Ball on Turchin
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Feb 2006 14:25:38 -0800
Empire of the sums
In a controversial book, Peter Turchin outlines mathematical formulae
for history's grandest narratives: the rise and fall of great
civilisations. Philip Ball investigates
Thursday August 25, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1555330,00.html
With the science of psychohistory we can predict the future. We can map
out the next thousand years in detail, and the next 30,000 in outline.
Equipped with mathematical models of mass behaviour, psychohistorians
such as Hari Seldon of Streeling University can predict the fate of
nations.
But neither psychohistory nor Hari Seldon are real: they were invented
by Isaac Asimov in his famous Foundation series, which describes the
fluctuating fortunes of the Galactic Empire.
Now, however, a real-life Hari Seldon has developed his own form of
psychohistory. In September, ecologist Peter Turchin of the University
of Connecticut publishes War and Peace and War, a book in which he
explains much of pre-industrial world history with his bold and
controversial theory of the rise and fall of empires, using the same
kind of maths that Turchin has used previously to study ecosystems.
Turchin believes that history can indeed be a science, with laws as
inexorable as the law of gravity. He claims to have found the general
mechanisms that cause empires to wax and wane - laws as true today as
they were during the Roman or Ottoman Empires. According to this view,
the world order is in a state of perpetual change and the global powers
today will inevitably be replaced in the coming centuries.
Turchin's theory is anathema to some historians. When he presented the
detailed mathematics that underpins his theory of empires in a book
called Historical Dynamics in 2003, it met with stiff opposition. Some
regarded his assumptions about human behaviour as simplistic. "Social
theory is a minefield, even for those experienced in it", said Joseph
Tainter, an American historian who has studied the collapse of
civilisations. He dismissed Turchin's view of history, saying that
"sophisticated mathematics will not improve naive social theories".
Others are opposed to the very idea that history has rules analogous to
those in science, and that the historian's aim is to discover them.
"History is our interpretation of past thoughts that happened to be
written down or otherwise preserved," says historian Niall Ferguson.
"We do not really study [historical] causes, but what people at the
time thought were the causes. And our aim in retrieving their thoughts
is not so much to explain how things happened as to understand how they
seemed to have happened."
It is an old argument. In the second century BC, the Greek writer
Polybius proposed that societies are like organisms, which are born,
grow, age and die, leading him to predict the decline of the Roman
Empire 600 years ahead of the event. The idea of a mechanical science
of history became popular in the 18th century, in the wake of Isaac
Newton's mechanical explanation of planetary motions, and by the 19th
century such notions were held by most "progressive" thinkers.
Turchin's title alludes to Tolstoy's speculations in War and Peace that
history is deterministic, directed by "forces" such as those invoked by
Newton.
And Karl Marx echoed Polybius's belief in cyclic history in his
economic theory of why a proletarian revolution was inevitable. But
others deplored this reduction of the richness and complexity of
history to a clockwork caricature. What about the role of "great men"
like Napoleon or Alexander, whose influence could never have been
predicted? Nietzsche voiced an opinion shared by many historians today
when he said "So far as there are laws in history, laws are worth
nothing and history is worth nothing."
Turchin knows he is entering a battleground. But his experience in the
mathematical modelling of animal populations such as lemmings, voles
and forest insects has given him confidence that the complex processes
of human interactions can be captured by such methods too. "History is
not just a huge number of random factors interacting in very complex
ways," he says. "There are some strong patterns that come out. And
there are some reasonably simple explanations at work for these
patterns."
Of course, human society is more complicated than vole communities. But
Turchin thinks it is not necessarily too complicated for a scientific
approach. "A good scientific theory does not need to include everything
we know about the subject", he says. "It needs to include only the
stuff that is necessary for getting the job done."
For example, Turchin argues that the fluctuations in population of
pre-industrial societies can be linked to periods of political
instability and civil war. His theory shows how population growth
caused by increased prosperity can itself trigger such social
instability, thus sowing the seeds of its own decline. This, says
Turchin, is how civilisations and empires collapse.
But War and Peace and War is even more ambitious, for it attempts to
explain some of history's grand narratives: the rise and fall of Rome,
the expansion of medieval European powers, the Russian conquest of
Siberia. Turchin believes that these empires were the product of one
factor: social cohesion, or the willingness of groups to cooperate
against their opponents.
Turchin calls such solidarity asabiya, an Arabic word used by the
14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun to denote "mutual affection
and willingness to fight and die for each other". A courtier of several
North African sultans, Ibn Khaldun was the first person to propose that
asabiya is the fuel of empire building.
Using modern understanding of how cooperative behaviour develops in
groups of organisms, Turchin's models suggest that asabiya becomes
particularly strong on the frontiers of empires, where two
civilisations confront one another. This, he says, was how a small
group of Cossacks led by Yermak Timofeyevich was able to defeat a much
larger army of Tatars in Siberia in 1582.
Thus, the "meta-ethnic faultlines" between civilisations are "asabiya
incubators" from which new empires spring. Here, either you unite or
you die.
The happy consequence is that frontier peoples bury their differences
and help one another. The downside is that they exaggerate factors that
distinguish them from their foes, who become subhuman barbarians,
heathens or infidels. It's us versus them.
Sounds familiar? Turchin points out how, after 9/11, a US radio host
referred to Arabs as "nonhumans" and claimed that "conversion to
Christianity is the only thing that probably can turn them into human
beings". America has all the hallmarks of an empire, he says, and it is
one in which asabiya is showing its dark side in nationalism and
xenophobia. "Today the most violent clash of civilisations occurs on
the meta-ethnic frontiers of Islam with the western, Orthodox, Hindu
and Sinic civilisations," says Turchin. But if his theory is right, it
will be in these conflict zones, such as the borders of Europe, that
the next great empires will arise.
Further reading
Turchin's theory of history aka cliodynamics
www.eeb.uconn.edu/turchin/Clio.htm
Historical Dynamics
Peter Turchin, Princeton Unversity Press, 2003, ISBN 0691116695
· War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin is published in September by
Pi Press.
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