Fragile & Impermanent: USU Expert Tapped for His Take on Big-Picture Social Disruption

Not everyone gets popular when it looks like society might be collapsing, but Joseph Tainter does. His phone rings, emails pour into his inbox, and people from around the world track down this Utah State University expert to ask the same question: Is this it?

Tainter spent decades studying how and why historical societies collapsed. He explored how human innovations solved problems and created new ones, why complex social systems aren’t indefinitely stable, and in what ways society becomes vulnerable under the weight of maintaining itself.

And he leans toward measured optimism, actually, as illustrated in a new interview in the high-profile publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the professional organization that sets the “Doomsday Clock,” a measure of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe. The interview is part of an issue of the journal dedicated to defining tipping points for societal and environmental collapse.

It’s gratifying — and maybe unusual — for this kind of academic analysis to reach the public’s attention in such a significant way, said Tainter, who is an anthropologist and historian in the Quinney College of Natural Resources, but he’s glad it does.

“These big questions tend to get asked more often during cultural stress points,” he said. “When things feel unstable people tend to pause and take a wide-angle look at the societies to which they belong. They think about the systems they depend on and how they might be vulnerable to change. These are the kinds of questions anthropologists tend to be good at answering.”

Any one particular administration, policy change or social crisis probably won’t scuttle life as we know it, he assures. Most events in that category are just a blip when considered from the perspective of all of human history. Instead, according to Tainter’s research, the fate of civilization rests largely on something else — the way we use energy resources.

Complex societies — Mesoamerica, the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, and the globally interconnected system we share today — developed over time to solve various human problems. They made life better for humans and became energy-expensive.

In the past, the energy to support layers of a complex society came directly from human labor. Societies tended to collapse when the costs of that energy outpaced the return on investment — such as during the Roman Empire when a large government and burgeoning army pulled significant resources from the population but offered little benefit in return.

Today we live in social structures that are vastly more complex than at any other time in human history. Your breakfast plate might hold foods from three continents. Your cell phone contains a full 73 of the 80 stable elements of the periodic table. Services you depend on — medical care, transportation, communication — are intertwined with thousands of variables outside of your control.

That complexity is built largely on the stored energy of fossil fuels. Oil allowed modern humans to innovate and expand at staggering scales. Now we are nearing the end of that borrowed-energy break, Tainter said. We haven’t fully measured, and we aren’t ready for, the direct cost of our energy-hungry system. Over the next century that is likely to change.

And then?

“Once a complex society enters the stage of declining marginal returns, collapse becomes a mathematical likelihood, requiring little more than sufficient passage of time to make probable an insurmountable calamity,” he said.

Another way to define collapse, he said, is “rapid simplification.”

The big question, of course, is whether today’s world is at that metaphorical tipping point. Tainter’s answer might not satisfy those inclined toward the dramatic; tipping points from recorded history often took centuries to unfold.

There are also differences in today’s social makeup that put limits on comparisons with past civilizations. We are globally connected like never before, which means we can support neighbors in crisis — or alternately, experience total global collapse.

“But humanity tends to muddle through these things,” Tainter said. “It’s all we’ve ever done. These factors are out of anyone’s individual control, but we’d all benefit from finding ways to think more broadly about ourselves in time and space, and act in ways that sustain the things we most value.”

Tainter’s seminal book, published in 1988, is called The Collapse of Complex Societies. His current research examines how the cost of innovation is rising, requiring more people, investment and energy to develop and implement innovations than it did just a few decades ago.