nothing to do with language and everything to do with his legal ability to wield arms.

The Goths of Alareiks were self-evidently Roman. He seems to have clearly been a regular Roman officer, just like Sarus, Gainas, and Tribigild; unlike those three (but rather like Constantinus "III" or Marcellinus), he used his troops against imperial forces in order to improve his position within the Roman military hierarchy. At no point attested in the sources during his period of semi-independent dueling with the Ravennate authorities was he ever explicitly described as being solely in command of allied federate formations, nor were the federate soldiers operating under him ever described as completely ethnically Gothic. Suggestions that he was in charge of a 'people on the move', such as those of Peter Heather, can be dismissed out of hand; they rely on descriptions of Alareiks' troops being accompanied by wagons, women, and children, but that was true of every Roman army in the period, regardless of its ethnic status. (Indeed, concerns over not being able to move with their spouses and families had sparked the revolt of 361 that put Iulianus Apostata on the throne.)

Perhaps the most decisive element in refuting the notion that Alareiks' Goths were a 'people on the move' constituted of the defeated Tervingi and Greuthungi settled in the Balkans after Theodosius' victories is that in order for them to have been these Goths, they would have exceeded the attested numbers of settled Goths in the area. So during the intervening ten to fifteen years, these Goths would have had to undergo a completely unattested and illegal population explosion by further migratory activity (unless you can figure out a way to breed thousands of soldiers in fifteen years). Furthermore, Alareiks' Goths were not the only group of Goths in the Empire. We must deal with the Gothic elements that Sarus had under his command, and those of Tribigild, and the Goths that Gainas brought to Constantinople...there are simply too many 'Goths' to be made up by the defeated and resettled Tervingi and Greuthungi. Clearly, then, many, if not most, of these Goths were in fact not Goths by descent at all, but men who adopted a 'Gothic' identity, perhaps as part of a sort of unit esprit de corps (the discussion of the late Roman army and self-identification is a whole other beast).
Which clearly suggests that the imperial military was still able to do so after these supposedly lethal internal struggles - effectively undermining the point you try to make...
Your lack of familiarity with the period you're attempting to argue about does not undermine my point.

As noted, in the late 410s Constantius III (who hadn't become co-emperor yet, but who was on his way) beat the living **** out of everybody in Gaul, forced the army units that had been following Alareiks before his death back into line, and was beginning to attack the Sweboz Suebi, Hasdings, Silings, and Alans in Iberia. The initial campaigns were apparently so devastating that the latter three groups were gutted, and forced to join together in order to retain any sort of military power. It was at that point that, as Masada, noted, Constantius III died of pleurisy while on the cusp of victory, setting off another fifteen years of civil war (involving figures such as Iohannes, Bonifacius, and the overrated Aetius) that further gutted the Roman army and permitted the Vandals to cross into Africa and capture Carthage. It is only with the loss of Carthage that we can even begin to start talking about Roman fiscal collapse: not a cause, but a symptom, of the vicious fratricidal conflict.
Then you should have no trouble pointing out one.
Sure thing, champ.
What was new however, was the appearance of larger conglomerates of German tribes at its borders. The 4th century sees a whole range of new peoples´ names appearing, a good deal of which had been before referred to as mere tribes.
This is wrong. Previously noted.
So while the East had been presented with [I]one new superpower (the adjustment to which placed a huge strain on the imperial structure), all along the Rhine-Danube front, numerous larger local powers emerged, whose military were all a par with the Romans.
Similarly wrong. Worst offender is bolded. Underlined segment is the part where you insinuated some sort of political institutional development in the extra-Roman world that I (apparently mistakenly) thought was a reference to something real historians were actually talking about.
Instead of being incorporated within the military, they were now allowed to occupy their own land within the empire and under their own leaders.
This is a gross simplification, moving a process that mostly happened during and after the 460s (when Rome was already kinda screwed) to much earlier in the century. Walter Goffart destroys this.
They no longer effectively became romanized then, and after a while, as it turned out, they were in fact germanicizing the areas they occupied - to a degree, that is, as these ´peoples´ were never that numerous as to reverse what the Romans had done for centuries.
Speaking Latin, serving in the Roman army, conversion to (Chalkedonian) Christianity...not the hallmarks of "Romanization" I guess?
But they did cut in on the Roman taxbase, as huge tracts of, indeed, arable land, no longer payed its surplus to the imperial treasury. So, in a way, the Romans were paying for their own demise.
Directly contradicted by yourself earlier in your post when you agreed with me.

...lot of repetition in this post...
As to ´fratricidal civil war´ leading to these events, I don´t see any proof for this, nor has it been effectively presented. Yes, the East intervened in the West, but this was a matter of dynastic policy usually, and yes, there was intrigue in Rome, in Constantinople, and in the military, but this also might be termed as endemic to the Roman polity since the early days of the res publica.
The fact that civil war itself had happened before does not mean that the specific civil wars of the late fourth and fifth centuries were not the proximate causes of the demise of the WRE. It just changes the cause from a long-term Great Big Trend to contingent events.

With that said, the civil wars of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were systemic: they represented a clash between Gallic interests and imperial ones. Even after one civil war was won, more of the same for the same causes popped up afterwards because the underlying problem - elite management - was never dealt with. Eventually, the emperors began to deal with that problem, but by that time, the Roman army had ripped itself apart and much of the remainder was increasingly convinced that the imperial government was no longer able to provide for their needs.

Suggestions that he was in charge of a 'people on the move', such as those of Peter Heather, can be dismissed out of hand; they rely on descriptions of Alareiks' troops being accompanied by wagons, women, and children, but that was true of every Roman army in the period, regardless of its ethnic status.
Did contemporary descriptions of Alaric's groups include more mentions of "women and wagons" then contemporary descriptions of formed Roman armies?

Did contemporary descriptions of Alaric's groups include more mentions of "women and wagons" then contemporary descriptions of formed Roman armies?
No. They are mentioned in passing, or to explain events on the march, just like they are with any army.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FVUvJznq5-A/TiCWc1x_5FI/AAAAAAAAAMA/A4_hM1XUuFo/s1600/Fenton+Crimea.png

Guy Halsall memorably deployed the picture above when discussing Heather's "women, children, and wagons" argument. It's a picture of the camp of the British 8th Hussars during the Crimean War, a group that can not seriously be described as a migratory people on the move. Yet this photograph also notably depicts A: a wagon and B: a woman; children were also present in any group of camp followers.

No. They are mentioned in passing, or to explain events on the march, just like they are with any army.
How then did the "people on the move" narrative gain popularity?

How then did the "people on the move" narrative gain popularity?
Because speaking in terms of "peoples" was par for the course for Western European history from about the Renaissance on up to the nineteenth century, and then got a boost from types like Spengler and Toynbee. We didn't start abandoning the narrative until a few decades ago.

I recommend this book (http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Tides-Migration-Empire-Middle/dp/0812221052/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1328035132&sr=8-2), and that author in general, on the subject of "peoples", migration, and historiography. This one (http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Migrations-Roman-West-376/dp/0521435439/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328035186&sr=1-1) - my standard recommendation - is better on creating an actual narrative.

I recommend this book (http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Tides-Migration-Empire-Middle/dp/0812221052/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1328035132&sr=8-2), and that author in general, on the subject of "peoples", migration, and historiography.
Amazon.com: $26.50 (£16.79)
Amazon.co.uk: £45.50 ($71.79)

:crazyeye:

Amazon.com: $26.50 (£16.79)
Amazon.co.uk: £45.50 ($71.79)

:crazyeye:
I'm torn between two (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_cSnpoKMMk) reactions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL37UEdQTvA). :p

What do you think of the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan? He's just getting to the Fall of the Empire. I think the last episode covers 423 to 433.

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

What do you think of the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan? He's just getting to the Fall of the Empire. I think the last episode covers 423 to 433.

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/
Interesting source list (I particularly like Alaric Watson's Aurelian and the Third Century), but he doesn't seem to have updated it for the fifth century. Be interested to see that.

Oh, and I haven't listened to it.

That's a rather ridiculous way to look at things. These are tribal structures. They have little to no permanence. Elements of the group leave and join almost constantly; new groups form and old groups cease to be. Political continuity in the extra-Roman world did not, to all intents and purposes, exist, unless you're really charitable about the Boii (and even then, they didn't have continuity for very long).

Whether ´elements of a group´ leave and join is neither here nor there. Migration is a thing of all ages. And frankly, I don´t see what ´political continuity´ has to do with anything; no one was arguing about that.

Long-extant groups like the Yancai or Sweboz, if they actually were politically continuous (see below), were so not because of some sort of institutionalized political structures but because of contingent events.

Whether they were ´politically continuous is neither here nor there. Again, I wasn´t referring to any politcial continuance, but to tribes´ names, and this by way of example.

Further complicating things is the Roman tendency to anachronistically classicize references to everything. Historians referring to Attila's armies, for instance, mentioned legit groups that had decent chances of taking part in the fighting (e.g. Goths, Sciri, Burgundiones) and also groups that had ceased to exist centuries before (Bastarna, Bructeri, Bellonoti).

Since Goths were a part of Attila´s confederacy, I don´t see anything anachronistic here... The Burgunds only pop up later, after being defeated by Attila. For someone arguing not to take Greca-Roman historiasns at face value, why are you even mentioning groups that no hsitorian today would include among the Huns´ subsidiaries?

It suffices to say that taking Greco-Roman ethnography at face value is foolish.

No argument there.

I apologize. It was a mistake to attribute to you an internally consistent position held by reputable historians (admittedly ones with whom I disagree).

As I can appreciate a lame attempt at humour on your part, champ.

You cannot speak of 'kingdoms' established on Roman soil until the 460s, by which point the empire's Italian field army had virtually ceased to exist and the other field armies in Gaul, Spain, etc. had decided to strike out for themselves. For instance, the Frankish state of the Merovingians descended from the Roman field army on the Loire River, whose soldiers were mostly Roman but which seem to have included some people of Frankish descent. The 'Frankish' ethnicity that the soldiers adopted was a constructed identity and had no relationship to ancestry or where the soldiers had actually lived before they joined up with Rome. Even a cursory look at the Salian Frankish law code will show that the definition of a Frank had nothing to do with language and everything to do with his legal ability to wield arms.

Why would the Franks define language as part of ´the definition of a Frank´? Speaking of anachronism... That´s an idea which only surfaced in the 19th century. That elements of Roman were part of the Dalian law doesn´t seem surprising. The Germanic tribes had no tradition of written law. Roman law was in fact one of the things that stayed on long after the Western empire had ceased to exist.

The Goths of Alareiks were self-evidently Roman. He seems to have clearly been a regular Roman officer, just like Sarus, Gainas, and Tribigild; unlike those three (but rather like Constantinus "III" or Marcellinus), he used his troops against imperial forces in order to improve his position within the Roman military hierarchy. At no point attested in the sources during his period of semi-independent dueling with the Ravennate authorities was he ever explicitly described as being solely in command of allied federate formations, nor were the federate soldiers operating under him ever described as completely ethnically Gothic. Suggestions that he was in charge of a 'people on the move', such as those of Peter Heather, can be dismissed out of hand; they rely on descriptions of Alareiks' troops being accompanied by wagons, women, and children, but that was true of every Roman army in the period, regardless of its ethnic status.

Again, no one was claiming that Alarik´s Visigoths were a people on the move. But his Goths weren´t ´self-evidently´ Roman; no one ever is. These ´self-evidently´ Romans were slaughtered by Romans in Rome, for one. Now, if neither Alarik was Goth, nor they, why would he take command to avenge this act and sack Rome?

Your lack of familiarity with the period you're attempting to argue about does not undermine my point.

No, your own argument does that all by itself.

Sure thing, champ.

This is wrong. Previously noted.

Saying something is wrong does not make it so. See above.

Similarly wrong. Worst offender is bolded. Underlined segment is the part where you insinuated some sort of political institutional development in the extra-Roman world that I (apparently mistakenly) thought was a reference to something real historians were actually talking about.

The mistake is on your part though. Check P. Heathers´ The fall of the Roman Empire - who, AFAIK, does not repeat your ´people on the move´ thesis. I´m not sure where you get this ´political institutional development´ from that you keep repeating, by the way.

This is a gross simplification, moving a process that mostly happened during and after the 460s (when Rome was already kinda screwed) to much earlier in the century.

Not really. The Goths entering the Balkans, originally in the East Roman Empire, fit this picture; this was before Attila´s Huns came onto the scene. That was the first group crossing the border, quite a long time before the 460s.

Speaking Latin, serving in the Roman army, conversion to (Chalkedonian) Christianity...not the hallmarks of "Romanization" I guess?

I´m not sure where you are going here now... The Germanic kingdoms adopted Arianism, which was officially declared heretic in the empire long before. Speaking Latin shouldn´t be surprising after centuries of cross-border contacts with Romans. Or perhaps you´d rather have the Romans speak lots of Germanic dialects instead?

Directly contradicted by yourself earlier in your post when you agreed with me.

I´m afraid you´ll have to do better than that.

The fact that civil war itself had happened before does not mean that the specific civil wars of the late fourth and fifth centuries were not the proximate causes of the demise of the WRE. It just changes the cause from a long-term Great Big Trend to contingent events.

With that said, the civil wars of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were systemic: they represented a clash between Gallic interests and imperial ones. Even after one civil war was won, more of the same for the same causes popped up afterwards because the underlying problem - elite management - was never dealt with. Eventually, the emperors began to deal with that problem, but by that time, the Roman army had ripped itself apart and much of the remainder was increasingly convinced that the imperial government was no longer able to provide for their needs.

That would suggest that the underlying cause of Rome´s fall lies rather in its inability to provide a stable top structure. Indeed this is a key ingredient of post-republican civil wars: there was a de facto monarchy, but no de jure dynastic rule of succession. Again, that - if it was so - this civil war was so disruptive as to undermine the Roman empire´s durability, makes it still not the cause, but a sympton of a deeper lying problem. The Gallic example also wasnt the first time that a part of the empíre threatened to secede.

That would suggest that the underlying cause of Rome´s fall lies rather in its inability to provide a stable top structure. Indeed this is a key ingredient of post-republican civil wars: there was a de facto monarchy, but no de jure dynastic rule of succession. Again, that - if it was so - this civil war was so disruptive as to undermine the Roman empire´s durability, makes it still not the cause, but a sympton of a deeper lying problem. The Gallic example also wasnt the first time that a part of the empíre threatened to secede.

I'm not an historian and I feel I should take care before entering a discussion between Dachs and Jeelen. :)

However it seems to me that the fall of the Roman empire cannot be attributed to only one single cause, but only to a coincidence of various events converging in the centuries between 100AD and 500AD.

In my view it's true that the greatest weakness of Rome was the continous state of civil war.
This is not something new to the empire (or even to the republic) but in previous centuries the Romans did not have that much "pressure" on their borders of West.

It's clear that after 500AD we have large parts of the WRE controlled by populations that were not originally part of the empire in the previous centuries.
This is, probably, not the coordinated invasion envisioned by "classic" historiography but there have been clear movement of populations from the "east" into the WRE.

At the same time modern studies on weather pattern suggest that changing climate had a considerable impact on the demise of the Roman Empire.

Rome expanded through the period we now call the Roman Optimum (among other names) and when that period or cycle began to change to a colder one it not only caused problems for the Romans in food production and the related colder weather disadvantages, it caused problems for the Northern tribes who had increased in the warm climate to a point of suffering want of food as the northern and higher areas under cultivation diminished.
This contributed to the unrest, and generally caused warfare.
This not only started a southern migration but prepared the "barbarians" through warfare for the battles against a nation (Rome) which military might was too "distracted" to react appropriately.

Again this is not the only or main reason for the "fall" but it's con-cause that made the other crisis more difficoult for the Roman empire to overcome and survive.

At least, no one suggests that the Roman Empire fell because the slaves did a revolution. That dubious thesis was popular in early Soviet popular history books.

I wonder (a) why people still usually refer to "Occam's razor" when the standard modern spelling is "Ockham", (b) whether any of these people know what Ockham actually said and meant by it, and (c) why it is so commonly assumed that whatever it was Ockham said, he was right.

A quick google search in English shows about as many hits for Occam than Ockham. I've never seen it listed as Ockham before you mentioned it, and I first encountered it in a philosophy course. I'd say that it's probably not been universally standardized although the English (UK) name for the namesake location is Ockham.

Back to the OP:

I'd guess that the key factors of a "rise" are an abundance of food, naive intelligence, basic inventiveness to craft, a means of preserving writing, a literate social class/caste, and a sustainable culture (the last part especially from reading Masada's posts in this thread). Military means of dominating neighbors is optional, while military means of defending one's core assets is mandatory. The alternative to military domination of the neighborhood as a means of extending territory would be economic or cultural domination.

I'd say that economic disaster, especially the agricultural/fishing sector, is such a problem that environmental problems can cause a fall of civilization if they are closely tied to the agricultural/fishing sector. If the environment decays to be unfriendly to food production, then cultural stability and hegemony can't guarantee food on the table, unless the population turns to cannibalism. I'm not trying to argue here about the Easter Islanders, etc... and I'm not a Diamond fan. Just arguing from a simple macro-economics stance, not a history one.

At least, no one suggests that the Roman Empire fell because the slaves did a revolution. That dubious thesis was popular in early Soviet popular history books.

Well, they did had peasant's rebellions.

Well, they did had peasant's rebellions.
You referring to the bacaudae? It's not clear that that's what they actually were.

A quick google search in English shows about as many hits for Occam than Ockham. I've never seen it listed as Ockham before you mentioned it, and I first encountered it in a philosophy course. I'd say that it's probably not been universally standardized although the English (UK) name for the namesake location is Ockham.

Well, "Ockham" is pretty much universally used by scholars today - you simply will not see "Occam" in modern professional literature now - I certainly never did when I studied him. "Occam" is the old-fashioned spelling and I always find it somewhat jarring. I suppose that "Occam" remains the more common popular spelling for the simple reason that popular culture always lags well behind academic and professional culture. It's also presumably because "Occam's Razor" is so well-known (although almost universally misquoted and misunderstood) that the name remains in constant use, and the old spelling is simply repeated without ever being updated.

You referring to the bacaudae? It's not clear that that's what they actually were.

Yes, I was thinking of that. I do get the idea we don't know what exactly they were, but they were rebellions (disturbances?) against imperial authority which seemed to lack the usual element of promoting an alternative emperor. So, rebellions "from below". That's why I just class them as peasant rebellions.

Did they affect major cities also, or had any recorded leaders?

Yes, I was thinking of that. I do get the idea we don't know what exactly they were, but they were rebellions (disturbances?) against imperial authority which seemed to lack the usual element of promoting an alternative emperor. So, rebellions "from below". That's why I just class them as peasant rebellions.

Actually, it seems that the bacaudae popped up in areas where the Imperial writ had ceased to function. Thus we get bacaudae in northern Gaul and Brittany initially, particularly after 388 when the Gallic frontiers in the north were left alone. With the fall of Spain and Southern Gaul we see much the same thing happening. It would seem to me that the bacaudae were more like a local self defence force, responding to a general state of lawlessness than anything else. In the north of Gaul, and Dachs will likely correct me, it seems that the bacaudae were likely organised around an aristocratic core. In Spain similar groups were organised along a civic core in the South; with Northern groups organised along aristocratic/estate lines.

Has anyone else read War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin? I found it a good read. Basically, his thesis is that empires rise due to asabiya, or ibn Khaldun's term for society's capacity for collective action, and fall due to a lack thereof. Pretty obvious, but he also claims such asabiya always appears in societies that are threatened over a long period of time by a distinct and neighboring civilization. For example, Turchin claims the Romans (and some other northern/central Italian peoples) were solidified by a common struggle against the invading Gauls. Additionally, Turchin says that several generations after such a struggle ends, society begins a slow decline in unity, which is exacerbated by a growing rich-poor divide.

Though I think this theory has some merits, it also has a few holes in it. For example, Japan was hardly ever threatened by outsiders, yet it is a remarkably united society.

So what are your opinions on the matter, CFC?

Has anyone else read War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin? I found it a good read. Basically, his thesis is that empires rise due to asabiya, or ibn Khaldun's term for society's capacity for collective action, and fall due to a lack thereof. Pretty obvious, but he also claims such asabiya always appears in societies that are threatened over a long period of time by a distinct and neighboring civilization. For example, Turchin claims the Romans (and some other northern/central Italian peoples) were solidified by a common struggle against the invading Gauls. Additionally, Turchin says that several generations after such a struggle ends, society begins a slow decline in unity, which is exacerbated by a growing rich-poor divide.

Though I think this theory has some merits, it also has a few holes in it. For example, Japan was hardly ever threatened by outsiders, yet it is a remarkably united society.

So what are your opinions on the matter, CFC?

More than few holes, like every single European colonial empire.

Sounds like someone trying to construct a theoretical basis for integralist nationalism, to be honest. Doesn't mean he's wrong, of course, but that's the first impression I get.

Apart from the many holes one could poke in the construct, it has the salient problems of a) not explaining much, if anything and b) horribly failing any causation test one would care to devise.

Hm. Perhaps I didn't explain it well enough. Not that I agree with it too much myself, but your impressions seem off. It's complicated and I shouldn't have brought it up.

he also claims such asabiya always appears in societies that are threatened over a long period of time by a distinct and neighboring civilization
Ireland and Korea seem to undermine this.