Human civilization has been a topic for historians, sociologists, philosophers, thinkers, and scientists throughout history. The discussion of the rise and fall of human civilization often leads to a look back at the work of the Muslim thinker Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun who is often described as the originator of the theory of cyclicality of human civilization. Although Ibn Khaldun did not take credit for such idea, and many modern researchers have concluded that that idea was not Ibn Khaldun's original idea, it is nonetheless part of his work and his contribution to the field of social history. Related to this topic, we examine and re-present ideas by a scientist from the modern time, one who used statistical data to predict social trends.
On the New Scientist website, Peter Valentinovich Turchin, a Russian-American scientist specializing in mathematical modeling and statistical analysis, presents his analysis of the decline of Western civilization and its causes by studying mathematical patterns in complex systems and applying them to history. Turchin believes that Western societies are rapidly moving toward the brink of destruction, and that they must make important decisions to avoid this collapse. Here are some of Turchin's ideas and assertions.
Today, Western civilization may face the same fate, as there are clear signs of a variety of crises, including widening economic inequalities, political divisions, violent conflicts, and environmental disasters. Some observers see this as a sign of a “multiple global crises” that pose a serious, perhaps existential, threat to contemporary societies.
More than two decades ago, I predicted that this was the end of things, based on studying mathematical patterns in complex systems and applying them to history. Using this approach, I discovered that violent political upheavals follow certain time cycles, one peaking every 50 years or so, and the other peaking every two or three centuries.
Applying this model to the United States and Western Europe, I was surprised to find that these societies were rapidly moving toward the brink of destruction. In 2010, I suggested in Nature that the crisis would escalate and peak within the current decade. Ten years later, the evidence has confirmed this prediction.
My recently published book, End Times , has caught the attention of critics and readers who use words like “collapse,” “revolution,” and even “doom” to describe my work. Yet you might be surprised that I don’t think collapse is inevitable. My recent research reveals something interesting: Human societies have evolved to become less vulnerable to collapse. Better yet, this discovery could play a key role in overcoming the current crisis. For more than three decades, my colleagues and I have collected data on past societies and how they deteriorated during and after crises. This is a daunting task because it requires information about dozens of measurable variables that describe the key characteristics of social systems and analyze their dynamics, or the factors and relationships that influence the evolution of societies and changes in their behavior over different time periods.
When direct indicators aren’t available—which is common the further back in time you go—you have to look for proxy indicators. Fortunately, we now have data on nearly 200 crises over the past 5,000 years. To do this, we’ve used this data to compile a large historical database called CrisisDB. This way, we can start looking for patterns and trends in societies during and after crises. But as we study the data and the variables that influence societies and set them on the path to collapse, we’ve come across some surprises: A handful of variables are enough to determine whether societies are headed toward collapse. These external variables include the loss of state legitimacy and geopolitical, geographic, and economic pressures. However, the two main indicators of the impending crisis are “popular misery,” or more precisely, the deterioration or deterioration of the welfare state or living conditions of the overwhelming majority of the people, and “elite overproduction,” that is, society produces a disproportionate number of individuals seeking to join the elite, outnumbering the positions the state provides them.
These two indicators are interconnected; popular discontent, which arises as a result of the deterioration of the economic and social conditions of the vast majority of the population, is not sufficient on its own to change the status quo; it requires leadership and organization by a class of opposition elite, those who seek power and wealth, but find it difficult to achieve their goals.
Although crises typically follow a pattern of collapse, our analysis reveals that there is no standard pattern for collapse, and it is not possible to predict exactly how crises will occur or develop. Fortunately, the large historical database CrisisDB has allowed researchers to identify a range of effects of societal collapse, and the analysis shows that there is enormous variation in how crises occur.
The most common way societies emerge from their “end times” is through bloody civil wars or violent revolutions. Other possible outcomes include severe demographic shocks that can sometimes result in the loss of a majority of the population, the overthrow or killing of rulers, and the overthrow of ruling elites through social revolution or even their extermination. Crises can also lead to the fragmentation of territories, the destruction or abandonment of capitals, or their fall to foreign occupation.
What we may forget, however, is that the case of total collapse (when a society collapses on more than one front or in different areas) is extremely rare. Alternatively, the collapse may be focused on specific aspects or issues without affecting all aspects of life. In some cases, leaders and peoples succeed in uniting and overcoming social unrest without resorting to violence.
Although there are factors that may increase the likelihood of crises, the total collapse of societies is not inevitable. Two centuries ago, a wave of instability swept the entire world. Although crises are primarily fueled by internal factors, no country lives in complete isolation; therefore, broader influences - such as geopolitical, economic, and cultural influences - tend to trigger crises in different countries, but not simultaneously, but at different times or with different frequencies.
In my previous research, I found that such “periods of turmoil” recur approximately every two centuries. Today, we live in the midst of an era of such turmoil, while the previous period could be called the “era of revolutions” that peaked in the mid-nineteenth century (although its consequences continued into the early twentieth century). In the same vein, the revolutions of 1848 spread rapidly across Europe, sweeping across a wide range of countries, beginning with France and moving on to Germany, Austria, Italy, and a number of other smaller states. From 1850 through the 1860s, China, Russia, and the United States experienced major upheavals. Essentially, all the major countries of the world were affected by this wave of instability. However, the severity of the results varied greatly.
Humans have witnessed several significant social and political transformations that occurred around the world during a given period of history. Sometimes, crises ended in violent and bloody outcomes, such as the Taiping Rebellion (a large-scale civil war in southern China, lasting from 1850 to 1864 during the Manchu (Qing) dynasty*), which killed between 20 and 30 million people, making it the bloodiest civil war in human history. The same is true of the American Civil War, which lasted from 1860 to 1865, and is considered the bloodiest war in the history of the United States, resulting in the deaths of about 600,000 people. On the other hand, the British Empire, despite experiencing much turmoil between 1838 and 1857, managed to avoid violent revolution, as the ruling elites cooperated and adopted a set of reforms that helped mitigate the crisis, such as allowing workers to organize and expanding the right to vote. Russia also managed to avoid collapse, despite a slide into crisis in the 1850s and a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (which was fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire in 1853, and was sparked by Russian ambitions to conquer Ottoman territory and control the Black Sea and its passages*), and many unrest among the Russian population. However, things in Russia ended relatively peacefully, with the government adopting a series of reforms, including the abolition of serfdom.
A recent analysis of the CrisisDB database offers a positive message about how crises have evolved in different societies over time. As my colleagues and I have been researching this issue over the 5,000 years covered by the database, we have found that historical evidence suggests that early states and societies were more fragile than later ones. The empirical patterns show that the closer we get to the present, the less severe the social and political collapses that result from crises become.
At the quantitative level, one of the dimensions of collapse is population decline, which is justified because the size of a society can be one of the most important features of any society, and population decline reflects indescribable human misery, as a result of people dying from violence, epidemic diseases, and famines, or because they became refugees, for example.
The most famous examples of the collapse of societies in the past usually involve a sharp decline in population, and the collapse of the Mayan civilization is a good example of this. Thanks to modern technologies such as LiDAR (a device that scans the surroundings with laser beams and builds a three-dimensional representation through the scanning process that accurately reflects the shapes, sizes, and dimensions of objects in the space*), archaeologists have shown that the forests surrounding abandoned Mayan centers were once full of houses, fields, and roads.
The important question here is: What will we discover behind the relationship between the severity of past crises and population decline? Let us return to the Taiping Rebellion again. During this period, China's population fell by 13%, from 412 million in 1850 to 358 million in 1870. Despite the magnitude of this loss, it was nothing compared to the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220 AD. At the height of its power and prosperity, the dynasty's population was about 60 million, while after the collapse, its population was less than 20 million. Over time, the population decline caused by the end of China's subsequent dynasties, such as the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties, became less severe. That is, the social and political crises that led to the population decline were less severe with each change in power and end of a dynasty. Or take Germany, for example. Although it experienced a revolution in 1848, this wave of instability did not leave behind serious demographic consequences, unlike the earlier turmoil and chaos of the 17th century, which, starting in 1618, saw devastating wars and conflicts such as the Thirty Years’ War, which raged across Europe from 1618, killing millions of people and leaving some parts of Germany with only 50% of their former population.
On the other hand, our analysis revealed that the reason human societies have become more resilient is that they have become more complex. This may seem surprising given the popular idea in archaeology that complex societies are highly susceptible to collapse. In his influential book The Collapse of Complex Societies , Joseph Tainter of Utah State University argues that it is the accumulation of complexity that undermines stability, but the analysis of the study disagrees. We now need to distinguish between two dimensions of complexity to understand how societies have become more resilient over time.
The first dimension is size, and here we are talking specifically about population size, that is, the number of people ruled by a state or empire. However, there are other aspects of size, such as the area of a state and the number of people living in the capital and other cities. As a society grows in size, it becomes more difficult for a state to govern effectively, as areas far from the capital become more prone to dissent, and tensions flare between different ethnic groups within large, multi-ethnic empires. Given that states have increased in size since they first appeared about 5,000 years ago, this trend should have made them more fragile.
The second dimension of complexity offers the opposite trend. States have not only expanded in size, but have also evolved in institutional complexity. As a result of competition and conflict among themselves, states have acquired more sophisticated systems for processing information, economic exchange, and governance, and the systems of administration and organization within government have become more efficient in carrying out tasks and procedures. This development in efficiency indicates improved methods of work, reduced bureaucracy, and improved constraints on rulers and elites. As with any form of development, the fittest ultimately survive (i.e., the most adaptable and efficient systems are the ones that usually survive).
Put simply, states that failed to acquire this type of complexity have collapsed, and their territories have fallen prey to stronger competitors. What makes societies more resilient to internal and external shocks is therefore “useful complexity,” which is essentially the accumulation of social technologies that contribute to making societies more organized and cohesive internally.
Expanding on this idea, my team recently conducted a new analysis of Neolithic societies as they spread from Asia across Europe between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. These early farmers in Europe lived in simplified communities, with each village having its own system of government without writing, bureaucracy, or hereditary rulers (like those who later became prominent during the later Bronze Age). Yet these societies were not immune to demographic collapse. Wherever we have detailed information about population dynamics, we see that periods of population peaks were followed by sharp declines, after which more than half the population might disappear and the entire region might be abandoned. Some researchers have suggested that climate change, soil depletion, or epidemics were likely to cause these sharp population declines. However, our analysis suggests that violent conflict was a major cause of these collapses. Whatever the cause, mounting evidence suggests that demographic collapses were not uncommon in prehistory. As more quantitative data from different regions is collected, it is becoming clear that such large population declines were the norm rather than the exception. The implications of this study, combined with analysis based on the massive CrisisDB database, are striking. Over the past 10,000 years, human societies have evolved culturally to become larger and more complex.
During that time, these societies have tried to suppress internal violence to varying degrees. Initially, they were too fragile to do so, and soon descended into civil wars that tore apart the people. Over time, however, these societies evolved and built better and more effective institutions, which made them more resilient to internal and external shocks.
As a result, the collapse of these societies has become less likely. Given the limited time, we cannot rely solely on cultural evolution to solve the current crisis of the collapse of Western civilizations. By analyzing in detail the previous success stories in which countries were able to avoid collapse and civil wars, and resolve their crises through the implementation of appropriate policies and reforms, it becomes clear that it ultimately depends on the decisive actions of influential individuals in society, and the elites must be motivated to care about the common good. To achieve this, two basic elements are required: pressure from popular social movements, and the presence of selfless individuals to lead these movements.
Western civilization is currently facing serious problems, but an analysis of history reveals ways to avoid collapse. The secret lies in promoting the right kind of social complexity, especially focusing on institutions and policies that enhance the well-being of the majority of people and reduce conflicts between elites. For example, imposing a progressive tax system, in which the tax rate increases as income increases, helps to limit the formation of a large number of very wealthy elites, and prevents the worsening of economic poverty in the rest of the population.
Also, granting all citizens the right to vote and elect public officials limits the arbitrary and selfish actions of rulers. When citizens have the right to choose their leaders through elections, rulers become more accountable to the people; This reduces the likelihood that they will make decisions that serve their personal interests at the expense of the public interest.
In addition, institutions that protect workers’ rights and determine the minimum wage, such as trade unions, play a role in reducing the economic gap between the classes of the people, in addition to the fact that the state is supposed to fairly promote the welfare of all its citizens. When the state adopts a model of people’s welfare, it provides social services and support to ensure that all citizens have a minimum level of health care, education, housing and income, which in turn leads to achieving social equality, reducing the gap between social classes and enhancing the welfare of all members of society. Finally, through joint work between states and international organizations, global issues such as climate change and other global issues can be addressed.
A brief about Ibn Khaldun's work
In his Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun elaborates a primitive theory on the development and origin of civilizations, life of dynasties, social cohesion in sociology and an organicist theory about the rise and fall of empires.
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