Civilization and Its Discontents

Is Civilization worth the effort?

There have been tradeoffs. Civilization at base is urbanism. Trading nomadic hunting/gathering for stationary horticulture. Horticulture grows more intense and leads to agriculture. More surplus leads to population increase. This leads to role stratification and specialization. Villages grow into towns which grow into cities which grow into states and empires. At every level complexity is increased. Meanwhile environments are degraded and till the tipping point is reached and overshoot results in collapse. Complexity retreats.

Diminishing returns have struck with a vengeance in the form of the industrial megalopolis. This is as bad as it gets. Yet, I'm not quite comfortable with my descendants living entirely as hunter-gatherers no matter how uncomplicated and happy their primitivist lives may be. This is at the root of the creation myth at the heart of Judeo-Christianity and Greek myth. Humanity trades the garden of delight for the curse of knowledge, the farm and the city.

Is it possible to have a restrained civilization that doesn't require constant growth in population and complexity? Can civilization be sliced into static levels or is civilization a process in and of itself? Certainly industrial capitalist civilization is a process that requires eternal, accelerating growth. It's effectively a Ponzi scheme that tallies the cost which is paid by those at the bottom of the pyramid. These costs manifest as ecological destruction, increasingly dehumanizing hierarchy and the diminishing returns on complexity which afflict the last generation before the collapse.

Yet civilization as merely the grouping of humans into permanent settlements produces a wide range of non-toxic benefits. The danger comes when growth tips over some critical point which results in environmental abuse and resource wars. The exact location of this point depends largely on just what the carrying capacity of a given region is. Some places may easily support towns of 10,000 people without danger of environmental degradation while other harsher locales could sustainably support 100. The problem seems to arise from the fact that a stable population is not something that any species seems to be able to choose to maintain. Correcting populations has ever been the province of accident, disease and starvation and in the case of humans war. To be honest, life itself is about runaway reproduction, or converting as much matter as possible into replications of the reproducing things. Successful genes use various roundabout strategies basically to organize other elements into copies of themselves. Life by its nature is ultimately viral. Nothing truly exists "in balance" in the bioshpere; things just reproduce as much as constraining factors let them. This is true of bacteria, algae, deer, buffalo, eagles, humans, etc. What are resources? Things that can be used. What are they really used for: Energy and material, more specifically the energy to turn material into copies of genes. So aggregate behavior of any species, including ours, will be to maximize strategies that make copies of its genes (these can involve indirect strategies outside of direct reproduction which is "higher" animals often have strategies involving helping others in direct degree of genetic closeness).

Human beings are in the unique position among all the species ever to exist. We can recognize that there are situations in which it would be wise to limit our numbers. It's not civilization itself at fault, but our biological natures skew the civilizing process out of control every time. Whatever the carrying capacity is, we will be sure to exceed it once we figure out how to establish any sort of surplus. Whatever level of complexity brings us technological comfort, we will be sure to press and increase complexity until bureaucracy and specialization turn the majority of us into slaves for the organizers and administrators at the top of the hierarchy.

I honestly believe a) that some level of civilization is worth the loss of Eden and b) we have the means to make civilization a sustainable affair . I would like to stop here to point out that although our prevailing creation myth shows the Garden of our origin as being a tragic trade for agriculture and science(knowledge), it also depicts the paradise following the apocalypse as a shining city. Urbanity free of unchecked population growth and the resulting resource depletion, tyranny and war is possible. The most salient practical step is a limit on urban populations. Hunting and gathering tribes have the luxury of resource availibility rather immediately limiting their numbers. Agricultural-urbanites do not. We have to accept the responsibility to regulate our birthrates and the size of our settlements so that they never strain their regions. If a sensible estimate shows that there is enough food and fuel to support 20,000 humans and still allow for regeneration of resource stocks, then keeping the population well within this natural limit should be the obvious course of action. Allowing the population to swell to 40, 50, 60,000 and more is an act of suicide. This is what leads to want and to going further afield to rob neighbors of their resources after your own stash has been depleted beyond the regeneration level. Sadly this seems to be the inevitable outcome with regard to our species. Maybe our latest experience on the downside of Hubbert's peak will teach us a lesson; we will have to curb our tendency to replicate if we want to continue to enjoy the benefits and comforts of some level of complexity and technology, or to continue to exist at all.