A Thought Experiment in the Aggregation of Civilizations

The View from Oregon – 333: Friday 21 March 2025

In last week’s newsletter I discussed what I call the dissolution threshold, in which a civilization that fails below the dissolution threshold is re-absorbed into its environment, while a civilization that fails above the dissolution threshold is constrained to a catastrophic scenario of collapse. I am dissatisfied with my formulations of the dissolution threshold, but I return to the idea every so often because it seems to me there’s something valuable in it that remains elusive to me.

Let’s try to approach the dissolution threshold by way of its opposite number. What is the complementary historical movement to dissolution? I think this would be the gradual coming together of a population until this population can be called a civilization. For lack of a better term, let’s call this aggregation. I’ll use “aggregation” for this process of the social formation of pristine civilizations partly because in past newsletters (nos. 180, 186, and 229) I’ve already employed “agglomeration” for a different process by which already extant (post-pristine) civilizations grow by addition. Given this terminology, I could say that aggregation differs from agglomeration in that aggregation holds for pristine civilizations while agglomeration holds for later generations of civilizations; the agglomeration process begins after the aggregation process is completed.

We can suppose, given the first experiments with settled agriculturalism, that the earliest agricultural villages gained in population both due to the influx of nomads (such as are allowed to join the settlement, and, given the levels of distrust usually found between settled and nomadic peoples, these probably would have been few) and the increased rate of growth of the population as the result of possessing food stores and the ability to increase family size in the context of settled agriculturalism. Villages would grow in size, craft specialization would increase and diversify, and at some point the village would become a town, and then a city. If we assume this development (this aggregation) to be taking place across a geographical region (such as a river valley or a floodplain), there would be villages across the fertile region, some few of which would grow into towns and cities, and the villages that did not grow into cities would naturally fall under the influence of the nearest city, which would become a market town for the villages of its hinterland. A similar process would then take place with cities, with less powerful cities falling under the control of regionally dominant cities.

In a fertile region such as where most pristine civilizations got their start, where there is a generous amount of arable land available, there would be a natural spacing of villages across the landscape due both to topographical features (say, a defensible hilltop with a stream nearby) and given the natural limit of the quantity of land that could be cultivated by the efforts of an extended family that would be the nucleus for a village. As the process of aggregation grew in density and rapidity, eventually the edges of the fields of one village would meet the edge of the cultivated land of a neighboring village, and territories would be defined. As the best lands were taken, later settlers would content themselves with squatting on the lands that earlier settlers had voluntarily left uncultivated, and this would eventually fill the interstices between all cultivated lands. It’s easy to see how conflicts would readily give rise to a need for some kind of socially recognized land tenure and established boundaries between cultivated lands. States would come into being as a result of administering tenure and boundaries.

These events, i.e., a paradigmatic aggregation process, would only happen in the period that constitutes the earliest formation of a civilization. Various topographical differences in the land and in river networks would force permutations of the pure model to play out in other regions, but a recognizable process of aggregation would proceed the social formation of civilizations. I could say “once and only once in history” does this opportunity occur to settle arable lands, but when a civilization fails as utterly as the Indus Valley civilization or the Minoan civilization, settled agriculture largely disappears across a geographical region, and in some future period of social formation, the lands that had been abandoned are settled again, with first come first served, until all arable lands are again divided up as communities aggregate. There is a succession of aggregation processes (loosely analogous to ecological succession), in which villages aggregrate, then towns, then cities, then geographical regions, and with the aggregation of a geographical region, a basal civilization comes into being.

When civilizations fail utterly, I can imagine, for the first many generations after that failure, the empty cities would be regarded as taboo, and, after longer periods of time, when explicit knowledge of the cities disappeared, as happened with cities that were completely overgrown and lost to historical memory in many regions of the world, the taboo would survive, and eventually mythologies would be constructed that justified the taboo apart from any actual history of the cities and their failure that was the original source of the taboo. We could make an obvious distinction between a civilization that undergoes dissolution and the population returns to village agriculture (call this a soft dissolution, where only the cities are depopulated) and a dissolution in which the population returns to hunter-gatherer nomadism (call this a hard dissolution, where cities, towns, and villages are all abandoned). The kind of utter failure of a civilization I have postulated is a hard dissolution, and in this case the process of aggregation can happen again (we might even refer to a second aggregation, as we refer to a second urbanization of the Indian subcontinent after the Indus Valley civilization). In the scenario of soft dissolution, arable land remains divided and the process of aggregation doesn’t happen again (at least at the scale of village agriculture).

Thinking through this historical process it becomes obvious that there must be an aggregation threshold, above which the aggregation process can no longer function as I have described it above, and civilizations come into being, if they come into being, through processes other than aggregation. Byzantine civilization, insofar as it was distinct from Roman civilization, didn’t originate through a process of aggregation. The villages, towns, and cities were all already existence; what formed the civilization was segregation and differentiation rather than aggregration. The aggregation threshold is complementary to the dissolution threshold; the two processes represent complementary directionalities of civilizational development, i.e., the direction of growth and the direction of decline.

I have commented (and indeed many have commented) that the geographical region of what we know today as China is effectively an island, isolated from the rest of Eurasia by deserts and mountain ranges. Yes, over historical time there has been a trickle of overland trade, but this trade was rarely ever anything more than the luxury items that could carried over trackless deserts by caravans of camels. Because the arable land of China is effectively an island, once all arable land on this island has been claimed by one civilization or another, the historical processes that dominate the region are changed. The Sanxingdui civilization that I wrote about in newsletter 307 could form through a process of aggregation, even as aggregation was also taking place at Erligang, Erlitou, and Wucheng during the Bronze Age. Once these Bronze Age centers of civilization grew to the point that they impinged upon neighboring civilizations, the period of aggregation ends and the period of conquest, consolidation, and agglomeration begins. Where the former ends and the latter begins, that is the aggregation threshold. And the aggregation threshold is approximately the same density of social formation as the dissolution threshold, except that the aggregation threshold describes the geographical region in which civilization is increasing in scope and scale, while the dissolution threshold describes a geographical region in which civilization is decreasing in scope and scale. Each is the mirror image of the other.

All civilizations in recorded history have been formed by post-aggregation processes, because all pristine civilizations appeared in the distant past prior to written language. If we define a civilization in terms of written language, which was previously the case, this formulation doesn’t work, but something similar could be framed, just being a little more careful about the formulation. One consequence of this is that the historical processes that characterized the initial formation of civilizations differ from the historical processes that have characterized the civilizations of recorded history. This ought to of interest (at least to historians and philosophers of history), since it means that the processes of history that are familiar to us today are not the processes of history that obtained for the first five thousand years of civilization. We’ve had about five thousand years of civilization below the aggregation threshold and about five thousand years of civilization above the aggregation threshold. Those were five thousand years of very different historical processes.

Where the aggregation process is still ongoing, the dissolution process remains possible. Multiple civilizations within a given geographical region might be aggregating or dissolving, each independently of the other, as long as the density of settlement allows civilizations to be spread out at a natural distance from each other, like I wrote above that villages are naturally spaced from each other by the amount of land the number of individuals in a village can cultivate. It would be a interesting problem to try to define the natural spacing of civilization analogous to the natural spacing of villages, towns, and cities. What would be the operative forces? Is it merely the scaled up forces of aggregation, playing themselves out through cities instead of through villages? I will have to think about this.

Needless to say, the above speculations are idealized and simplified models of actual historical processes, which are always more complex as they play out in fact. In fact, arable land is unevenly distributed, it isn’t equally good for any cultivar of the region, and it’s concentrated in geographical regions like river valleys (Mesopotamia, the Indus, and the Yellow River) and river floodplains (Egypt). By adopting a different cultivar, or turning to pastoralism instead of agriculture, a people might define themselves within or between settled agricultural peoples. There is a natural complementarity between pastoralists who produce meat and milk and agriculturalists who produce fruits, vegetables, and grains, but pastoralists usually remain semi-nomadic, and given the above-mentioned distrust between settled and nomadic peoples, the natural complementary of the food supply was probably the occasion of conflict rather than cooperation. Perhaps the failure to manage this complementary was the “original sin” of civilization that gave us warfare.

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