Civilization: The West and the Rest (55 page)
47. The end of Western predominance: President Barack Obama bows to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, November 2009
Well, Sir Anthony, since you desire it, we will not anticipate the past! – So mind, young people – our retrospection be all to the future.
Sheridan
He felt that in the electric flame department of the infernal regions there should be a special gridiron, reserved exclusively for the man who invented these performances [amateur theatricals], so opposed to the true spirit of civilization.
P. G. Wodehouse
There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a civilization than
The Course of Empire
, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the gallery of the New York Historical Society. A founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Cole beautifully captured a theory to which most people remain in thrall to this day: the theory of cycles of civilization.
Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first,
The Savage State
, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture,
The Arcadian or Pastoral State
, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is
The Consummation of Empire
. Now the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, while
the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes
Destruction
. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over
Desolation
. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.
Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole’s pentaptych has a clear message: all civilizations, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was that the young American republic of Cole’s age would do better to stick to its bucolic first principles and resist the temptations of commerce, conquest and colonization.
For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public at large have tended to think about the rise and fall of civilizations in such cyclical and gradual terms. In Book VI of Polybius’
Histories
, which relate the rise of Rome, the process of political
anacyclosis
goes as follows:
1. Monarchy
2. Kingship
3. Tyranny
4. Aristocracy
5. Oligarchy
6. Democracy
7. Ochlocracy (mob rule)
This idea was revived in the Renaissance, when Polybius was rediscovered, and passed, meme-like, from the writing of Machiavelli to that of Montesquieu.
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But a cyclical view also arose quite separately in the writings of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun and in Ming Neo-Confucianism.
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In his book
Scienza nuova
(1725), the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through a
ricorso
with three phases: the divine, the heroic and the human or rational, which reverts back to the divine through what Vico called ‘the barbarism of reflection’. ‘The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies,’ wrote the British political philosopher Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in 1738,
‘carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and, though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.’
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In
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith conceived of economic growth – ‘opulence’ as he put it – ultimately giving way to the ‘stationary state’.
Idealists and materialists agreed on this one thing. For Hegel and Marx alike, it was the dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in
The Decline of the West
(1918–22) that the nineteenth century had been ‘the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money’. The British historian Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume
Study of History
(1936–54) posited a cycle of challenge, response by ‘creative minorities’, then decline – civilizational suicide – when leaders stop responding with sufficient creativity to the challenges they face. Another grand theory was that of the Russian émigré sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who argued that all major civilizations passed through three phases: ‘ideational’ (in which reality is spiritual), ‘sensate’ (in which reality is material) and ‘idealistic’ (a synthesis of the two).
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The American historian Carroll Quigley taught his students at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service (among them the future President Bill Clinton) that civilizations had, like man, seven ages: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay and invasion. It was, Quigley explained in a classic statement of the life-cycle theory:
a process of evolution … each civilization is born … and … enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power … until gradually a crisis of organization appears. When this crisis has passed and the civilization been reorganized … its vigor and morale have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise. At this time there appears, for the first time, a moral and physical weakness, which raises … questions about the civilization’s ability to defend itself against external enemies … The civilization grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and eventually disappears.
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Each of these models is different, but all share the assumption that history has rhythm.
Although hardly anyone reads Spengler, Toynbee or Sorokin today – Quigley is still enjoyed by conspiracy theorists
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– similar strains of thought are legible in the work of more modern authors. Paul Kennedy’s
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
(1987) is another work of cyclical history, in which great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to their economies. Just as in Cole’s
Course of Empire
, imperial expansion carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes: ‘If a state overextends itself strategically … it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all.’
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This phenomenon of ‘imperial overstretch’, he argues, is common to all great powers. When Kennedy’s book was published, many people in the United States shared his fear that their own country might be succumbing to this disease.
More recently, it is the anthropologist Jared Diamond who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His book,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(2005), is cyclical history for the Green Age: tales of societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: ‘Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their golden age, and
perished.’
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According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.
Diamond’s inference is of course that today’s world could go the way of the Maya.
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The critical point is that environmental suicide is a slow and protracted process. Unfortunately, political leaders in almost any society – primitive or sophisticated – have little incentive to address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years or more. As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 made clear, rhetorical pleas to ‘save the planet’ for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now. We love our grandchildren. But our great-great-grandchildren are harder to relate to.
Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole’s artistic representation of a civilizational supercycle of birth, growth and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic – sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration? What if historical time is less like the slow and predictable changing of the seasons and more like the elastic time of our dreams? Above all, what if collapse is not centuries in the making but strikes a civilization suddenly, like a thief in the night?
Civilizations, as I have endeavoured to show in this book, are highly complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, so that their construction more closely resembles a Namibian termite mound than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder – on ‘the edge of chaos’, in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time, apparently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they ‘go critical’. A slight perturbation can set off a ‘phase transition’ from a benign equilibrium to a
crisis – a single grain of sand causes an apparently stable sandcastle to fall in on itself.
To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept.
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Think of the spontaneous self-organization of half a million termites, which allows them to construct a complex mound, or the fractal geometry of the snowflakes formed by water molecules, with their myriad variants of sixfold symmetry. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system – what the neuroscientist Charles Sherrington called the ‘enchanted loom’. Our immune system is also a complex system in which antibodies mobilize themselves to wage a defensive war against alien antigens. All complex systems in the natural world share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes – what scientists call ‘the amplifier effect’.
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Causal relationships are often non-linear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing from observations (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Indeed, some theorists would go so far as to say that certain complex systems are wholly non-deterministic, meaning that it is next to impossible to make predictions about their future behaviour based on past data. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of ‘self-organized criticality’; it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown, because the distribution of forest fires by magnitude does not follow the familiar bell curve, with most fires clustered around a mean value, the way most adult male heights are clustered around five foot nine. Rather, if you plot the size of fires against the frequency of their occurrence, you get a straight line. Will the next fire be tiny or huge, a bonfire or a conflagration? The most that can be said is that a forest fire twice as large as last year’s is roughly four (or six or eight, depending on the forest) times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern – known as a ‘power-law distribution’ – is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Only the steepness of the line varies.
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The political and economic structures made by humans share many of the features of complex systems. Indeed, heterodox economists
such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along these lines for decades, going far beyond Adam Smith’s notion of an ‘Invisible Hand’, seeming to guide multiple profit-maximizing individuals, or Friedrich von Hayek’s later critique of economic planning and demand management.
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To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of any central control, multiple levels of organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches and no general equilibrium. In contradiction to the core prediction of classical economics that competition causes diminishing returns, in a complex economy increasing returns are quite possible. Viewed in this light, Silicon Valley is economic complexity in action; so is the internet itself. And the financial crisis that began in 2007 can also be explained in similar terms. As Nassim Taleb has argued, the global economy by the spring of 2007 had come to resemble an over-optimized electricity grid. The relatively small surge represented by defaults on subprime mortgages in the United States sufficed to tip the entire world economy into the financial equivalent of a blackout, which for a time threatened to cause a complete collapse of international trade.
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Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute are currently exploring how such insights can be applied to other aspects of collective human activity, including ‘metahistory’.
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