A Discussion of the Dissolution Threshold

The View from Oregon – 332: Friday 14 March 2025

While working on an upcoming episode in my Thought Experiments in Civilization series (Episode III: In Search of Lost Civilizations) I have returned to an idea that I called the dissolution threshold. I’m going through old notes that will be incorporated into this episode, and in these notes I touch on the dissolution threshold. In 2018 I had written a series of posts about dissolution threshold, including:

• Counterfactuals about Mayan Civilization (Tumblr)

• On the Cusp of the Dissolution Threshold (Tumblr)

• Dark Ages, Suboptimality, and Collapse (Tumblr)

• The Dissolution Threshold in the West Asian Cluster (Tumblr)

• Civilization and the Dissolution Threshold: How Individuals and Communities Opt Out of the Social Paradigm (Medium)

• The Dissolution Threshold: Dark Ages, Thought Experiments, and Counterfactuals (Medium)

• The Dissolution Threshold in the West Asian Cluster: Egypt’s Role as a “Bridge Civilization” (Medium)

• Opting In and Out of Civilization (Tumblr)

I had more posts on the dissolution threshold drafted, but didn’t finish them. This past week when I returned to the dissolution threshold I attempted to summarize what I was trying to express with this idea. I knew that there were problems with my original formulation that led me to stop working on this, so that it remained elusive to me, but the idea isn’t entirely without value, if only it can be expressed clearly. What follows is my attempt to clarify the dissolution threshold and to state it in explicit theses. Some of these points are taken directly from old blog posts, while some are ideas that came to me while returning to this conceptual milieu in the light of what I have learned since then.

Theses on the Dissolution Threshold

1. At or below the dissolution threshold, a civilization can fail and be largely effaced from history, and their structures and artifacts will be absorbed back into its environment.

2. The activities of the civilization in dissolution grind to a halt, the population scatters, and the cities are eventually absorbed by the landscape.

3. A civilization at or below the dissolution threshold can simply be abandoned; there might be a sudden collapse or a catastrophic war, but these aren’t necessary for the dissolution of a civilization.

4. In dissolution, the “little tradition” (Robert Redfield) of a people is retained while the “great tradition” is lost.

5. Above the dissolution threshold, a civilization does not undergo dissolution, but rather failure or collapse.

6. Above the dissolution threshold, a failing civilization is propped by neighboring civilizations, or its population is absorbed into neighboring civilizations, resulting in idea diffusion from the failing civilization.

7. In collapse above the dissolution threshold, a fragmentary record of the “great tradition” is retained through idea diffusion, but the collapse event means the end of a great tradition as a living central project.

8. The dissolution threshold is proportional to the scope and scale of a civilization.

This is still more conceptually diffuse than the kind of tight formulation I’d like see, and it would take some effort at clear thinking to clean this up (or to determine that it can’t be cleaned up). At about the time as my posts on the dissolution threshold I wrote several posts about effacement: what can be partially or entirely lost to the historical record. These included:

• History Effaced

• Sagan on Extinction

• A Brief History of the Loss of History

• On the Longevity of Submerged Civilizations

• Constructing Prediction Walls

• The Archaeology of Cosmology

• Being and Forgetfulness

• The Effacement of Being

The dissolution threshold is bound up with effacement, since, as I state in the first the theses above, a civilization that undergoes dissolution is largely effaced. What interests me in both concepts is the potential for generalization. I start with civilization and move up from there, so I’m only interesting in large-scale structure. This is implied by Thesis 8 (above), which as stated is only a suggestion of what might be done with the concept: “The dissolution threshold is proportional to the scope and scale of a civilization.” The whole question is how the dissolution threshold can be stated in a way that readily applies to civilizations of greater or lesser scope or scale.

I started with the ideas of an agricultural civilization that either fails below the dissolution threshold, and so experiences dissolution, which the peoples of the civilization abandoning their cities and returning to subsistence agriculture or hunter-gatherer nomadism, or which fails above the dissolution threshold, and so experiences a transition to a lower level of civilization or the scattering of its peoples to other civilizations in the region. Without fully thinking it through, I had postulated the dissolution threshold in relation to the origins of civilization (i.e., pristine civilizations). If formulated with the degree of generality I have in mind, similar considerations should apply to the origins of kinds of civilization—when a new form of civilization, say, industrialized civilization, emerges from an established form of civilization, say, agricultural civilization, that is the origin of a kind of civilization, and the origins of this kind can be treated in parallel with the considerations I discussed in relation to the dissolution threshold.

My first formulations of the dissolution threshold were pretty muddled (I suppose they still are, which is why I’m still trying to clarify them), and I didn’t invest the time to clarify the various elements that I was trying to tie together, which included:

1. Demographic Dissolution: the fate of formerly civilized populations when a civilization fails

2. Historiographical Dissolution: the erasure of a civilization from history through mechanisms of effacement

3. Institutional Dissolution: the continued existence of some post-civilizational institution in the wake of the failure of a civilization (i.e., a “dark age” in which at least some of the population and at least some knowledge and technology is maintained at a lower level of complexity)

For each of these forms of dissolution there are possibilities of outright dissolution sensu stricto, and instances of partial dissolution, in which former institutions are either impoverished or replaced by less sophisticated institutions:

1. Demographic dissolution

• Outright Demographic Dissolution—The population scatters from former centers of concentration and does not return.

• Partial Demographic Dissolution—Some remnant population remains at former centers of concentration, but not a sufficient number to maintain institutions in their former state (hence partial institutional dissolution, as described below).

2. Historiographical Dissolution

• Outright Historiographical Dissolution—Historical records, if any exist, are lost or destroyed, and no record remains of the civilization.

• Partial Historiographical Dissolution—Historical records are partially lost or destroyed; what remains may be portions of books or summaries and excerpts in other books.

3. Institutional Dissolution

• Outright Institutional Dissolution—Social institutions fail and are replaced by nothing.

• Partial Institutional Dissolution—Social institutions partially fail, either being replaced by less sophisticated social institutions, or operate at a lower level of efficiency and competency, or they operate only at the level necessary to serve a much-reduced population.

With three modes of dissolution, and two states for each mode—outright (or total) and partial—we can lay out eight permutations of dissolution:

1. Total demographic, total historiographical, and total institutional dissolution.

2. Total demographic, total historiographical, and partial institutional dissolution.

3. Total demographic, partial historiographical, and total institutional dissolution.

4. Total demographic, partial historiographical, and partial institutional dissolution.

5. Partial demographic, total historiographical, and total institutional dissolution.

6. Partial demographic, total historiographical, and partial institutional dissolution.

7. Partial demographic, partial historiographical, and total institutional dissolution.

8. Partial demographic, partial historiographical, and partial institutional dissolution.

Some of these permutations don’t make much intuitive sense, but I’ve found that this kind of schematic approach can be a way of “forcing” intuition: by proposing a scenario, however unlikely, it’s a challenge to try to find a plausible realization of that scenario. If I were to carefully think through each of these either permutations, I might find the clarification I’m looking for. But more than that remains to be done. These are all permutations of dissolution, and that leaves open what the modes of failure would look like above the dissolution threshold. Is civilizational failure above the dissolution threshold to be accounted for with a parallel schematism, or is some other schematism necessary? I have approached this question rather differently in the past, laying out scenarios for civilizational failure based on the institutional structure of civilization. This calls into question my analysis of the institutional structure of civilization, since the above schematism for dissolution is, I now see, based on an implicit analysis of institutional structures that is different from what I have heretofore employed. Can these analyses be reconciled? That remains to be seen.

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