What is Peak Civilization?

Peak Civilization Defined

The quick and dirty summary is this - peak civilization is the era when our modern industrial world was at its most effective based on the criteria that it considers as effectiveness.

Reading the fine print, two things should stand out -

• How is effectiveness defined?
• Is one civilization's effectiveness another civilization's defectiveness or vice-versa?

There is a lot of wriggle room in there, but the key takeaway is that if a civilization is no longer functioning at the level that it expects to be, then it is in decline. Since people seldom come up with new ideas, and reduced effectiveness is usually based on something which takes a lot of new ideas to address, decline from a peak is usually terminal. Inertia has a whole reality of its own and the ball doesn't stop once it gets rolling.

The classic example is the Roman Empire, where things were great at the top, and not so great for everyone else. Rome fueled its rise based on the idea of unlimited conquest, in turn leading to unlimited quantities of cheap labor in the form of slaves, and unlimited amounts of loot, which paid for fancy buildings and lots of soldiers.

When Rome's neighbors finally figured out how to beat them, and Rome's people felt a decreased desire to wind up on a Germanic spear, Rome's expansion essentially stopped. This dried up the supply of slaves and loot, so the Roman elite decided on a similar course of action by treating their own people as slaves and looting them with a destructive tax code. In short, they tried the same old idea. Strangely enough, efficiency declined, the treasury kept getting emptier and emptier, and Roman citizens felt that it was often better to deal with the "barbarians" than the Roman tax collectors.

Maybe if Rome had adopted new ideas, they wouldn't have had the Western half fall apart in the 400s, and wouldn't have had the Eastern half under siege for another millennia until it also bit the dust. Maybe if they had switched from trying to be a military power to being a trading and economic powerhouse they would have survived much longer.

Here in America, we double down on spending way beyond our means, trying to prop up old models like private cars and suburban sprawl, measuring success by how much junk is bought and sold, how many ridiculous hours people are working, and so on. If this is the yardstick, we probably peaked back in the 1980s, maybe, and are now living with that broken model in the 2020s.

The word "peak" assumes that something has hit the highest point possible and it's all downhill. Looking back, America has already passed that peak. Car ownership is getting unaffordable and the impact of it on our environment and living conditions is clear. We're drowning in cheap plastic, but advertising porn drives people to go buy the latest gadget or whatever, often with debt. People work a lot these days, but it's mostly to make ends meet, because the cost of living rises while the value of wages really hasn't.

Another asterisk here is the question of whether or not civilization as we know it can ever be salvaged, or if it's a one-shot-and-done a deal. The Fermi Paradox here at home. Cheap resources are not coming back. Global warming is destroying American farmland in the west and causing havoc with the weather everywhere. Maybe, in a way, it's a good thing. If this is the best we can manage, we really have failed as a species. I'm not saying that dogs or dolphins will do any better when they get around to evolving, but I don't think they'd do any worse. Unlimited belly rubs or free fish sound okay.

The thing is, the conditions which made the rise of civilization possible have been sustained by one discovery after another, too, or the ability to exploit natural resources that had not been tapped before. These enable human growth, which in turn enables faster exploitation of resources. We've stayed one step ahead of Jevon's paradox by making existing systems more efficient and developing new ways to grow food, move goods, etc. That time is coming to an end. Fusion power is always fifty years off, and fields require tons of fertilizer to be dumped on them now to produce the food we need. At some point, that all comes to an end, and with it the structures of civilization built on them.

People argue back and forth about whether or not modern civilization is bad. I guess it's in what you value and see of being as value. The decline of modern civilization doesn't really care about that one way or the other, as it is happening even now and is likely inevitable at this point.