Isegoria

Peter Turchins opens his Conversation piece on cliodynamics with this hook:

They say history always repeats itself — empires rise and fall, economies boom and bust — but is there a way to map and predict the dynamical processes of history? The new and highly controversial discipline cliodynamics is the most recent attempt to transform history into science.

When the French Assembly of Notables frustrated attempts by the royal government to fix the state fiscal crisis in 1788, because they did not want to pay taxes, these aristocrats did not intend to trigger the French Revolution, during which many of them ended up guillotined or exiled. Yet this is precisely what happened.

When the slave-owning elites of South Carolina declared their secession from the Federal Union in December 1860, they did not intend to trigger a bloody civil war that caused more than 600,000 deaths, killed one quarter of military-aged white Southerners, and resulted in the loss of most of their own wealth, when their slaves were freed. Yet this is precisely what happened.

Now, when the radical Tea Party Republicans refuse to negotiate with the Democrats to achieve a compromise, they probably don’t intend to push the United States into default, trigger a massive economic crisis, widespread urban riots, political assassinations and terrorism, and bloody clashes between the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement. Yet — well, this hasn’t happened but cliodynamics indicates that during the next decade the United States will be unusually vulnerable to an outbreak of serious political violence.

Peter Turchin explains the forces behind imperiogenesis, the formation of empires:

Take the case of the Sinic (Chinese) civilization. Over the last three thousand years the cradle of the Chinese civilization, the Yellow River Basin, has been unified by one empire after another. There is no other region on Earth that could rival the Yellow River Basin in the intensity of ‘imperiogenesis’ (proportion of time that it found itself within a large empire). In a series of publications (for example, this one) I have argued that the explanation of this remarkable pattern has to do with the very intensive warfare between nomadic pastoralists (Hunnu, Turks, Mongols, etc) and the agrarian Chinese. This is why China was typically unified from the North (and most frequently from the Northwest) – it was the military pressure from the Great Eurasian Steppe that selected for unusually cohesive North Chinese societies, which then would go on to build huge empires by conquering the rest of East Asia.

Steppe frontiers are crucibles of empires; you add a major river and you are practically guaranteed to have an imperiogenesis hotspot. Examples are numerous: the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus are the usual suspects. But the first empires in sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) arose on the Niger River where it flows through the Sahel. This correlation has been long noted. Karl Wittfogel attempted to explain this observation with his theory of ‘hydraulic empires’, based on the control of irrigation by state bureaucracy, but this theory has been empirically disproved. For example, the major river of eastern Europe, the Volga, was the cradle of a number of empires (Bulghar, the Kazan Khanate, and, most notably, Muscovy-Russia), none of which relied on intensive irrigation. Nor did the Chinese along the Yellow River. In other civilizations irrigation was typically a local, rather than an imperial concern. Most likely, the river effect is due to a combination of good environment for intensive agriculture on alluvial soils and the ease of communications (because transporting goods on water was an order of magnitude cheaper than carting them on land).

Peter Turchin sees human egalitarianism following a complex Z-curve, zigging to greater inequality during the pre-axial period, and then zagging back toward equality in the last few thousand years:

The starting point for approaching this question is what is sometimes called as the ‘U-shaped curve of despotism’ in human evolution. We know that our closest relatives, the chimps and gorillas, live in fairly ‘despotic’ or inegalitarian societies. The chimps, for example, establish linear dominance hierarchies, in which alpha males get better food and greater access to females. We don’t know for sure whether human ancestors also lived in similarly inegalitarian societies, but it seems likely.

In contrast, as was argued by Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, human hunter-gatherers, who lived in small-scale societies before agriculture, were fiercely egalitarian. High degree of equality does not simply happen because hunter-gatherers are poor and cannot accumulate much wealth (chimps also cannot accumulate wealth). No, equality requires active maintenance. People living in small-scale societies possess numerous norms and institutions designed to control ‘upstarts’ — those who attempt to set themselves as alpha-males so that they can gain control of an unfair share of resources (including females). The sanctions deployed against upstarts range from gossip and ridicule to ostracism and, ultimately, assassination.

Thus, until c.10,000 years ago, before agriculture was invented, the human evolutionary trend was that of increasing egalitarianism. The adoption of agriculture, however, enabled the rise of large-scale societies organized as states and empires with highly unequal distributions of power, wealth, and social status. In other words, the trend to greater equality reversed itself. What accounts for this U-turn? Why did humans allow inequality to develop?

The answer apparently is that the U-turn was a side effect of the transition from small-scale to large-scale societies. Small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers were integrated by face-to-face sociality. Such a diffuse, non-centralized social organization was well-suited to maintaining egalitarian ethos. However, once the size of cooperating group increases beyond 100–200 people, even gigantic human brains are overwhelmed by the demands of face-to-face sociality (this is the argument made by Robin Dunbar). Shifting from diffuse, uncentralized social organization to hierarchical organization (as chains of command) allowed evolution to break through the upper limit on society size imposed by face-to-face sociality. A member of a hierarchically organized group needs to have face-to-face interactions with only a few individuals: a superior and several subordinates. Such links can connect everybody in a group of arbitrarily large size. The group size grows by adding additional hierarchical levels.

So far so good, but the great downside of hierarchical organization is that it inevitably leads to inequality. Once you allow a leader to order everybody around, he will use the power to feather his nest. This is sometimes known as the iron law of oligarchy.

I have argued elsewhere that conditions of endemic warfare between human groups create enormous selection pressures for larger group size (“God is on the side of big battalions”) and for effective (which means centralized) military organizations. Under such conditions, emergence of centralized military hierarchies becomes virtually inevitable. The result is the rise of increasingly complex centralized societies — chiefdoms, complex chiefdoms, and archaic states.

As Bellah notes, archaic states were characterized by enormous fusion of power in the person of the ruler. Almost invariably the rulers of such states were ‘divinized’, that is, considered to be gods as well as kings. They had literally the power of life and death over their subjects. One frequent characteristic of early centralized societies was the practice of massive human sacrifice. This naked pursuit of power and voracious appetite for consuming resources is reflected in such characterizations of rulers as a land shark who ‘eats’ island (in Hawaii), or a big rat that gobbles people’s millet (in archaic China).

Thus, although highly effective on the battlefield, a centralized military hierarchy has several drawbacks as a general way of organizing societies. A society cannot really be held together by force alone. Worse, great inequities resulting from rapacious military chiefs and their retinues alienate large segments of the population. As a result, early despotic chiefdoms and archaic states were very fragile and frequently did not outlast their founders.

The tension between the human preference for equitable outcomes and the need for centralized hierarchy brought about the “legitimation crisis of the early state” (this idea was borrowed by Bellah from Jürgen Habermas). The tension became particularly acute during the Axial Age (c.800–200 BCE), for reasons discussed in my review of Bellah’s book and other publications. One central argument in Bellah’s book is that the new world religions and philosophies that arose during the Axial Age began the long job of building more equitable societies. A large part of this evolution was imposing limits on the power of rulers and replacing power based on naked force with legitimate authority.

It should come as no surprise that Peter Turchin describes himself as “an avid consumer of science fiction and fantasy novels” — his field of cliodynamics aspires to become Asimov’s psychohistory.

Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of his favorites:

I don’t know whether Herbert read Ibn Khaldun, but much of his cliodynamics, especially the aspects dealing with Arrakis and Fremen, could come directly from Ibn Khaldun. As a result, he creates a highly believable world (well, this is a science fiction novel), both ecologically and sociologically. This must have been an important reason why this novel was so successful.

There is one law of historical dynamics that Herbert discusses explicitly. This general rule may be formulated as follows: Harsh environmental conditions create a selective regime under which only the best survive, producing cultures with tough and capable warriors. This is the reason why the Emperor recruits his best shock troops, the Sardaukar, from the prison planet Salusa Secundus. Only the Fremen, evolving under equally harsh conditions of Arrakis, can match the ferocity and fighting ability of the Sardaukar.

What is particularly interesting about this hypothesis is that it is explicitly evolutionary. Nevertheless, I believe it is wrong. The problem is that it focuses on individual fighting ability, which is much less important than collective fighting ability. To give a single historical example, an average Roman legionary would most likely lose in a single combat against an average Celtic warrior. A Roman legion, on the other hand, would easily defeat an equal number of Gauls. Cooperation, discipline, ability to work as a team, willingness to sacrifice for the common good (in short, asabiya of Ibn Khaldun) is what wins battles and wars, not ferocity of individual warriors.

The selective regime that breeds militarily capable cultures is not harsh physical environment, but living in a ‘tough neighborhood.’ In other words, it is between-group selection, not individual selection, that creates aggressive expansionist cultures.

A real-world discussion led to his Dune Hypothesis:

This post was prompted by a recent discussion with colleagues about whether people living in poor environments (those capable of supporting lower population densities) are more likely to go to war. The logic here is that people living under such conditions have greater incentive for attacking neighbors, than people living in rich environments. I think that in predicting incidence of warfare, incentives are less important than capabilities. So people living in relatively poor environments that are also characterized by intense between-group selection (e.g., Ibn Khaldunian Bedouins) would be expected to be quite troublesome for their neighbors. On the other hand, people living in poor environments with weak between-group selection (e.g., boreal forests) should be relatively peaceful.