“At the dawn of civilization the productiveness acquired by labor is small, but so too are the wants which develop with and by the means of satisfying them. Further, at that early period, the portion of society that lives on the labor of others is infinitely small compared with the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the productiveness of labor, that small portion of society increases both absolutely and relatively” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 513).
In its ability to give more than it gets, a producing culture-society resembles nature. Just as the land can produce a harvest in excess of the amount sown, so an agrarian culture-society can produce more than is required for its self-reproduction. However, an agrarian culture-society is not able to maintain stable productivity, let alone stable productivity growth. Due to sudden changes in both socio-cultural and environmental conditions, population growth could be replaced by a sharp decline. Epidemics and crop failures led to the collapse of cultures-societies, that is, to a drop in their complexity. The ascending and descending phases of the demographic cycle replaced each other:
“With the huge population losses caused by the Black Death in many parts of Afro-Eurasia, cities shrank, farmlands were abandoned, and economies contracted. However, as had happened so many times in the past, growth soon resumed to kick-start a new Malthusian cycle that would last well into the 18th century” (Benjamin 2016, p. 267).
Cumulative cultural evolution continued through successive rises and falls of cultures-societies. Paradoxically, social collapse is an inherent element of cultural evolution. Increasing meaning complexity is like climbing the peaks of an adaptive landscape: the higher meaning climbs, the more complex it is. But neither people nor meanings know in advance which peaks are the highest and most promising. Sometimes a collapse is necessary to come back down and begin climbing a new, possibly higher peak.
The collapse of culture-societies meant a fall in socio-cultural complexity, but for the people who formed these societies, it meant the restoration of justice and freedom, which were necessary for any further development:
“What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to ‘normalize’ collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order” (Scott 2017, p. 210). “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription. As such, it may stanch the worst losses that arise from concentrated sedentism under state rule. The decentralization that arises may not only lessen the state-imposed burdens but may even usher in a modest degree of egalitarianism. Finally, providing that we not necessarily equate the creation of culture exclusively with apical state centers, decentralization and dispersal may prompt both a reformulation and a diversity of cultural production” (ibid., p. 217).
