Long time readers will have noticed my entrancement with Professor Peter Turchin’s Secular Cycles[1], a description of social demographic trends over the centuries. Very briefly, he and his coauthor, Sergey A. Nefedov, describe how and why empty farmlands fill and empty of human inhabitants as the years pass, and empires disintegrate. A key concept is that of asabiya, the “capacity of a social group for concerted collective action,” and a key motivator of asabiya is existential threat, a threat, usually human, that can destroy a society. For example, for centuries the great Roman Empire was under grave threat from the Gauls, and it was during this time the Empire was built and wisely managed. Eventually, the Gauls were defeated and destroyed, and that roughly marks the time the Roman Empire began descending into decay, deadly infighting within the elite, even madness, and eventual destruction.
I’ve come to recognize that the United States, having lost the existential threat of the Soviet Union some thirty years ago, and with no country openly threatening us with destruction, is almost certainly in a disintegrative phase. The supposed conservatives have retreated into an extremist position of refusing to compromise, a reluctance to accept the advice of experts, and religious fanaticism of various sorts, such as pastors proclaiming that a belief in God will prohibit infection by Covid, followed by the infection and, sometimes, deaths of both congregants and their leaders. They are but one part of an anti-vaccination, or anti-vaxx, movement that rejects the vaccination campaign for reasons ranging from concerns about adequate testing to reasons so fantastic that their adherents might be considered delusional, if not for their religious motivations. Our political elites are not compromising with each other as they should, despite the efforts of the moderate left. Land prices are rising as the growing population makes it more and more valuable, and has become the target for acquisition by wealthy entities. And fertility is down, for reasons that I expect have to do with the cost of raising children and their prospects at adulthood. These are all congruent with the observations set forth in Secular Cycles. These observations correlate an abeyance of asabiya with societies disintegrating from infighting, from an inability to work together, as Turchin and Nefedov suggest.
But does the growth of asabiya require existential threats from human entities? The United States is facing two such threats at the moment.
First is the aforementioned Covid-19 pandemic. The early Republican response to the growing numbers of ill people was denial, and, for some on the right, primarily in the evangelical sects, this continues. The requirements of isolation devastated many sectors of the economy. We’ve impatiently “reopened” the economy, and now reports of the delta variant ripping through the ranks of the unvaccinated is not matched by advances in therapeutic response – people are dying because of their refusal to take a simple vaccination shot or two.
Second is anthropogenic climate change. The United States and Canada are enduring abnormally high heat and extreme drought, while a portion of China was recently hit by floods from a typhoon – as were other parts of the world:
Massive floods deluged Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India in recent days, killing hundreds. June’s scorching temperatures, followed by a fast-moving wildfire, erased a Canadian town. More than a million people are close to starvation amid Madagascar’s worst drought in decades. In Siberia, tens of thousands of square miles of forest are ablaze, potentially unleashing carbon stored in the frozen ground below. [WaPo]
The above article is coverage of recent weather events that may or may not be connected to climate change.
My suggestion is that these twin threats, both of which can be existential if a far more deadly variant of the virus causing Covid-19 were to emerge, may be turning around the disintegration of the United States which we’ve been witnessing. The idea that if we don’t pull together, we may be terminally pulled apart, may strike a little sense into those who thought this was the time to strive for theological and ideological purity, or just to acquire power.
The evidence for this as far as Covid goes is, well, fascinating. In the last week or two we’ve seen an about-face from Republican political leaders, perhaps best exemplified by far-right Governor Kay Ivey (R-AL):
A fiery Gov. Kay Ivey made her most forceful statements yet today encouraging Alabamians to get the COVID-19 vaccine, saying “the unvaccinated folks are letting us down” in the fight to control the pandemic. …
“Media, I want you to start reporting the facts. The new cases of COVID are because of unvaccinated folks. Almost 100% of the new hospitalizations are unvaccinated folks. And the deaths certainly are occurring with unvaccinated folks. These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain. We’ve got to get folks to take the shot.” [AL.com]
She’s just one among many. Fox News hosts have also reportedly turned up the heat on the unvaccinated, ending months of casting doubt on vaccination. Of course, not all the political leaders are on board, but that’s no surprise, as by backing vaccination, their odds of accumulating power are reduced. And the religious extremists are, of course, clinging to the Divine, as this Joe.My.God headline suggests:
Hate Group Radio Host: I’ve Got COVID, My Husband Was Hospitalized, I’m Still Not Backing Vaccine
When it comes to climate change, the Biden Administration backs the climate change hypothesis and is attempting to transform the economy as necessary. Some private firms are also pitching in, such as Apple promising to go carbon-neutral. But we’re only one country; China is the biggest polluter, and, after ourselves perhaps, the hardest to shift if they don’t want to shift. As the recent chart on the right demonstrates, we’re not making much progress on the CO2 front. But if more devastation is wrought by storms, heat, and firestorms, and especially if it consumes regressive churches, we may see a renewed interest in pulling together for the sake of survival by the Chinese, who are notoriously concerned about staying in power, and by evangelicals who’ve made a practice of denying the science behind climate change.
The old chestnut is It’s darkest before the dawn. It can be read as a commentary on how humanity must sometimes be punched in the nose before it’ll discard old delusions, from the Divine to the addiction to outsized profits. If we can develop better batteries for storing harvested carbon-neutral energy, such as this recently announced iron battery from Form Energy, and make the other necessary changes – or discover a way to suck the excess heat right out of the air – we may eventually discover we have a case of lemonade in our hands, not just radioactive lemons, which is how it feels at the moment.
1 Secular, in this context, means Greater than 100 years. Turchin and Nefedov’s work is based on agrarian societies, a fact that I’ve conveniently ignored, except to wonder if technological urban societies have shorter social demographic cycles. And, yes, you should buy and read Secular Cycles. War and Peace and War is also very good.
