Scientists, historians and politicians alike have begun to warn that Western culture is reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that in many past civilisations precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse.
Peter Turchin (evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut) thinks there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin studied boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised the equations could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.
In civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest. “You’ve got to be very optimistic to think that this is just a blip on the screen”.
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society but, as wealthy elites form and the living standards of the workers fall, the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, leading to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse.
Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.
Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.
Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.
Safa Motesharrei (mathematician at the University of Maryland) noticed that some keep going, but some societies, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.
He modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.
This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.
Motesharrei’s group has shown that by rapidly using non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, a society can grow by an order of magnitude beyond what would have been supported by renewables alone, and so is able to postpone its collapse. “But when the collapse happens,” they concluded, “it is much deeper.”
Joseph Tainter (anthropologist at Utah State University), author of "The Collapse of Complex Societies", offers a similarly bleak outlook. He sees the worst-case scenario as a rupture in fossil fuel availability, causing food and water supplies to fail and millions to die within a few weeks.
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However things pan out, almost nobody thinks the outlook for the West is good. “You’ve got to be very optimistic to think that the West’s current difficulties are just a blip on the screen,” says Ian Morris (historian at Stanford University in California).
Turchin says introducing more progressive taxes to address income equality and the exploding public debt might be possible to avert disaster.
Motesharrei thinks we should rein in population growth to levels his model indicates are sustainable.
The problem with these kinds of solutions, however, is that humans haven’t proved themselves to be great at playing the long game.
And new technologies that solve short-term problems create their own long-term problems. Climate change is just one example. Overuse of antibiotics leading to microbial resistance, and the problem of an increasing old-aged population is another.
So, is the West really on the ropes? Perhaps. But ultimately its survival will depend on the speed at which people can adapt. If we don’t reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, tackle inequality and find a way to stop elites from squabbling among themselves, things will not end well. In Tainter’s view, if the West makes it through, it will be more by luck than by good judgement.
“We are a species that muddles through,” Tainter says. “That’s all we’ve ever done, and all we’ll ever do.”
(New Scientist lead article 20 Jan 2018)
