Loosely- and Tightly-Coupled Civilizational Ecosystems

The View from Oregon – 339: Friday 02 May 2025

In last week’s newsletter I discussed what I called the upper bound of hunter-gatherers, mentioning Lewis Henry Morgan’s taxonomy of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, which is no longer used because the terms are now considered evaluative rather than descriptive. (That’s not on Morgan; that’s on us.) The obvious taxonomy that I failed to mention last week is the quadripartite taxonomy of Elman Service, who distinguished among bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This taxonomy is still in use, since its terms haven’t been (entirely) converted into evaluative epithets, and so I could frame the project of the previous newsletter in terms of defining the upper and lower bounds of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Moreover, if we identify state-level societies with civilizations, then my earlier question about the upper and lower bounds of civilization is part of this more comprehensive taxonomy of Elman service, and that represents a gain in generality, which is something we should value in science.

These ongoing reflections have given me a new perspective that has allowed me to make a small advance in my formulation of the dissolution threshold. In newsletter no. 332 I discussed the dissolution threshold, previously mooted some years before, and I expressed my dissatisfaction of being able to come to a more definitive formulation. Recurring to my discussion of the lower bound of civilization in newsletter no. 335, there I suggested that the lower bound of a civilization would be three cities engaged in relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict, so that if we are willing to give a minimum population for a city, we are then in a position to give a minimum population for a civilization. This minimum would be an ideal simplification of the actual historical evolution of cities and civilizations, because, again, this is how we pursue science. Sometimes it’s hard to get this point across to someone who is very much in the grip of an ideographic conception of history, in which the emphasis falls on particularity, and not upon idealization and generalization, as in science.

With this in mind, it occurred to me that when civilizations engage in cooperation, competition, and conflict, then a new social formation comes into being that is above the level of civilizations proper, and which is constituted by the interaction among civilizations (as a civilization is constituted by interaction among cities). This concept of a social formation above the level of civilization needs to be distinguished from the agglomeration of complex civilizations. An agglomerated civilization may be composed of temporal or spatial parts that extend this civilization over time and space, and so may closely resemble interaction among civilizations. And, in fact, an agglomerated civilization may be the result of the concrescence of multiple civilizations within a given geographical region so that this may be an historical sequence, with an agglomerated civilization having been previously this higher level social formation subsequently integrated into a single civilization.

In some newsletters I’ve used the phrase “civilizational ecosystem,” which isn’t perfect, but it does convey the meaning that I’m trying to get across. In a civilizational ecosystem, civilizations interact even as they maintain their individual identities. In an agglomerated civilization, there is some degree of the surrender of individual identities—not complete surrender, since differences among geographical regions will be retained, but there is a surrender especially in regard to what Redfield called a “great tradition” and more-or-less what I call a central project. A civilization that ranges over a large geographical region will have distinct populations practicing distinct folkways rooted in the “little tradition” of the local village, but they will have incorporated some relation to the (possibly distant) great tradition of the cities.

Here too we find the difference between an empire and a civilization. An empire exercises military, political, and legal jurisdiction throughout its territory, but its subject peoples are not obligated or forced to adopt the great tradition (central project) of the imperial power. Obedience is usually considered to be sufficient. There can be a gray area also, as when peoples of the Roman Empire were expected to make sacrifices to the emperor, or to offer up prayers for the emperor to whatever god or gods they worshipped. This was an imposition of the valuation of the office of the emperor, but that valuation did not require subject peoples to surrender their traditional beliefs or practices, only to add the emperor into their practices. As with a civilizational ecosystem, an empire can be transformed into a civilization. The subject peoples of Rome were (with important exceptions) ready to accept Roman ways, to build in the Roman style, to become Roman citizens, and so on.

The point I am making here is that a civilization, a civilizational ecosystem, and an empire can all be distinguished, but they can also be stages in an historical process that integrates them. Because one can be transformed into the other, it will be difficult to identify a particular point in time when this transition began or when it was complete, because even as one is transforming into another, the elements that constitute the civilization, or the civilizational ecosystem, or the empire are all themselves changing. I wrote above that a civilizational ecosystem can become a single civilization, or an empire can become a civilization; the process can also work in reverse when civilizations disintegrate. Roman Britain was a part of Roman civilization, but when Rome withdrew its troops in AD 410, Britain and Rome began to grow apart, and what was one civilization for a few hundred years become two or more civilizations. All throughout the former western Roman Empire peoples found themselves in control of their own destiny, whether they wanted this or not, and they came to define a future for themselves on their own terms.

Not all civilizations are part of a civilizational ecosystem. The origin of an isolated pristine civilizations occurs, by definition, without any civilizational ecosystem. If a civilizational ecosystem arises, which is in no sense inevitable, it may come into being by more than one pathway. The formation of a civilizational ecosystem might come about through the division and multiplication of a single pristine civilization, or through the appearance and growth of multiple pristine civilizations that eventually form mutual boundaries at their farthest limits. These are distinct historical processes, with distinct consequences. And, even though a pristine civilization arises in splendid isolation, that doesn’t mean that it comes out of nowhere. The context from which it arises is expanding village agriculture which eventually results in cities. We can imagine a geographical region, like Mesopotamia, given over to village agriculture and dotted with growing centers that we could call proto-cities. If a cluster of these proto-cities grow into true cities, their interaction will constitute a civilization, but this hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The appearance of the first pristine civilization in the region changes the dynamics of the region, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent another civilization from forming. We could postulate the existence of an exclusionary zone around a forming civilization, within which any village that grows into a city will be unavoidably integrated into the civilization, and beyond which a city may be the nucleus of a distinct civilization. In this way, a civilization may come to be surrounded by other civilizations and part of a civilizational ecosystem.

Once a civilizational ecosystem comes into being, i.e., once a social formation comes into being that involves cooperation, competition, and conflict among civilizations, any given individual civilization within this civilizational ecosystem may retain its individual identity, with its people having their own great tradition and making their own decisions for themselves, but the mere fact of being related to neighboring civilizations means that there is a human element in its environment that is not within its control. There are other peoples with their own purposes that must be taken into account, so that even as each people sees its own destiny in accord with its great tradition, its destiny is bound up with the destiny of neighboring peoples. And this is what it means to crest over the dissolution threshold. For the isolated pristine civilization, its destiny is entirely within its own hands, up to and including abandoning the project of civilization altogether and returning to hunter-gatherer nomadism. With the intermingling of destinies that follows from a civilizational ecosystem, this ceases to be true—not absolutely so, but to some degree.

We can distinguish between tightly-coupled civilizational ecosystems and loosely-coupled civilizational ecosystems. This is largely, but not exclusively, a function of the size and the density of the major cities to be found in a given civilizational ecosystem. Generally speaking, the larger the cities and the larger the populations, the more tightly-coupled the civilizational ecosystem of a given geographical region. Sparsely populated regions are more likely to be loosely-coupled, with greater freedom of self-determination on the part of the peoples of the civilizations. The size and density of populations, in turn, is probably a function of the fertility of the region and the cultivars available for domestication, hence in a highly fertile region like Mesopotamia one finds a tightly-coupled civilization ecosystem, with many cities and many civilizations. In the wider region including Anatolia to the north and Egypt to the west, further along in the development of civilizations, you have civilizations so tightly-coupled that a catastrophic event like the late bronze age collapse was like a line of dominoes falling as one civilization after another failed.

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