The Empire Collapses

Our federal government —  all three branches — soon will be under the control of a party that hates government. (Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”) The ridicule continues with Donald Trump. Immediately after his reelection he appointed a pair of self-described “small-government revolutionaries” to cut trillions of dollars from agency budgets. Then he began nominating cabinet members as if he were a director casting a show for television and little else. 

There’s a long history of colonizing empires cutting costs to avoid complete collapse. Is America an empire? It does not fit the historic definition because it has never colonized. Yet, it does have about 750 foreign military bases, its consumer market is fed by thousands of foreign producers, and immigrants covet its citizenship. These are times that try new definitions, as I will show with the help of a scholarly 250-page book published in 1988 by Cambridge University and surprisingly reprinted at least 29 times since then. It is “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph A. Tainter, a PhD archeologist who did a lot of field work in northwest New Mexico.

He discovered a political law of diminishing returns from accelerating complexity and applied it to some major failed ancient empires. In other words, ambitious colonizing eventually costs too much and becomes a burden to citizens at the center of a complex society. Rome could not govern northern Britain and other territories that were too far away. Imperial expenses produced hardships at home and weakened Roman defenses. It became prey for barbarians, and Tainter found that many Romans welcomed them. Good riddance, Empire! 

Tainter did not write about America in 1988, and I do not mean to imply that we are “Waiting For The Barbarians,” to quote the title of a novel by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee in which they never actually arrive, although the fiction has some similarity to Trump’s propaganda. We are not Rome, but we have been warned by Elon Musk (small-government revolutionary) that we may face some Roman type hardships. His assignment by Trump is to do what Tainter in a Roman context calls “economizing” in a crisis. With unmanaged complexity running loose, taxes increase in kind and amounts, bureaucracy becomes bloated with specialists, administrators replace workers, costs of higher education skyrocket because of increases in administration but not teaching, enabling legislation stacks up, and rural support is transferred to urban areas. Complete collapse can include, ghost towns, the end of construction of palaces and monuments, use of rubble to build small dwellings and, in Tainter’s words, “No longer can the populace depend upon external defense and internal order, maintenance of public works, or delivery of food and material goods.” 

I compared this gloomy picture of the problem, not the solution, with what I recall of the prosperous 1970’s, especially on the West Coast. Microsoft and Apple were on the path to become the world’s most valuable companies. Baby boomers had good jobs and single-family homes. Paul Ehrlich at Stanford was turning out sequels to his panicky “The Population Bomb.” Now, on the contrary, many nations are awarding couples with baby incentives. 

Perhaps because of his budding radical philosophy Tainter lost his first teaching job, at the University of New Mexico in 1975 when the anthropology department was still under the influence of Frank Hibben, the retiring archeologist-big game hunter-Game and Fish Commission chairman. Tainter went to work for the Forest Service as an archeologist in New Mexico and took a deepening interest in what is now called Chaco Culture Historic National Park, which comprises the largest spread of ancient ruins in North America. They likely are the northern extremity of the Maya civilization as it is represented in Yucatán.

I stood in Chaco Canyon on a spring day long ago at the south door of Casa Rincon, a circular 63-foot-diameter gathering place called a Great House. I could see the mysterious niches in its walls that likely were markers for streams of sunlight when there was a roof. Sighting through the north door, I could see the strict stone architecture of Pueblo Bonito, a solar-oriented structure of 37 kivas and 700 small rooms. Raising my aim to the mesa top I could see Pueblo Alto and on the far horizon the white summits of La Plata range. I knew an ancient curbed road had been detected going true north straight as a light beam from Pueblo Bonito through Pueblo Alto to the San Juan river and probably beyond. It was just one of several roads connecting some 70 outlier villages with the center. The very last work in a 300-year construction project was dated (by timber-stub tree rings) as 1132, at Alto. The culture centered in Chaco Canyon still flourished at that point, according to National Park Service literature. Then, suddenly in terms of geological time, it disappeared. The marvelous center was completely empty by 1300. I wondered what happened.

In his book, Tainter correlates Chaco and 17 other dead empires, giving special attention to the fall of Rome and the Maya. He found the popular projected causes in each case were either insufficient by themselves to bring down empires or did not exist. For example, there is no evidence invasion by competing empires at Chaco. The Navajos did not migrate to the area until the 15th Century and always have avoided the vacant “Anasazi” ruins. As to “peasant revolt,” Tainter wrote that this, or its equivalent by slaves (there likely were some at Chaco), never happens without elite leadership. The various environmental hypotheses — drought, irregular rain patterns, soil depletion, crop diseases, firewood scarcity — did not collapse Chaco at first because this empire was set up for “energy averaging,” as he put it. A corn crop failure in one place was compensated by fertility in another.

The fatal combination of conflict, division and mismanagement may be the most popular explanation of collapse, Tainter says.  When the San Juan basin, for example, experienced a population boom, the measured balance governed from Chaco Canyon was no longer working and diverse areas abandoned the center. In a long cycle population went from increase to decrease. People moved away and many went to the Rio Grande Valley, where some have lived a thousand years in autonomous communities. Tainter rhapsodizes: “A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less centralized control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is overall lower coordination among individuals and groups.”

The similar “Warring States” era before China was unified by the Chin dynasty in 221 BC produced some of that culture’s greatest thinkers. Confucius and Mo Tzu produced philosophies of good government under the Mandate of Heaven, which could be lost by bad self-serving emperors. The Tao Te Ching produced in that  period has a curious Verse 80 that praises life in a small village that buries its weapons and cultivation implements and does not travel, even to other villages so close their dogs could heard barking. In my interpretation the verse is a subtle condemnation of big government.  

Yet the complex world of specialized job descriptions providing new solutions to new problems or old problems is fundamentally necessary now. Under competent government complexity, in my view, is certainly not detrimental. Science requires specialists for new research. Medicine requires more specialists as new diseases are named and new cures come up. General practitioners who used to treat everything by themselves now make referrals.  Defense requires specialists to invent and operate new weapons. Only romantic fools would turn to John Wayne.

Surely there are some revolutionary political consultants who think collapsing and starting over would be a good thing. And there must be some progressives who believe collapse of industrial society will save the planet from what the writer Jared Diamond called “ecological suicide.” His primary example is the deforesting of Easter Island by the people who carved those

remarkable stone statues they left, staring into the cosmos. And as Tainter put it, collapse “is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a  rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.”

Every class in the political theory reviews the idea of the “social contract” that inspired the American founders. The curriculum  begins with Hobbes and his famous quip that the life in its natural state is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this we give up (alienate) certain freedoms. Tainter paints a different picture. States are a recent anomaly in human history. He writes that complex societies “are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall into some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity.” He agrees with the calculation that “98.8 percent of human history has been dominated by small autonomous communities.” We are the anomaly with our “hierarchical, organized, independent states.”

The North American continent was that way when the first European colonists arrived with their faith-based Hobbesian philosophies, beginning a 400-year war of bureaucracy against traditional kinship-based Indian communities. Pekka Hamalainen, the revisionist historian of that conflict says (in his encyclopedic “Indigent Continent”) the Indians were “sophisticated, diplomatic, shrewd traders, and forceful leaders,” and “when war came the Indians won as often as not.” It was the Europeans who committed most of the atrocities, he says.

In a 2022 New York Times Magazine interview, Tainter emphasized that in collapsed complex societies literacy falls off, technical knowledge is lost and central government disintegrates. 

The poet Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” in the dark anarchistic time following World War I in Europe when monarchies collapsed. America might not be a collapsing Empire. A one-party democracy might still hold elections. Loyalty might successfully replace experience in government. Voters might not have meant to abolish the constitution. The show might go on. But the center cannot hold.