Peter Turchin claims to be able to transform history from a collection of anecdotes into a rigorous science and thus foresee the future. Cliodynamics - this is how he calls his discipline (obviously, according to the ancient Greek museum of history).
If his calculations are correct, then at the end of the decade, the United States will face serious unrest. Critics have called Mr. Turchin's approach oversimplified and naive, and some are convinced that the history of humanity is still too short to build on it statistical models describing the rise and fall of empires.
Well, let's wait for 2020 … Don't like this theory? Offer yours, Mr. Turchin will only be glad. Mr. Turchin has not always been a bull in the china shop of history. He is a respected mathematical ecologist, professor at the University of Connecticut (USA), with a long list of influential works on animal and population migration.
“It was a midlife crisis,” the scientist recalls. “I turned 40, had achieved some notoriety among specialists in the field of population dynamics and wanted more complex problems.” In search of the use of his formidable mathematical power, he turned his attention to history. “This is the only science that is bypassed by mathematics,” says Mr. Turchin. - An unplowed field!
It happened 15 years ago. Since then, the researcher has managed to apply an analytical approach tested on animals to solving all kinds of historical questions, including how religions spread, why empires tend to arise on the border of the steppe and arable land, etc.
“The goal is to turn history into an explanatory science, that is, to teach it to abandon some theories in favor of others,” emphasizes Mr. Turchin. For example, there are more than two hundred theories explaining the fall of the Roman Empire, because new ideas continue to come, but no one abandons the old ones. It is not surprising that cliodynamics was not welcomed with open arms. Most historians are so deeply buried in cultural details that they consider each specific time and place to be unique.
“Historians are used to telling stories by following their chosen characters,” says philosopher Anthony Beevers of Evansville University (USA).
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Of course, such specialists will be suspicious of any attempt to turn a beautiful story about a particular culture into a dataset. However, the increase in computing power has already affected Clio's holdings. For example, Fred Gibbs and Dan Cohen of George Mason University (USA) used the online library Google Books to test the long-standing belief that religiosity was on the decline in Victorian England.
Indeed, by tracing the titles of all books published in Great Britain in the 19th century, they noted a sharp decline in the use of the words "God" and "Christ" in headlines after 1850 in favor of the more neutral "Jesus." But Mr. Turchin goes further than identifying individual trends in specific countries in certain historical periods.
Having reasoned that the fate of the empire ultimately depends on the cohesion of society, he took up the history of "collective violence" (as he himself calls it), that is, political assassinations, riots and civil wars, without touching international wars and criminal offenses. At the same time, the researcher concentrated on three large civilizations: the Roman Republic, medieval Europe and tsarist Russia.
Using mathematical tools borrowed from population biology, he found that in each case, the increase in the death toll from collective violence follows two overlapping cycles lasting two to three centuries and fifty years. The most likely explanation for the largest cycle of these two, he said, is the structural-demographic theory proposed two decades ago by Jack Goldstone of George Mason University (USA). The fact is that in a prosperous state, population growth and technological progress ultimately lead to an overabundance of labor.
This allows exploiters to pay workers less. As a result, the rich become so rich and there are so many of them that the ruling class can no longer accommodate them all and breaks up into factions fighting for the right to luxury. The cohesion of society falls and the state begins to lose control over its citizens. Then and only then does violence begin. Anarchy lasts until enough people drop out of the elite for growth and prosperity to return.
Indeed, one can glance at history and be convinced that Lenin's statement about the unwilling lower classes is worthless. It is not the suffering of the working class that becomes the catalyst for social collapse. Riots begin only one or two generations later: this is how long it takes for the excessive accumulation of a wealthy and highly educated elite. Mr. Turchin came to this conclusion by comparing the time of the social explosion with the economic indicators of the three empires, that is, wages, the level of social inequality and population growth.
Special attention was paid to the treasures of coins, because in dangerous times the one who buried his savings is less likely to survive in trouble and then return for treasures. In short, in all cases, civil war lagged behind economic difficulties by about one or two generations. The same pattern holds true for the United States, according to Mr. Turchin in a new article. The researcher is not sure about the reasons for the second, 50-year cycle. Perhaps this is a kind of transitional stage, when a part of the population, who grew up in troubled times, appreciates stability and calls for it, while the other, having eaten stability, rocks the boat. Critics, of course, point to a number of inconsistencies. For example, Mr. Turchin refers to the declining population in Tang China (9th century), while the historian Johannes Preiser-Kapeller of the Austrian Academy of Sciences points outthat in those days the central government simply weakened and the residents of the outlying provinces were not taken into account in the new censuses.
The cyclical theory of Mr. Turchin also does not take into account random and unique phenomena such as climate change, epidemics, and the emergence of prominent personalities. “The story is more chaotic than its model,” sums up Mr. Prizer-Kapeller. But Mr. Turchin is not embarrassed by the fact that he paints with a wide brush: “Any model, any theory should be simplified, otherwise the most important variables will not be found. The question is how well this or that theory is tested in practice. However, he admits that sometimes one person can become such a variable. For example, military historians have calculated that Napoleon's presence on the battlefield increased the chances of victory as much as increasing the number of troops by a third.
One way or another, but Mr. Turchin is ready to face the most severe judge - time. Two years ago, he publicly predicted political instability in the United States and Western Europe in the coming decades. In his new work, he describes even more signs of an impending crisis in the United States, where, according to his theory of cycles, the tipping point will come around 2020. If the country makes it to 2030 without any major shocks, he will admit defeat. But so far the chances of being right are estimated by him as 80 to 20.
Let's assume for a moment that the researcher is right. Can the crisis be prevented? Yes: for example, raising tax rates for high-paid workers should help reduce social inequality and slow elite growth. Mr. Turchin also advises the United States to slow down the rate of immigration in order to stem the growth of surplus labor. The third step: higher education should be made less accessible so that there is no surplus of unnecessary graduates. Few historians are capable of such bold predictions and advice.
“Suggest your theory,” says Mr. Turchin. "Perhaps she will explain the accumulated data better than mine."
Based on materials from NewScientist.