> Today it seems very possible that another 2,000 years of world governance by ‘powerful extractive elites’ could lead to the destruction of most life on Earth.
While it is difficult to assign a probability, the possibility of modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse in a relatively short time is not unthinkable. The combination of ever advancing technological capabilities and stagnant sociopolitical maturity should be prompting any thinking person to ponder how we could possibly learn and evolve long-term sustainable social structures.
The underlying 'freedom vs empire' theme that permeates the article is too simplistic. E.g., in the modern era empires fragmented into national states, granting "freedom" to populations self-identifying as "one people" yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted and promptly collaborated in a variety of supranational cartels.
The human society "equation" that would guide us how to reach a desirable stable state has never been written down. If it is close to anything it is highly complex and non-linear system, admitting a variety of solutions as "N" (our numbers) and "C" (the collective cultural imprints in our brains) keep cumulating, but "P", our planet, remains fixed.
Oppressive hierarchical societies seem to have been a relatively stable state in various phases of human development. This does not make them natural or inevitable under all conditions. Even a simple linear string will admit different solutions depending on boundary conditions.
> modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse
If it happens next potential civilizationable species will be fucked: we have extracted all the easy high density resource we could find. So no easy gas for them which may hamper any progress. Also no easy high nitrogen sources: food sources will have to not depend on this cycle if they want a huge population. And maybe a lack of helium if they're unlucky.
That seems true if you only think about coal, but we started with wood and any future world without people would have a ton of that. Whale oil too would also be available. Depending on the time periods we're talking about, there would be a LOT of oil wells that could be discovered via the crumbling infrastructure left behind. Surface level coal my be gone in most places, but large mines full of coal site idle in a lot of places now for economic reasons, and energy poor society may dig out these deposits. On the scale of millions of years, there could well be additional hydrocarbons produced, and methane could be used by some future sapient organisms.
> That seems true if you only think about coal, but we started with wood and any future world without people would have a ton of that. Whale oil too would also be available.
I think the point is you can't go far with those fuel sources (e.g. you can't have a trucking industry that runs on whale oil).
> Surface level coal my be gone in most places, but large mines full of coal site idle in a lot of places now for economic reasons, and energy poor society may dig out these deposits.
How deep? In a thousand years (let alone a million), will the mining tunnels have collapsed and/or filled with water? Even if the tunnels still exist and are serviceable, an "energy poor society" is probably not going to pump out the many millions of gallons of water needed to get at the coal.
Current humanity has shown very little capacity for heavy investment with only a long range payoff (say taking 100 steps at a time vs. 1 or 2 steps). The problem is with removing all the easily extractable energy resources is that, is it puts the remaining ones too many steps out of reach for someone starting at square one. If you've got 2 6-sided die and someone has to roll 100 with them to get to the next step, it's never going to happen.
> I think the point is you can't go far with those fuel sources (e.g. you can't have a trucking industry that runs on whale oil).
Yeah, that's true but you can have electric trains and trams. Canals and sails are also totally useful for a coastal society.
> How deep? In a thousand years (let alone a million), will the mining tunnels have collapsed and/or filled with water? Even if the tunnels still exist and are serviceable, an "energy poor society" is probably not going to pump out the many millions of gallons of water needed to get at the coal.
In the US alone, they're all over the place. There's 250 billion short tons of coal that's estimated to be commercially recoverable in the US today. A good bit of that isn't particularly deep. There's still surface coal all over West Virginia. A lot of of it just gets left around because its too dirty to burn under current law, or is a little to disperse to mine profitably in current energy markets.
Pumping isn't that hard if labor is cheap, the Romans did it with two cylinder pumps, person powered water wheels, and screw pumps. Pumping water is actually a key challenge that leads to important technology, or it did for us.
> simplistic [...] yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted
Another complication is elites could be leveraged against each other. In the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian farming villages would use strikes to discipline local elites. Village(s) unhappy with local elite decisions would go on strike - slowing down or abandoning work, and moving in with family in nearby villages. The production drop would bring down a pissed and powerful Ottoman official on the local elite - "you will fix this, now".
I've thought about this idea a lot. It seems like the idea we have of the centralized empires of the past is mostly based on movies and fiction - and maybe from the actions of the last remaining empires in the 19-20th century. I think we take for granted advancements in communications and transportation that allowed for the governance of large areas of land in more recent history.
Are maps of ancient empires even accurate? What do they even mean. If you went back in time to some backwater village on the edges of some Empire map and asked the villagers who was the emperor could they even tell you? Or would they still name some king from 50 years ago?
Borders are a more modern concept anyway, and even modern borders are anything but a line on a map. (Consider airports. Embassies. Checkpoints. Federal agencies operating inside neighboring countries to deter migration. Etc)
Boundaries are policies, not objects. They always have been.
That really depends. I have been reading a lot recently on early Indian civilization, and really most of what we know in terms of historicity, aka writing in the earliest times, is only in the north, the Indus, the Ganges plains and so on. However there were many cultures living in the subcontinent south. Some of those “tribes” were deep in forests and survived relatively intact to the current day, with at least some features unscathed.
Then there is the trade of the early CE time. Trade between India and the Roman Empire over sea was of incredible proportions. Recently a sanskrit brahmi script was uncovered in an old Egyptian harbour port. So there must have been also a large group of people exposed to trade and exchange of ideas.
So I don’t think any broad sweeping statements can be made. To answer your question, it totally depends on the place and time you want to look at.
Like these guys' fascinating book, The Dawn of Everything, this article introduces but over-interprets some exciting new data.
A lot of what we're told about is new locations for urban life. But the claim that they weren't empires is arguing from absence of evidence. We mostly don't know what they were.
For an interesting pairing, see Bryan Ward-Brown on the fall of Rome, interviewed here by Razib Khan (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bryan-ward-perkins-the-material-...). There we do know what happened when an empire ended, and it was very bad for the people in it. That's because big empires are usually not replaced by anarchy, or by democratic nation-states, but by small empires, which have fewer economies of scale and therefore more taxation and exploitation.
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?
There are interesting ideas here, but also a lot of presumption. Just because a people lacked stone writing and centralisation doesn't mean they were free of local tyrants and internecine tribal warfare.
I was thinking the same thing. I don't think there's evidence of anyone ever trying to flee from an Empire where they lived, at least if they were not there as slaves brought from another area. If the "outside" was so great, you would expect people to try to move there... everything I've read so far makes me believe the exact opposite has been true. People tend to want to move to more prosperous areas, just check the world today.
Surely it's all just about organising people on a larger and larger scale that has benefits? Perhaps an empire is a way to do that which works in the sense that some controlling centre has to be chosen and that's going to happen initially by war and conquest.
The rulers of tribes are going to want "freedom" so they can stay in the game of possibly building their own empire but that doesn't mean their people in the end wouldn't find some consolation in the stability of being under e.g. Roman rule.
I'm sure nobody wants to be under Russian or Chinese rule but if the rest of us cannot organise ourselves on a larger scale than they can .... it might eventually happen.
> archaeologists working in the inland delta of the Middle Niger revealed evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority
I don't have access to this article, but I'm skeptical. How would you conclusively determine that the ruins of a city without writing indicate a lack of rulership or central authority? Likewise, the fact that various archaeological finds are turning up more organized societies in previously unexpected places tells us nothing about how state-like and hierarchical they were, while all our evidence of cities from places where we have written historical records is of states that function on the basis of organized violence. This feels like ideologically-motivated wishful thinking. The author wants to believe that empires are not just bad, but "unnatural."
> What, exactly, were ancient empires ‘successful’ at, if extraordinary levels of violence, destruction and displacement were required to keep them afloat?
It comes down to whether you are with Hobbes or Rousseau. This author is clearly with Rousseau, and believes the natural state of humanity is to be free and happy and that empires are a kind of unnatural cancer. If you are a Hobbesian, and believe that violence and exploitation are endemic to human life, than what empires succeed at is to push the violence to the periphery, and allow those inside the orbit of the empire to enjoy a relatively peaceful existence.
> Or maybe, by then, none of it will really matter very much, because the past will itself have been automated. Instead of historians, we’ll have ‘history machines’ based on algorithms and databanks: more facts on file, designed by survivors of the final bureaucratic assault on what was once fondly called ‘the humanities’.
Honestly, I can't imagine that a machine like that won't devolve into a Ministry of Truth.
While it is difficult to assign a probability, the possibility of modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse in a relatively short time is not unthinkable. The combination of ever advancing technological capabilities and stagnant sociopolitical maturity should be prompting any thinking person to ponder how we could possibly learn and evolve long-term sustainable social structures.
The underlying 'freedom vs empire' theme that permeates the article is too simplistic. E.g., in the modern era empires fragmented into national states, granting "freedom" to populations self-identifying as "one people" yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted and promptly collaborated in a variety of supranational cartels.
The human society "equation" that would guide us how to reach a desirable stable state has never been written down. If it is close to anything it is highly complex and non-linear system, admitting a variety of solutions as "N" (our numbers) and "C" (the collective cultural imprints in our brains) keep cumulating, but "P", our planet, remains fixed.
Oppressive hierarchical societies seem to have been a relatively stable state in various phases of human development. This does not make them natural or inevitable under all conditions. Even a simple linear string will admit different solutions depending on boundary conditions.