Yep, the world actually is falling apart… here’s proof
Peter Turchin’s analytical work on political disintegration & deep history
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This is part of my series, Making sense of things: Navigating tensions of progress and collapse to arrive at collective healing. Check out part 1, part 2, and part 3 to catch up.
The main tension I have been trying to make sense of is the question of how we can live in a time of such global economic prosperity and simultaneously so much pain. The seemingly inconsistent phenomenon that the world can be better off and that we also live in a time of collapse. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs says in his book The Age of Sustainable Development, “Ask an economic policy maker almost anywhere in the world about the country’s main economic goal, and the answer will typically be “economic growth”1… The age of modern economic growth is one of rising output per person combined with rapid overall population growth. Together, those two dynamics, more income per person and more people on the planet, have meant a massive expansion of total economic activity.”2
I then came across a new puzzle piece in my sense-making journey: Peter Turchin’s work. Turchin is a complexity scientist who is taking an innovative approach to looking at history to better understand why civilizations collapse. Within his newly founded field of cliodyanmics, him and his team show us that yes, the world is falling part. Yes, it is directly connected to our current economic standing. No, there is no way around it; all societies go through these ups and downs, and we are at a crossroads within our current civilization cycle (the ‘we’ being America, specifically). But ultimately, optimistically, yes there are things we can do to soften the fall.
Turchin’s work is exciting because it offers findings on things like social unrest and political change in an empirically rigorous way that most other social science methods can not. You see, the challenge with social science is that it is often considered to be too subjective to offer objectively true, concrete insights about what is happening in the world. It can get us close; give us proxies. But can never really help us know something for sure.
Don’t get me wrong, social science is an extremely important field of study. It’s why I’m in it. The attempt to systematically understand social and political phenomena is needed. But the way any given study is designed—the specific variables that are isolated, the assumptions that underpin them, the way data is collected—inherently puts a subjective gloss over what is discovered. In this way, it is impossible to be an objective observer within social science research, therefore its findings—from economics to history to sociology—will always need to be looked at with a discerning eye.
This makes knowing what is going on in the world really freaking hard! I was chatting with a fellow development practitioner friend who works on World Bank projects in Bangladesh the other day. He was lamenting about this exact reality, feeling disillusioned by the promise of evidence-based development work. “We can’t really know, man.” And within the age of reason and science and Big Data, we want to know. We want to know that the work we’re doing, the approaches we’re taking, the investments we’re making, the policies we’re implementing are heading in the right direction. This type of evidence-based approach to understanding the world seeks to be an antidote to a world run on the flagrant whims of ideology.
That’s why my ears perked up when I heard Turchin talk about his work. Him and his team are doing something different. They are using complexity science to take a quantitative approach to history, seeking to understand how and why societies go through social and political change. They have taken the age of Big Data that we live in and have developed analytical models to run that data through to look for trends across societies from the past 10,000 years. In his words,: “It [cliodynamics] uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record, compiled by generations of historians, as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions between the different “moving parts” of the complex social systems that are our societies”3 in order to better understand how they tick and what things lead to different political outcomes, like peace and social cohesion or bloody revolution and war.
In his book “End Times” he goes on to describe, “Historians have long noted that there is a rhythm in history. “Golden ages” of internal order, cultural brilliance, and social optimism are followed by “times of trouble” of recurrent internecine fighting, declining high culture, and social gloom.”4 He lays out how cliodynamics is the first to quantitatively confirm that this rhythm exists, phases of political integration followed by political disintegration, each lasting roughly a century.
Cliodynamics takes the same general organizing principles we find in complex systems all throughout the natural and social worlds and applies it to look at deep history. It looks at how internal forces related to economics, social power, popular discontent, ideology, radicalism and more develop within societies to understand “why, and how, our societies end up in crisis, and how we can get out of crisis with the least amount of bloodshed.”5
This analytical approach to deep history is fascinating. Although far from perfect, it offers us new tools to identify patterns across history to better understand what feeds societal collapse, what this tells us about the times we live in now, and what we might do about it. Complexity theory, which is at the center of cliodynamics, teaches us that systems are nonlinear; they don’t operate in a point A to point B fashion. Instead they have a dynamic to them that is cyclical, therefore they exhibit patterns. And what complexity scientists do is study those patterns—whether it is in the migration of birds or the global spread of a virus—in order to understand how different factors within a complex system interact with each other to create the outcomes that we see.
Turchin pays particular attention to what economic circumstances lead a society towards social fragility, and ultimately, to a phase of political disintegration. Here is where he introduces the concept of a “wealth pump:” times within a civilization’s evolution when the social pyramid is too top heavy, which creates, what he calls, an overproduction of elites. He sums it up by saying, “We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within.”6
Turchin’s analysis revolves around social power: who has it, how is it ascertained, and what dynamics within a society—most importantly elite overproduction and popular immiseration—affect the balance of social power and lead to its redistribution, often times through civil war or bloodshed. He is quick to point out that while this is a pattern we have seen throughout history, there are also cases, 10 to 15 percent of the time, in which a period of political disintegration does not end in violence that we can learn from. “[There are] examples of prosocial elites overcoming crises and rebuilding social cooperation… [They] eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder. They realized that they needed to pull together, suppress their internal rivalries, and switch to more cooperative way of governing.”7
Although cliodyanmics revolves around the impersonal social forces that shape society, Turchin nods to the fact that at the heart of these dynamics are individual people, each one “unique and having free will.”8 He poses questions towards the end of the book like “How do interests and relative capacities of groups evolve?9 “What are the trends affecting the interests and power levels of various groups, and are they likely to undergo a trend reversal or continue developing in the same direction?”10
His model and work helped me connect dots between how economic growth can breed collapse in more nuanced ways. Even more than that, though, his work demonstrates that we really are at a crossroads as America. A crossroad that is shaped by the momentum of forces that are outside of our control, for sure; and a crossroad that we have been at before and therefore have an opportunity to shape.
We can shape the times we live in because we have the unique advantage of being aware of where we are at within this political cycle in a way that our predecessors did not. Although Turchin’s book is titled “End Times,” his work shows us that periods of political disintegration aren’t really the end. Yes, they may be the ending of a chapter; the curtain call for a certain scene within humanity’s large and ongoing play. But it’s not really the end; in some ways it’s actually a beginning.
Instead the times we live in are part of a larger creative cycle that all systems go through. Cycles filled with generative growth and abundance, followed by degradation and death. We can look to our forest friends for insight, seeing this same pattern amongst them. Uninhabited forests go through blooms in which they flourish, and then go through natural periods of decay in which they decline. This decomposition process, led by mushrooms and bacteria and bugs, helps return essential nutrients to the soil, setting up the conditions for the literal seeds of the next generation of tress to begin.
As I tune into this flow within myself, I see Brother Sister Tree becoming old, still, and quiet. A natural turning in process. One I can relate to within my own life: times of menstruation, times of depression. Times when my energy naturally draws inward as things that are no longer of service in my life fall away. A hospicing process that sheds the old and creates space for newness to be born.
Is it possible for us to hold the times we live in, and the world’s pain, within this frame? Can we use our awareness to sense into what within the collective is no longer of service and therefore is falling away? Can we do so abstractly as we read news reports and witness suffering on the streets and in the world around us? And can we also do so directly, by exploring how this process, this dance is showing up within our personal lives as individuals? The way that this hospicing dynamic is transpiring within our relationships, at work, within the communities we love, within our extended families, within our identities.
So, what do I make of all of this? Why is the world in so much pain? What does it say about the state of things? Join me next week for the final piece in this series where I answer these questions and talk about—you guessed it—collective healing.
Thanks for being here :)
Sachs The Age of Sustainable Development p. 16
Sachs The Age of Sustainable Development p. 22
Turchin End Times p.xii
p.37
p.295
p.xiv
p.147
p.295
p.298
p.299
Well, here are my observations: Humanity is an evolutionary failure, it happens sometimes. Usually, a species goes extinct because it can't adapt to a changing world, but never before has a species been the cause of a global extinction level event that wiped out everything. What is the change that humanity failed to adapt to? We developed technology, but failed to drop competition. It was fine to compete before technology, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but life goes on. Now here we are, competing on a global stage, with ever increasing demand for land to exploit for capital gain, but we live on a finite sphere. Competing for more and more consumption on a finite sphere, I hope, would be obviously suicidal, yet it's more taboo than even talking about population control. Shshshsh, don't talk about limiting growth, that will ruin the economy. It's insane. You have Biden, arguably the best choice out of three depressingly bad choices, talking to Xi Jinping and saying, "I think competing in a global market is healthy for us, but we shouldn't go to war over it." This statement clearly shows his lack of understanding concerning the overarching problem: competition for resources on a finite sphere is death and can only lead to war.
We created technology to make our lives better, but we work twice as hard to acquire/maintain/replace/upgrade it. I'm sure this is a matter of yin and yang, a balancing of all things in life. Still, technology must not be, in and of itself, a bad thing, because it seems clear now that other organisms have developed it and are traversing the galaxy, but they must have developed empathy for all life on their planet, something we have failed to do. Instead, we have an economic model that naturally paves the way for psychopaths like Putin, Trump, Hitler, Stalin, etc. to rise to the top. If you don't mind being cruel and heartless, you can do whatever it takes to gain power and wealth. They always make the same promise, I will protect you and raise your standard of living, but they always deliver death and destruction. This is because we can't shake the competitive tendencies we have; the desire to provide the best life we can for our loved ones.
You talked about a hundred year cycle, but the Universe is nothing but cycles. From the electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, to the solar systems orbiting the galactic core, life is cyclical. There are tiny little cycles, like everyday you cycle through being happy and sad. These are so small, you don't notice them. Oh, I burnt the toast, yay my aunt called, ugh, I'm late for work, oh good the traffic is moving... Then you have good weeks and bad weeks, good years and bad years, good decades and bad decades good centuries and bad centuries, millenia, epochs... This cycle we're in now is a big one, the biggest one. Barring some unforeseen, dramatic, global evolutionary leap that transforms the entire human race into a cooperative organism instead of a competitive one, I can only see mass extinction at the Chicxulub event level. Hopefully it won't be a Permian level extinction event.