The complexity that is being referred to is social and administrative complexity, the huge military upkeep being a side effect of that.
A simple policy can still reflect a highly complex, expensive form of social organization. It's rather hard to argue that stationing massive garrisons throughout an empire is not a massive exercise in social complexity and organization.
> Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard,
It's difficult to argue that late Imperial Rome, with its multiple levels of bureaucracies, military and civilian, a nascent Church, along with large standing garrisons wasn't far more socially and economically complex than the societies of the invading barbarians.
And all that complexity went exactly towards 'keeping large groups together' without the benefit of a unified ethnicity or other identity.
But note that in earlier times, Rome's technological and social complexity was able to pay for itself and then some: it was able to field and man large military organizations, and the complexity brought in a profit by conquest and war booty.
In other words, size was a logical end result to earlier complexity: in order to keep the system running, Rome had to continue to grow.
Unfortunately, Rome ran out of rich easily-conquered lands and its inefficient (and complex) economy could not make the economic transition (unlike the Eastern Empire, which had richer and more densely populated lands).
Your example of stationing two-thirds of a massive standing army just to keep order is an example of just how inefficient the late Western Imperial economy must have been, and why it fell against barbarian groups that had much simpler, flatter social hierarchies based on ethnic kinship and trust.
Much conflation of size and complexity, here, once again. And you seem to merely elide my points. The size of the Roman army allowed a remarkable degree of standardization in the tools of war, and training. That's not complexity. Roman society hadn't gotten poorer; but it had gotten less cohesive, fewer were ready to sacrifice for the whole.
Size automatically required large amounts of social complexity in the days of Rome, especially if you measure complexity in the actual cost it took to hold Rome together.
I'll remind you that the contemporaneous Chinese Han dynasty also evolved into a large militarized, centralized bureaucratic state despite the wide differences in geography and developmental path, and faced very similar problems of replacing conscripts with professional soldiers and then keeping them loyal. What forced them to have similar organization was their sheer size and the organizational pressures this caused.
But I started with a profound example of the reverse. Cost is size, not complexity. There were considerable savings due to scale in Rome, including assembly lines for manufacturing amphora, etc.
Re China you give another example of size creating simplicity and standardization. In contrast to your first paragraph.
You're narrowly defining 'complexity' as only 'complexity of procedure' and completely ignoring social complexity and specialization.
How about you justify why only the single measure of 'complexity' is sufficient for our discussion?
A few direct responses to your example:
1. Standardization may save costs overall, but they represent a form of social complexity (you now have
specialized bureaucrats and administrators to determine standards and communicate with troops, weapons must move a long way to supply every legion, training is now done in a centralized fashion)
2. This social complexity adds fragility to the system—if your army depends on having standardized gear to function properly, and barbarians capture your centralized workshops, then all of a sudden you lose the ability to equip the troops effectively; barbarians don't have that problem
3. It's not even clear that standardization saves overall costs here; it may save administrative cost at the Imperial level (it's easier to manage and train troops if they are interchangeable) but incur large hidden costs at the local level; in other words standardization may be an externalization of administrative problems onto the provinces. A direct example would be: if you force all the troops to use standard gear, they might fight worse than if they used weapons that were specialized for dealing with local enemies; also now your troops have a huge delay in being equipped from a central armory, and may end up pay out of their own pockets for local wares just to survive.
Anyone who has sat through multiple re-orgs at a large corporation will understand that what is 'simple' for the administrator (let's make the org chart simple and clear!) may actually cause tons of hidden additional complexity at the bottom layers, so that total complexity has risen even though things look 'simpler' at one particular level.
Lots of strenuous agreeing with me (vs the article) here, if you actually read what I've said, along with hypothetical tangents that may be worth thinking about but don't belong in a reply to me. Much of this I've addressed, see complex for the pilot, simpler plane. Many distinctions can be made, but less-organized societies have no shortage of complexity and variety (the armies the Romans met in Gaul had enormous variety in equipage, and thanks to little training, all too much variety in the responses of soldiers in battle.) The (Western) Romans didn't go down due to complexity, and Gibbon can't be cited for that claim, as was done. The standardization of Roman shields allowed them to pack together and shield soldiers better, their uniformity was not a "liability".
It's a liability if the costs of the costs of the standardization exceed the real returns, a point which you have 'strenuously' ignored while pretending to push the burden proof back to me.
Sure, in a vacuum anything can be seen as 'complexity', but if you actual measure the costs of doing complicated things in late Roman times then it's clear why their system fell apart while the Germans' largely didn't, despite the Romans having more territory and population to start with, and the key is to see that the late Roman system was horribly inefficient, even after taking standardization into account.
I've made a detailed case for my views. Where's yours?
Otherwise you will never come to any real conclusions, since every society will look more complex from a particular perspective, so none can be fruitfully compared to another. Or you would end up with ridiculous conclusions like modern society is simpler than hunter gatherer societies, because we have uniform driving laws and a global data routing protocol while they don't.
I'm not ignoring perverse standardization as a possibility, but c'mon there's no shortage of additional details that can be added, tangents, exceptions to exceptions, etc. But I'd be more interested if your points were specific historical instances and sourced, not hypotheticals (which we all acknowledge as logically possible.)
I've cited a source, and a specific historical instance, have you?
PS - the German "system" fell apart many times, populations swapped, etc. The area was always a problem, no one empire or monarchy there was a constant problem.
I think the crux of our disagreement here seems to be that you believe size is the main driver of Rome's failure and complexity should play no (causative) role.
I have a more nuanced position: size was certainly a strong causative factor, but it had an intricate relationship to social, military, other complexities in a strong feedback loop that took place over centuries.
In large, complex systems, it's never one factor that fully causes another, but a complex feedback occurs; sometimes the system tends towards homeostasis, while other times a feedback occurs that utterly transforms the system as a whole.
Let's just talk about Rome in particular. Rome's Empire has often been called the 'accidental' empire in the sense that the Roman Republic and the people did not seek out to create an empire from the get-go, but it sort of fell into their lap. How did this happen?
1. Rome was embroiled with constant conflicts with their neighbors starting with the Etruscans and Samnites and developed the military and social institutions (a certain form of complexity here) that let them eventually triumph
2. To defeat their enemies, Rome eventually built a massive war machine (complexity) and found out that conquest was very profitable (selling slaves back in Rome, pillaging and taxing the conquered territories—tons of social, economic, and military complexity, but here have the beginnings of size as well).
3. However, this 'pillaging economy' only worked as long as Rome was able to keep conquering weaker neighbors and taking its population as slaves. At any point in the process, Rome theoretically could have disbanded (or drastically reduced) the size of its legions and decided 'here is enough', but internal conflicts, the quest for glory, etc. kept the military adventurism, because it was profitable for the generals and troops that lead the conquest (a complex arrangement, leading to 'size')
4. Administering a vast empire was difficult, so simplifying reforms (which, as you say and I completely admit, may reduce complexity) like standardization of coinage, law, military equipment, etc. occurred in the late Empire. However this was still in the context of an overly bloated (size) and overly inefficient (complexity) Empire that was only held together by military force
So I think you're absolutely right if your thesis is that size -> complexity. However, in certain cases (like Rome's), complexity -> size as well, and the combination is key.
And the rise and fall of Rome over the centuries can be seen as a certain path one can take:
initial complexity (the highly profitable, 'accidental' Roman war machine) -> overly fast, unsustainable growth -> forced additional complexity due to size -> failure to reform (and simplify) quickly enough -> collapse
The Barbarian societies were often more complex, being less well-integrated and uniform than Roman society; Rome was far more interested in integrating conquered populations. Trust didn't work well for the Persians or Mongolians (at the leadership level.) I don't know a society that solved that one from my reading, highly religious and superstitious societies in which the ruling families were Gods, such as the Egyptians came closer to a solution. Simplicity of a kind.
A simple policy can still reflect a highly complex, expensive form of social organization. It's rather hard to argue that stationing massive garrisons throughout an empire is not a massive exercise in social complexity and organization.
> Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard,
It's difficult to argue that late Imperial Rome, with its multiple levels of bureaucracies, military and civilian, a nascent Church, along with large standing garrisons wasn't far more socially and economically complex than the societies of the invading barbarians.
And all that complexity went exactly towards 'keeping large groups together' without the benefit of a unified ethnicity or other identity.
But note that in earlier times, Rome's technological and social complexity was able to pay for itself and then some: it was able to field and man large military organizations, and the complexity brought in a profit by conquest and war booty.
In other words, size was a logical end result to earlier complexity: in order to keep the system running, Rome had to continue to grow.
Unfortunately, Rome ran out of rich easily-conquered lands and its inefficient (and complex) economy could not make the economic transition (unlike the Eastern Empire, which had richer and more densely populated lands).
Your example of stationing two-thirds of a massive standing army just to keep order is an example of just how inefficient the late Western Imperial economy must have been, and why it fell against barbarian groups that had much simpler, flatter social hierarchies based on ethnic kinship and trust.