In NewScientist (20 January 2018, paywall) surveys recent research concerning a potential future collapse of civilization, and these are the kinds of research I like – something simple-minded, application of techniques from other disciplines. And the end of the world:
So is there any evidence that the West is reaching its end game? According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.
In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest.
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.
Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.
Which suggests we do a poor job of teaching our young the lessons of previous years. Hell, we could see that when the American Glass-Steagall legislation was repealed and our economy subsequently, and possibly consequentially, fell into the Great Recession.
Onwards:
This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by two amateur historians called William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed that in about 2008 the US would enter a period of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim said to have made a powerful impression on US president Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.
When population grows, in the age before WMDs, it helped to perpetuate the society that it makes up, so there’s a social survival value to that population growth; but the cheapness of labor it causes, and the strains which appear to grow out of that cheapness over time, certainly tends to suggest that in the common economic models, the growth of population is not a salutary development to the members of the population outside of the elite. In the end, those religions which encourage[1] unlimited procreation – which is not uncommon, although not universal – may carry quite a lot of the blame for the misery of their adherents. Another reason to doubt the assertion that life is sacred, no?
But since we’re talking about a social science rather than a hard science, I don’t accept that these need be inevitabilities, and instead I believe this suggests that there’s certainly a role for government in the management of the economy. The trick is to do so without picking specific winners and losers, but instead to shape it in such a way as to benefit those who are not benefiting as they should. It certainly justifies a progressive tax system, since without one the rich ignorantly run the risk of the collapse of society – and the disappearance of their wealth.
The applicability of this article to current circumstances appears to be beyond dispute, as the article notes:
How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.
To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.
Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.
This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.
One might say the elite’s allegiance to their family outranks their allegiance to the society which made their wealth possible in the first place.
This whole thing makes the pulse quicken, doesn’t it? After all, we’re talking about an existential crisis. I took a look for this Peter Turchin for any pubications which I might comprehend and discovered he has a number of books out on this sort of thing, well-reviewed, so I put a couple of them on my Amazon wish-list.
As if I have time to read them 🙂
1And by encourage, I suppose I really mean divinely command.
