The way civilisations crumble
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Syed Fattahul Alim
Whither is our civilisation headed? The modern technological civilisation led mainly by the Western world has recently been reeling from the jolt of the collapse of one financial establishment after another. As the modern-day economy is no more confined within a national boundary, the financial shockwave emanating from the US, and Europe is now gradually proceeding towards the shores of the remoter parts of the world.
Unfortunately, financial collapse is not the only threat looming large over the horizon of human existence at the dawn of the 21st century. The prognostications of the environmental doomsayers, whose warnings were never heeded with due seriousness, are finally coming true. Hole in the ozone layer or the global warming triggering climate change, too, could not wake us from our slumber. But of late, those unheeded environmental hazards are gradually taking concrete shape before our own eyes. The polar ice cap is receding fast. It is hard to believe that hundreds of miles of lands that were once covered beneath hundreds of miles of ice have turned desolate within a span of few years. This
Are these two phenomena, the financial collapse and the irreversible damage to environment anyway related? Though outwardly they bear no relationship, in truth they are deeply connected. And the irony is, the environmental havoc, too, is another handiwork of the short-sighted human beings. In a word, both the Western financial collapse and the environmental cataclysm have their origins in human callousness. There is an eerie resemblance of the present situation to similar development in the case of past civilisations. Some scholars have suggested that the great civilisations of yore did collapse just around the time when they were peaking. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Indus, the Mayan and other such civilisations, too, met with their downfall just around the time when they reached the peak of their achievement. This strange resemblance sends the shiver down the spine, since humans, too, are at the peak of their achievement. Has our own civilisation also reached its peak and that the financial collapse and environmental catastrophe are just the warning gales of what is to come next?
Rory Carroll of the Guardian has drawn a parallel between the collapse of Mayan civilisation, the ruins of which are lost in Guatemalan jungle, and our own. The Mayans, to all intents and purposes, failed to administer their government in the traditional way when faced with the mounting dual problems of depleting resources and rising population.
Shortly after its apogee, around AD800, the Mayan civilisation, the most advanced in the western hemisphere, withered. Kingdoms fell, monuments were smashed and the great stone cities emptied. Tikal, the ancient Mayan city of northern Guatemala, now stands as an eerie embodiment of a society gone wrong, of collapse. How it came to pass is a question that has long fascinated scholars. There is a grim, irresistible appeal to this tale of Central American oblivion.
Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse?
There are, however, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era's convulsions. "We think we are different," says Jared Diamond, the American evolutionary biologist. "In fact . . . all of those powerful societies of the past thought that they too were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse." The Maya, like us, were at the apex of their power when things began to unravel, he says. As stock markets zigzag into uncharted territory and ice caps continue to melt, it is a view increasingly echoed by scholars and commentators.
What, then, is the story of the Maya? And what lessons does it hold for us? According to Diamond's thesis 'the ancients built a very clever and advanced society but were undone by their own success. Populations grew and stretched natural resources to breaking point. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed. There was no need for an external cataclysm or a plague. What did for the Maya was a slow-boiling environmental-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognise and resolve until too late.
"Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact - approaching the limit at which impact outstrips resources - we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks," wrote Diamond in a 2003 article, The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization. The idea is expanded in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The link between environmental, economic and political stress is clear, says Diamond. "When people are desperate and undernourished, they blame their government, which they see as responsible for failing to solve their problems."
Tikal, deep in the forest of Petén in northern Guatemala, was one of the Mayan capitals, a sprawling complex of limestone structures that was home to up to 100,000 people. Kings doubled up as head priests and political leaders. There were acropolises with hieroglyphs and pyramids with flat roofs from which astronomers and mathematicians mapped the planets and calculated calendars.
The Maya accomplished all this without pack animals - no cows, mules or horses to heave and push, just human muscle - and with limited water, which forced reliance on rainfall. By AD750 there were several million in the region, most of them farmers. Monuments and palaces became ever grander as kings and nobles competed for glory. And then everything went pear-shaped. Archaeological records show monument building abruptly stopped, as did the boastful inscriptions. There is evidence that palaces may have been burned.
Most dramatically, the population vanished. Over a few generations numbers withered from millions to tens of thousands, maybe even just thousands. Most abandoned the cities and migrated north. The birth rates of those who stayed tumbled. By the time Spaniards clanked into southern Yucatán in the 1500s there was hardly anyone left. Today, lush vegetation has reclaimed Tikal, turning everything mossy and green, but the temples, the tallest pre-Columbine structures, rise high over the canopy. George Lucas used Tikal as the site for the rebel base in the first Star Wars film.
To explain the mysterious collapse some scholars posit an invasion, or disease, or shifting trade routes, or a drought. There is wide agreement, however, that a leading cause was environmental pressure. "The carrying capacity of the ecosystem was pushed to its limits," says Marcello Canuto, an anthropology professor at Yale. Lakes became silted and soils exhausted. Tilling and man-made reservoirs provided more food and water but population growth outstripped technological innovation.
Complex and organised it may have been but Mayan society resembled a frog who stays in slowly boiling water, says Canuto. "Things were brewing within the system that were not picked up until too late." When the political elites did react they made things worse by offering greater sacrifices to the gods and plundering neighbours. "The kingdoms were interdependent and there was a ripple effect. They did not respond correctly to a crisis which, in hindsight, was as clear as day."
The environmental trouble built up over centuries and was partly concealed by short-term fluctuations in rainfall patterns and harvest yields. But when the tipping point came, events moved quickly. "Their success was built on very thin ice. Kings were supposed to keep order and avoid chaos through rituals and sacrifice," says David Webster, author of The Fall of the Ancient Maya. "When manifestly they couldn't do it people lost confidence and the whole system of kingship fell apart."
Which brings us to modern parallels. Webster, watching the season's first snowflakes through the window of his office at Pennsylvania State University, has been waiting for the question. Pinned to his wall is an old clipping about the fall of Enron Corporation in 2001. "That was the first tremor," he muses. "You know, human beings are always surprised when things collapse just when they seem most successful. We look around and we think we're fat, we're clever, we're comfortable and we don't think we're on the edge of something nasty. Hubris? No: ignorance."
*Some anthropologists hesitate to make direct links between ancient and modern societies, deeming it out of academic bounds. Not Webster. "In common with the Maya, we're not very rational in how we think about how the world works. They had their rituals and sacrifices. Magic, in other words. And we also believe in magic: that money and innovation can get us out of the inherent limits of our system, that the old rules don't apply to us." He snorts.
This is a modish view these days but it was considered cranky luddism back during the 1980s stock market boom and the 1990s dotcom bubble. That was when masters of the universe bestrode Wall Street and Francis Fukuyama caught the triumphalist liberal economic zeitgeist with his book The End of History and the Last Man. That era, to borrow from Star Wars, feels a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are history and governments are taking over banks and propping up markets.
If so, the Maya offer an ominous glimpse of what may lie in store. "Their population growth was like driving a car faster and faster until the engine blew up," says Webster, the anthropologist. "Look at us. I'm 65. When I was born there were two billion people in the world, now we're approaching seven billion. That's extraordinary." Eventually pressure on scarce resources will overwhelm technology - and do for us as it did for the Maya. "The western conceit is that we can have it all - and call it progress," says Webster. His voice drops. "I'm glad I'm not 30 years old. I don't want to see what's coming in the next 40 to 50 years."
Unbeknown to us, Western civilisation may have past its prime. What we are witnessing now might be the beginning of its end.
Whither is our civilisation headed? The modern technological civilisation led mainly by the Western world has recently been reeling from the jolt of the collapse of one financial establishment after another. As the modern-day economy is no more confined within a national boundary, the financial shockwave emanating from the US, and Europe is now gradually proceeding towards the shores of the remoter parts of the world.
Unfortunately, financial collapse is not the only threat looming large over the horizon of human existence at the dawn of the 21st century. The prognostications of the environmental doomsayers, whose warnings were never heeded with due seriousness, are finally coming true. Hole in the ozone layer or the global warming triggering climate change, too, could not wake us from our slumber. But of late, those unheeded environmental hazards are gradually taking concrete shape before our own eyes. The polar ice cap is receding fast. It is hard to believe that hundreds of miles of lands that were once covered beneath hundreds of miles of ice have turned desolate within a span of few years. This
Are these two phenomena, the financial collapse and the irreversible damage to environment anyway related? Though outwardly they bear no relationship, in truth they are deeply connected. And the irony is, the environmental havoc, too, is another handiwork of the short-sighted human beings. In a word, both the Western financial collapse and the environmental cataclysm have their origins in human callousness. There is an eerie resemblance of the present situation to similar development in the case of past civilisations. Some scholars have suggested that the great civilisations of yore did collapse just around the time when they were peaking. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Indus, the Mayan and other such civilisations, too, met with their downfall just around the time when they reached the peak of their achievement. This strange resemblance sends the shiver down the spine, since humans, too, are at the peak of their achievement. Has our own civilisation also reached its peak and that the financial collapse and environmental catastrophe are just the warning gales of what is to come next?
Rory Carroll of the Guardian has drawn a parallel between the collapse of Mayan civilisation, the ruins of which are lost in Guatemalan jungle, and our own. The Mayans, to all intents and purposes, failed to administer their government in the traditional way when faced with the mounting dual problems of depleting resources and rising population.
Shortly after its apogee, around AD800, the Mayan civilisation, the most advanced in the western hemisphere, withered. Kingdoms fell, monuments were smashed and the great stone cities emptied. Tikal, the ancient Mayan city of northern Guatemala, now stands as an eerie embodiment of a society gone wrong, of collapse. How it came to pass is a question that has long fascinated scholars. There is a grim, irresistible appeal to this tale of Central American oblivion.
Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse?
There are, however, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era's convulsions. "We think we are different," says Jared Diamond, the American evolutionary biologist. "In fact . . . all of those powerful societies of the past thought that they too were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse." The Maya, like us, were at the apex of their power when things began to unravel, he says. As stock markets zigzag into uncharted territory and ice caps continue to melt, it is a view increasingly echoed by scholars and commentators.
What, then, is the story of the Maya? And what lessons does it hold for us? According to Diamond's thesis 'the ancients built a very clever and advanced society but were undone by their own success. Populations grew and stretched natural resources to breaking point. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed. There was no need for an external cataclysm or a plague. What did for the Maya was a slow-boiling environmental-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognise and resolve until too late.
"Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact - approaching the limit at which impact outstrips resources - we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks," wrote Diamond in a 2003 article, The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization. The idea is expanded in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The link between environmental, economic and political stress is clear, says Diamond. "When people are desperate and undernourished, they blame their government, which they see as responsible for failing to solve their problems."
Tikal, deep in the forest of Petén in northern Guatemala, was one of the Mayan capitals, a sprawling complex of limestone structures that was home to up to 100,000 people. Kings doubled up as head priests and political leaders. There were acropolises with hieroglyphs and pyramids with flat roofs from which astronomers and mathematicians mapped the planets and calculated calendars.
The Maya accomplished all this without pack animals - no cows, mules or horses to heave and push, just human muscle - and with limited water, which forced reliance on rainfall. By AD750 there were several million in the region, most of them farmers. Monuments and palaces became ever grander as kings and nobles competed for glory. And then everything went pear-shaped. Archaeological records show monument building abruptly stopped, as did the boastful inscriptions. There is evidence that palaces may have been burned.
Most dramatically, the population vanished. Over a few generations numbers withered from millions to tens of thousands, maybe even just thousands. Most abandoned the cities and migrated north. The birth rates of those who stayed tumbled. By the time Spaniards clanked into southern Yucatán in the 1500s there was hardly anyone left. Today, lush vegetation has reclaimed Tikal, turning everything mossy and green, but the temples, the tallest pre-Columbine structures, rise high over the canopy. George Lucas used Tikal as the site for the rebel base in the first Star Wars film.
To explain the mysterious collapse some scholars posit an invasion, or disease, or shifting trade routes, or a drought. There is wide agreement, however, that a leading cause was environmental pressure. "The carrying capacity of the ecosystem was pushed to its limits," says Marcello Canuto, an anthropology professor at Yale. Lakes became silted and soils exhausted. Tilling and man-made reservoirs provided more food and water but population growth outstripped technological innovation.
Complex and organised it may have been but Mayan society resembled a frog who stays in slowly boiling water, says Canuto. "Things were brewing within the system that were not picked up until too late." When the political elites did react they made things worse by offering greater sacrifices to the gods and plundering neighbours. "The kingdoms were interdependent and there was a ripple effect. They did not respond correctly to a crisis which, in hindsight, was as clear as day."
The environmental trouble built up over centuries and was partly concealed by short-term fluctuations in rainfall patterns and harvest yields. But when the tipping point came, events moved quickly. "Their success was built on very thin ice. Kings were supposed to keep order and avoid chaos through rituals and sacrifice," says David Webster, author of The Fall of the Ancient Maya. "When manifestly they couldn't do it people lost confidence and the whole system of kingship fell apart."
Which brings us to modern parallels. Webster, watching the season's first snowflakes through the window of his office at Pennsylvania State University, has been waiting for the question. Pinned to his wall is an old clipping about the fall of Enron Corporation in 2001. "That was the first tremor," he muses. "You know, human beings are always surprised when things collapse just when they seem most successful. We look around and we think we're fat, we're clever, we're comfortable and we don't think we're on the edge of something nasty. Hubris? No: ignorance."
*Some anthropologists hesitate to make direct links between ancient and modern societies, deeming it out of academic bounds. Not Webster. "In common with the Maya, we're not very rational in how we think about how the world works. They had their rituals and sacrifices. Magic, in other words. And we also believe in magic: that money and innovation can get us out of the inherent limits of our system, that the old rules don't apply to us." He snorts.
This is a modish view these days but it was considered cranky luddism back during the 1980s stock market boom and the 1990s dotcom bubble. That was when masters of the universe bestrode Wall Street and Francis Fukuyama caught the triumphalist liberal economic zeitgeist with his book The End of History and the Last Man. That era, to borrow from Star Wars, feels a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are history and governments are taking over banks and propping up markets.
If so, the Maya offer an ominous glimpse of what may lie in store. "Their population growth was like driving a car faster and faster until the engine blew up," says Webster, the anthropologist. "Look at us. I'm 65. When I was born there were two billion people in the world, now we're approaching seven billion. That's extraordinary." Eventually pressure on scarce resources will overwhelm technology - and do for us as it did for the Maya. "The western conceit is that we can have it all - and call it progress," says Webster. His voice drops. "I'm glad I'm not 30 years old. I don't want to see what's coming in the next 40 to 50 years."
Unbeknown to us, Western civilisation may have past its prime. What we are witnessing now might be the beginning of its end.