3 Civilizations and Systems
In a recent anthology, Peter Katzenstein defined civilizations as “loosely coupled, internally differentiated, elite-centred social systems that are integrated into a global context” (Katzenstein 2010, 5). The ideas of “civilization” and “system” have an uncomfortable history with one another. The idea of civilization is too exalted, too ethereal, and too altogether slippery to slide comfortably into nested diagrams along with more materially grounded systems like economic networks or pathways to imperial expansion. Guns and butter are quantifiable; civilization is more felt or intuited. Relatively recent approaches to systems theory, such as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), open themselves to the intangible through the notion of “agency”. Systems can be viewed as patterns of interaction between agents. For social systems, those agents are people. People-as-agents get to have their cultures, their freedom, their dignity, their values, their contrariness, their irreducibility, and the artistic hallmarks of their civilized lives. This allowance for agent unpredictability occurs for the simple reason that CAS has given up the game when it comes to behavioral or mathematical reductionism. The “complex” part of CAS simply admits we do not know everything, and that linear algebra, which can barely model the orbits of three simultaneous planets, far exceeds its capabilities when trying to formulate or predict the collective oscillations of humans in their millions. CAS indeed undertakes to map and model the fruits of human agency; yet it allows the agents themselves to manage their own mysteries.
Reading Katzenstein’s definition through the lense of CAS, we can attempt to unravel some knotty problems that have plagued the analysis of civilizations-as-systems. One such problem is the use of organic or totalizing metaphors for civilizations as agents in their own right. Civilizations are said to “be born”, “grow”, “decline”, and “die”. The people who participate in civilizations certainly feature such lifecycles, but are civilizations themselves such tidily holonic containers for humans? Holons make sense up to the level of the physical person. Molecules contain atoms; cells contain molecules; bodies contain cells. So far, so tangible. The temptation is to now collectivize human bodies and to gather us up as components of more encompassing holons such as families, clans, tribes, peoples, nations, societies, and civilizations. One matryoshka must contain the rest, so that one must be civilization. The details of history, sad to say, makes a mess of such Pythagorean symmetries where humans are concerned. Actual humans, having precious little respect for carefully crafted social systems boundaries, are always coming and going, conquering and absorbing, reviving and resisting, and making old symbols mean new things. Did Rome ever really “fall”? There is a suspiciously large assortment of Latin words in modern world languages, with m