The Upper Bound of Civilization

The View from Oregon – 337: Friday 18 April 2025

In newsletter 335 I discussed the lower bound of civilization, by which I mean the minimal population and geographical area necessary to a social formation cresting over the threshold of civilization. In light of my recent remarks about Clive Bell in my episode on Friedrich Heer, I could have pursued the question of the lower bound of civilization as the minimum cultural achievement made by a people that would qualify them as a civilization. A correspondent wrote a comment that Bell’s criterion for his “paragons” of civilization might better be understood as refinement or courtliness rather than civilization. He may be right. We could regard the steps to civilization as many achievements, with refinement or courtliness manifesting as a later achievement that builds on an earlier, more basic civilization, which is still a civilization but hasn’t yet achieved those later refinements by which Bell defined his paragons.

In newsletter 336 I said that the obvious complementary inquiry to that into the lower bound of civilization would be to look at the upper bound of civilization, and today I’m going to make some initial forays in this direction, but with the proviso that I regard this as a very large question that ultimately demands a very large inquiry in order to do justice to it. I can’t even claim to offer the barest of bare outlines of the problem, because an outline is something that can be formulated only once one has fully surveyed a field and has an overview of the whole. An overview of the upper bound of civilization is not now possible for us; the most we can do is to begin to explore the idea, and report whatever discoveries we make.

With the lower bound of civilization we at least have historical precedent on our side; an inquiry into the lower bound of civilization more-or-less coincides with the origins of civilization, and for this we have some evidence. An inquiry into the upper bound of civilization more-or-less coincides with the destiny or extinction of civilization. Here we also have the evidence of many defunct civilizations of the past, but we don’t yet know the whole story of the destiny of civilization. We don’t know if there are further permutations of civilization yet to be realized, and we don’t know what it looks like for an industrialized civilization to fail catastrophically. We could discuss the apparent upper bound of agricultural civilizations, though in light of what I wrote in the previous paragraph about Clive Bell, we should try to be clear about what it is that is being used as a boundary. Is it an upper bound of population, of geographical extent, of total historical duration, or of height of cultural achievement? The fact that these potential boundaries of civilization don’t necessarily coincide implies that civilizations can grow and develop in distinct ways.

There is a remark from Nietzsche’s notebooks that Walter Kaufmann included in The Portable Nietzsche that I have long pondered:

“A state that cannot attain its ultimate goal usually swells to an unnaturally large size. The world-wide empire of the Romans is nothing sublime compared to Athens. The strength that really should go into the flower here remains in the leaves and stem, which flourish.”

This is of a piece with Bell’s view that the cultural achievement of the Greeks was qualitatively superior to the Romans, though no Greek empire grew as large or endured as long as the Romans. The Romans tested the quantitative upper bounds of agricultural civilization, while the Greeks tested the qualitative upper bounds of agricultural civilization. Perhaps relevant is that the Greeks tested the upper bounds of culture even as they were a subject people of Rome. While many an art critic (like Bell) would insist that the greatest works of Greek culture came from Periclean Athens, which Bell identified as a paragon of civilization, I would be willing to place the Nike of Samothrace alongside the caryatids of the Erechtheion as among the greatest of Greek sculpture. This poses the further question as to what exactly Greek civilization was once it had been politically absorbed by Rome and the best Greek historians and philosophers and artists put their talents at the service of Rome.

Rome administered its empire with roads and couriers. If they had had the steamship or the telegraph I suspect that the Roman Empire could have lasted longer, and it is, in a sense, remarkable that so large a social formation as the Roman Empire could endure for as long as it did without simple inventions like cotton rag paper or the printing press. In this way the Roman Empire appears to be straining at the limits of the population and geographical extent of a civilization prior to the scientific or industrial revolutions. The Portuguese, Spanish, and British empires of the early modern period enjoyed some of the benefits of the scientific revolution, and the British Empire endured to see the inventions of steam engines, telegraphy, and electric lights, but this doesn’t seem to have contributed to its longevity. It is possible that the introduction of technologies implicitly encourage a political formation to over-extend itself and so court collapse prior to encountering the upper bounds of civilization. This observation suggests two further observations: 1) a civilization might fail of over-extension with over-extension being the cause even if that extension bumps up against the limits of the upper bound of civilization (i.e., it’s not failing because it reached its upper bound), and 2) a civilization can fail prior to reaching their potential upper bound. Both of these are theses that need to be separately addressed on their own merits.

Modern civilizations, as best as we can demarcate them (which is poorly, given the lack of a theoretical framework for analyzing civilizations), don’t seem to endure very long. The example of the British Empire having industrial technologies and still being unable or unwilling to preserve itself means that my above observation that, if Rome had had steamships or the telegraph, it would have lasted longer, may be completely wrong-headed. It seems intuitive to me that better (more rapid and more efficient) communication and transportation would be conducive to the maintenance of a civilization, but this may not be the case. However, the historical circumstances of the Roman Empire and the British Empire were so different, with so many different forces in play, that it may be meaningless to try to compare them. But the lesson still stands that earlier civilizations seemed to have had greater staying power. Egyptian civilization preserved its institutions more or less intact for nearly three thousand years, and no modern civilization comes close to this. In terms of longevity (again, distinct from measures of population or geographical extent), Egypt is the standout, despite (or perhaps because of) appearing so early in history. Again, comparing Egypt even to another agricultural civilization like Rome may be meaningless because the historical forces acting upon Egypt and Rome were so different as to make the two cases historically incommensurable. It is obvious , then, that making sense of the upper bound of civilization requires that we compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges or the result will be meaningless.

Interpreted strictly, the need to compare apples to apples would rule out most comparisons and would greatly constrain our ability to make any generalizations. Since technology and ideas of social organization cumulatively bear on every civilization, civilizations separated by some unknown threshold of time aren’t comparable. We might meaningfully compare the early modern Portuguese and Spanish empires, and even this limited comparison is instructive. Both had an appropriate seafaring technology (i.e., they didn’t have to assimilate anything as radical as the technological changes the British Empire faced), and both employed their seafaring technology to establish planetary-scale empires—again, without steamships or the telegraph, covering a much larger geographical area than Rome, but relying upon shipping rather than roads and couriers for communication. Portugal I take to be a case of rapid over-extension: Portugal was a relatively small state which rapidly gained far-flung colonies, and almost as rapidly passed out of great power status. Spain was more successful in keeping and managing a planetary scale empire, holding it together for hundreds of years, which is no small achievement. It may be the case that Spain was also over-extended, or on the cusp of over-extension, but this doesn’t seem to have been the cause of the Spain’s decline as a civilization and as a great power.

Rome, with its technical resources, managed a large geographical region; Spain, Portugal, and the British Empire grew to planetary scale with greater technological resources. Earth seems to be a natural bound for any civilization, except in the event of large scale spacefaring in which terrestrial civilizations grow beyond Earth, and new civilizations may be founded on spacefaring technologies, with populations housed on other worlds or in artificial habitats. Because we have not yet seen this happen we can maintain either that it is impossible, or that we stand on the threshold of expansion that is orders of magnitude beyond a planetary scale civilization. Here technology really is key. Only if space transportation technologies and technologies for human beings to live and to thrive away from Earth can be made to work will any of this be possible. It is easy to find both analogies and disanalogies. We can analogize between Greek colonization of the Mediterranean or early modern colonization of the New World and spacefaring colonization. However, we can also point out that there is no analogy for the technologies required to do this or the conditions of the regions to be colonized.

Despite the difficulties and disanalogies, we have almost a century’s worth of science fiction exploring the possibility of human civilization (or any civilization, for that matter, human or non-human) expanding beyond Earth. The possibilities are so varied and complex that, if this is a possible development for civilization, we aren’t anywhere near being able to survey the upper bound of civilization. We could shift the goalposts and say that we can survey the upper bound of planetary civilizations, but there are already two problems here: 1) the planet as the natural boundary of non-spacefaring civilizations is the upper bound of geographical expansion by definition, so this problem becomes uninteresting, and 2) we don’t know anything about civilizations that are settled on a planet from outside and then expand from this spacefaring colonization effort.

Kardashev’s 1985 paper, “On the Inevitability and the Possible Structures of Supercivilizations,” makes explicit the most grandiose vision of civilization in the universe. Kardashev explicitly formulated two postulates regarding the ultimate limits of civilization:

I. The scales of activity of any civilization are restricted only by natural and scientific factors. This assertion implies that all processes observed in Nature (from phenomena in the microcosmos to those in the macrocosmos and all the way to the whole Universe) may in time be utilized by civilizations, be reproduced or even somewhat changed, though of course always in accordance with the laws of Nature.

II. Civilizations have no inner, inherent limitations on the scales of their activities. This implies that presumptions of a possible self-destruction of a civilization, or of a certain restrictions on the level of its development are not factual. Actually social conflicts may in fact be resolved, while civilizations will always face problems that demand larger scales of activity. It is this approach to the problem that seems most consistent with our current concepts.

These postulates could serve as a stalking horse for contrary views. It has been said that the Drake equation is a container for ignorance, and Kardashev’s postulates for the limits of civilization are also a container for our ignorance of the structure and distribution of civilizations in the cosmos. Whereas on Earth the transportation and communications of Rome were limited by roads and couriers, and of the Spanish Empire by ocean going shipping, and of the British Empire by steamships and telegraphy, the transportation and communication limits of spacefaring civilizations would be set by their technologies and by natural limits like the speed of light. Administering an interstellar empire with communication delays running to weeks and months would be in some ways analogous to administering a planetary empire with transoceanic shipping communicating over weeks and months. To a certain extent, the limit is that of human ingenuity in creating structures of governance that can persist despite such limitations.

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