Grand Strategy Annex

15th July 2017

Post with 4 notes

Supercivilizations and Superstagnation

A scene from the 1936 British production of “Things to Come” with an ancient Rolls Royce being pulled by horses.

A few weeks ago I asked, “What Do Stagnant Supercivilizations Do During Their Million Year Lifespans?” and it now occurs to be that one of the things that supercivilizations do during their developmental trajectory is to experience multiple catastrophic failures and collapses. If we entertain the possibility of supercivilizations, we ought also to entertain the possibility of super dark ages, or (since historians no longer use the term “dark ages”) superstagnation. That is to say, periods of stagnation and retrogression in terrestrial history have been proportional to the age of terrestrial civilization, so that million-year-old or billion-year-old supercivilizations would also likely experience periods of stagnation and retrogression proportional to their longevity.

If a civilization should endure for an order of magnitude longer than civilization as we know it (or for two or three orders of magnitude longer), then one would expect that periods of stagnation and retrogression would also endure for orders of magnitude longer. A million-year-old supercivilization, then, might have come through periods of ten thousand years or a hundred thousand years of stagnation – a dark age longer than the entire history of civilization on Earth has endured – while a billion-year-old supercivilization might have come through ten million or a hundred million year periods of stagnation and retrogression.

In The Phenomenon of Civilization Revisited I considered the multiple dark ages that have punctuated terrestrial civilization to date, while in Epistemic Collapse I considered scenarios that could lead to dark ages, but I have not yet applied these ideas to supercivilizations, though one can easily see the parallelism. And despite the fact that “dark ages” is a term now generally frowned upon, it is nevertheless useful. To speak of “stagnation” implies only the absence of progress, and a civilization that endures but experiences little progress might still be an advanced and functioning social institution. To speak of collapse implies the catastrophic failure of institutions, but not necessarily excluding their rapid replacement. When we invoke “dark ages” it is clearly understood that a society has lost at least some of its past functionality, and that it lingers at a lower stage of functionality for an extended period of time.

It is unfashionable to point this out now, because we are supposed to believe that all civilizations are equal, and no one civilization is better than any other. Nevertheless, civilizations have repeatedly reached high levels of achievement, but have been unable to sustain that achievement. Following this, a dark age ensues, in which the social memory of high achievement is retained, but the ability to rebuild the society of that achievement has been lost. And, in the meantime, new social institutions, started from scratch, emerge in the social vacuum of failed institutions. These new social institutions will reflect the lived experience of a population that has experienced the catastrophic failure of advanced institutions – the loss, the sadness, the regret, the bitterness, and the resentment will all be there – making the resurrection of these institutions impossible. More sophisticated institutions must wait until they evolve from the institutions that followed upon collapse and stagnation. 

Dark ages that stretch into thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of years pose certain problems. Whereas an active and advanced civilization could effectively intervene in its fate, meeting existential risks with meaningful responses, a stagnated civilization that remains stagnated over the longue durée would survive only if the cosmological and planetary conditions in which it found itself were sufficiently stable that no technological interventions would be necessary for that civilization to continue at a level of low technological expertise.

However, a much more advanced civilization than ours may “collapse” to a point that it still retains certain technologies equal to or in advance of ours, and is thus able to meet rudimentary existential threats with (limited) efficacy. If centers of civilization persisted, for example, locally effective measures against a pandemic might be implemented, but these would extend only in so far as social order extended, and in so far as the resources were available to pursue the mitigation. Similarly, a remaining center of civilization might possess a limited spacefaring capacity (think of the few remaining airplanes in H. G. Wells’ “Everytown” in Things to Come), and might expend whatever resources it possessed in order to prevent a planetary impact. It could be the plot of a tragic science fiction story to have such a remaining center of civilization overrun and defeated because it employed its remaining resources to save the planet, and could then no longer defend itself.

Would you use your last rocket, or your last nuclear weapon, to save the planet, if using them meant losing your deterrent and no longer being able to defend yourself?

Tagged: stagnationdark agesdark agesupercivilizationcivilizationinstitutionsexistential risk