A critique of the general concept: A culture may remain “in a state of collapse” for a long, long time. It’s a little like saying “as soon as you’re born, you start dying” — it’s a statement more about the speaker’s attitude toward life or society than about the life or society being described.
(Moreover, homeostasis only works until invaded. That’s why there ain’t no more moa in old Aotearoa.)
In terms of instrumental goals (‘keep society functioning’), I think these are secondary concerns. A person might believe that we are all in a perpetual state of decay; a doctor finds it necessary to understand the kidneys of a high-functioning adult so that later problems may be diagnosed and fixed. Even if decay itself might take a long time- and even if decay is ultimately inevitable- there are reasons to want to understand and replicate the rules that provide access to ‘doing okay, for now’.
Departing from my steelman for a moment, I think a more pressing concern with the model might be a poor understanding of the environmental pressures on specific societies. Homeostasis is contextual- gills are a bad organ for somebody like me to have. In the case of human societies, it’s not obvious what these environmental pressures might be, or what consequences they might have. Technology is certainly one of them, as are other human societies, as are material resources and so on, but it’s just not a well constrained problem. Does internet access alter the most stable implementations of copyright law? Does cheap birth control change the most economically viable praxis of women’s education? Would we expect Mars colonization to result from a new cold war? So I think it is not enough to show that a society endured- you have to show that the organs of that society act as solutions to currently existing problems, otherwise they are likely to multiply our miseries.
A critique of the general concept: A culture may remain “in a state of collapse” for a long, long time.
I think the “in a state of collapse” expression is a bit misleading with wrong connotations. A culture neglecting the real-world constraints is not necessarily collapsing. A better analogy would be swimming against the current—you can do it for a while by spending a lot of energy, but sooner or later you’ll run out and the current will sweep you away.
In the most general approach, negentropy. In the context of human societies, it’s population, talent, economic production, power. Things a society needs to survive, grow, and flourish.
A lot of that doesn’t look like the kind of thing societies consume, more like the substrate they run on. At least aside from a few crazy outliers like the Khmer Rouge.
I’m having a hard time thinking of policy regimes that require governments to trade off future talent, for example, for continued existence. Maybe throwing a third of your male population into a major war would qualify, but wars that major are quite rare.
Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.
A critique of the general concept: A culture may remain “in a state of collapse” for a long, long time. It’s a little like saying “as soon as you’re born, you start dying” — it’s a statement more about the speaker’s attitude toward life or society than about the life or society being described.
(Moreover, homeostasis only works until invaded. That’s why there ain’t no more moa in old Aotearoa.)
In terms of instrumental goals (‘keep society functioning’), I think these are secondary concerns. A person might believe that we are all in a perpetual state of decay; a doctor finds it necessary to understand the kidneys of a high-functioning adult so that later problems may be diagnosed and fixed. Even if decay itself might take a long time- and even if decay is ultimately inevitable- there are reasons to want to understand and replicate the rules that provide access to ‘doing okay, for now’.
Departing from my steelman for a moment, I think a more pressing concern with the model might be a poor understanding of the environmental pressures on specific societies. Homeostasis is contextual- gills are a bad organ for somebody like me to have. In the case of human societies, it’s not obvious what these environmental pressures might be, or what consequences they might have. Technology is certainly one of them, as are other human societies, as are material resources and so on, but it’s just not a well constrained problem. Does internet access alter the most stable implementations of copyright law? Does cheap birth control change the most economically viable praxis of women’s education? Would we expect Mars colonization to result from a new cold war? So I think it is not enough to show that a society endured- you have to show that the organs of that society act as solutions to currently existing problems, otherwise they are likely to multiply our miseries.
(Rejoinder to the rejoinder: Chesterton’s Fence.)
I think the “in a state of collapse” expression is a bit misleading with wrong connotations. A culture neglecting the real-world constraints is not necessarily collapsing. A better analogy would be swimming against the current—you can do it for a while by spending a lot of energy, but sooner or later you’ll run out and the current will sweep you away.
What is energy in this analogy, and where does it come from?
In the most general approach, negentropy. In the context of human societies, it’s population, talent, economic production, power. Things a society needs to survive, grow, and flourish.
A lot of that doesn’t look like the kind of thing societies consume, more like the substrate they run on. At least aside from a few crazy outliers like the Khmer Rouge.
I’m having a hard time thinking of policy regimes that require governments to trade off future talent, for example, for continued existence. Maybe throwing a third of your male population into a major war would qualify, but wars that major are quite rare.
Tentatively—keeping the society poor and boring. Anyone who can leave, especially the smarter people, does leave. This is called a brain drain.
Literally borrowing ever increasing amounts of money against future generations’ productivity.
Having social policies that lead to high IQ people reproducing less.
They are now, anyway.
The Ottoman Empire lost 13-15% of its total population in WWI but had by far the worst proportional losses of that war, particularly from disease and starvation.
In WWII, Poland lost 16%, the Soviet Union lost 13%, and Germany 8-10%..
In the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. as a whole lost 3% of its population, including 6% of white Northern males and 18% of white Southern males..
Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.