This pretty much sums up the human race, as I see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvLZeDgU-c

Civilization is predicated on Plumbing. This pretty much sums up the civilized and urbanised human race, as I see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bje_8Y7KUfM

Without plumbing there is no civilization only barbarism as the Romans found out when they failed 3 times to conquer the Caledonians and Picts in Northern Britain from the 1st to the 3rd Century AD.

so ... your theory is that the Romans got all grimey, couldn't wash, and their girlfriends refused to give them sex?? so they gave up on Northern Britain.

I wish I'd read more history books written by you Am Fear - I might have stayed awake in high school history classes :-)

Pete2

.... well, maybe past a certain size, waste management becomes an issue. But a tribe of a few dozen? Would you call any sort of tribal society (or even a dispersed agrarian society, a la mideival Europe) uncivilized? Remember, their version of plumbing was a chamber pot.

I would call them conquered, or maybe even vanquished.

For the most part, they were a defeated race of slaves. Only with the advent of the guilds and the merchant class did they really start to become civilized.

People are not civilized if they are considered chattel, they are just subdued, like sheep.

Sheep, that sounds like a familiar moniker.

OK - so now you are getting to the structure inside the group or nation. if you look at small tribes or groups - they often work off the "strong leader" principle. so a strong leader governs them - an alpha dog or alpha female - and the rest establish a pecking order in that group. it also means that the profits from their activities get divided by the pecking order, with the dominant people getting the best rewards. so there is a subservience in that structure, and some people are subdued. but at the same time, there is also a kind of "Darwinian evolution" where the strong members have to establish their dominance through superior fighting and food-gathering. This is not so bad, because it establishes genetic patterns where the strong genes get passed down successive generations. The group becomes stronger over time, because it keeps adapting successfully to its environment. Hence there is an interconnection between human genetics and group structures - to give the best chance of survival.

There are a lot of pathological things that can go wrong with the dominant-subservient group structure. The group needs intelligent, skilled fighters and hunters in order for everyone to survive. But if people dominate because of pathological personalities, that is potentially a big problem. The group will eventually fail or break up because the leaders are not fulfilling the basic needs for survival.

Pete2

So based on your premise, our current civilization should be dominated by strong, virile members who are natural fighters and respectable leaders.

Sorry, but our current version is anything but. In fact, I would say our current civilization is the antithesis of your model. I believe all of the pathologies you allude to are in full function today.

So it is with all civilizations. Without solving the why that this occurs, suffice it to say that it is as constant as the heavens that every civilization of our world history failed for essentially the same reason, that being a complete perversion of the natural order of things social.

The theory of civilization is sound. It is the practicality of the thing that falls apart in application, every single time. It should work; maybe it even does for a time, but eventually it falls apart and regresses back to something barbaric.

BTW, I do not consider tribal structures as civilized. Barbarians were tribal long before civilizations came along. To get to civilization requires at least three fundamentals; infrastructure, centralized government, and structured commerce. A common language and a currency would be additional characteristics, but not necessarily fundamental.
In civilization, you don't need a strong leader, just a lot of willing followers.

Perhaps therein lies the cypher.

I respectfully suggest that you are using the wrong terms for the discussion: the question is more precisely stated, " Is organization artificial?" The answer is, clearly not. Single celled creatures organized into multi-cellular creatures by the natural process of evolution, salted with some chaos theory determinants. Animals organize into herds, colonies, hives, et alia, without artificial help. Humans organize in a lot of ways, and those organizations have pathologies, life cycles, and histories, analyzed at great length in sociology and org dynamics texts. Civilizations are organizations of organizations, and are no more likely to be immortal than any other work of nature.

Definition of terms would help here. What precisely do you mean by "civilization" as well as "artificial" (as opposed to - what - natural?).

We can follow the increase in complexity of social organization from fairly basic Homo erectus beginnings right up to the IRS tax code, which is fairly complex....Human society has changed and adapted, often quickly, to meet differing circumstances. It's a good bet that this will continue.

well said. Adaptation, both genetic and social, seems to be part of the natural order, as is catastrophic failure to adapt to a changing environment, as in the fall of the Roman Empire, or the dinosaur extermination.