Leftist Fantasy: The Coming Collapse of Civilization (and the Central Planning Needed to Avoid It)
Remnant Review
The BBC has run an article by a presumed expert on the collapse of civilizations. It is here. It is part of a series.
We read this side bar:
This article is part of a new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote.
So, modern society is like an aging dowager with a large bank account, a large home filled with gadgets, but unable to walk up the stairs any more without gasping for breath. She is too exhausted even to watch TED talks.
If this image is remotely plausible to you, stop watching TED talks. You have seen way too many.
That’s why the Deep Civilisation season will explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants.
I have a Ph.D. in history. Those of us who have received training in studying history would be skeptical regarding any serious conclusions coming out of such a series. There may be interesting tidbits of information in it. There probably will be. But the idea that someone, or even a committee of a half a dozen people, could come up with anything significant to say in news site articles about the broad sweep of civilization is highly unlikely. History is complex, and the more we learn about it, the more complex it seems to be. There are no laws of history, contrary to Marx, that would enable us to identify "the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants." Anyway, if there are, they are derived from religious traditions, not studies of individual civilizations by people with Ph.D.s in history.
The most important historical question that can be asked today is this one: "Why was it, sometime around 1800, that in the British Isles and English-speaking North America, economic growth began to increase at 2% per year per capita?" That was when the world began to change decisively from what had existed prior to 1800. Nothing like it had ever taken place as far as the historical record indicates. What caused this? There are at least three dozen prevailing explanations, but when carefully examined, not one of them holds up. (See Professor D. McCloskey's book, Bourgeois Dignity [University of Chicago Press, 2010].)
If historians, including highly trained economic historians, are befuddled by this geographically and chronologically restricted question, why should we believe that a handful of people working for the BBC could put together a series that would enable us to make any kind of cogent statement about the broad sweep of civilization?
This preliminary article has a title: "Are we on the road to civilisation collapse?" Any trained historian who reads this headline has an immediate answer: "The answer to this will not be found in this article." Headlines such as this one are viewer click bait, not serious questions.
Here is how the article begins:
Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations.
I see. Suicides. Entire civilizations decided to end it all. Twenty-eight Jonestowns, each on an epic scale.
I think he has watched too many TED talks.
In 1963, I was assigned extracts from a 500-page abridgment of Toynbee's volumes for a course in historiography. It was written by D. C. Somerville. It is long out of print. Our professor did not take Toynbee's volumes or the abridgment very seriously. I think he assigned it as an example of how not to write history: "so much to cover, so little time." They were an extraordinary performance of a brilliant mind, but no trained historian believes that anyone is capable looking at 28 different civilizations and drawing any kind of meaningful conclusion about all of them. He would have to know too many languages. He would have to look at many documents. The results of such a project could be boiled down in advance by two brief sentences: "Here today. Gone tomorrow." Or maybe only one sentence: "This, too, will pass."
There is a reason why we rarely see any of Toynbee's theories cited in the footnotes of monographs written by professional historians. Historians are not confident that his books are reliable sources for anything except curious tidbits -- and even then, they would probably verify them by consulting something written by a specialist.
CURIOUS TIDBIT
The writer provided an interesting tidbit of information. I had never read this.
The Roman Empire covered 4.4 million sq km (1.9 million sq miles) in 390. Five years later, it had plummeted to 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles).
I would like to read an article about this. How did it happen? I would also like to know exactly what means of investigation enabled some lonely but diligent cartograper to provide such extraordinarily precise facts about the number of square miles or square kilometers that were involved. I am a little suspicious. Still, the magnitude of the contraction and the speed of it were spectacular. I had not read this before. I don't know why not. I think I would have remembered this. It deserves a footnote. Maybe two.
So, I am not opposed to a series like this. You never know what you are going to pick up that you would not have imagined possible. I just don't take the premise of the series seriously. The premise of the series is silly.
DEEP PAST
Then we read this.
Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through an historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?
Anybody who uses the phrase "deep past" needs to provide a definition. The past is unquestionably deep, but using a descriptive phrase like "deep past" is misleading. It implies that there is a single thing or process called "deep past," and implies that we can get a handle on it. We can't.
I ask: who funds this organization? Before I take this project seriously, I want to see some independent investigator follow the money. (Elon Musk is associated with the organization.)
DEAD EMPIRES
The author provides a list of civilizations with their time spans. He also has a convenient chart of this. Somebody put a lot of work into this. It's worth looking at. If I were going to write a history of civilization, I would certainly use the list to get started. So, I'm not dismissing it. I just don't think anybody is going to find a common explanation to describe why particular civilizations lasted as long as they did or failed to last any longer. You can see the list here. I have not heard of a lot of them. They came. They went. Such is life. Here today. Gone tomorrow.
Virtually all past civilisations have faced this fate. Some recovered or transformed, such as the Chinese and Egyptian. Other collapses were permanent, as was the case of Easter Island. Sometimes the cities at the epicentre of collapse are revived, as was the case with Rome. In other cases, such as the Mayan ruins, they are left abandoned as a mausoleum for future tourists.
What has this got to do with the collapse of Western civilization? Nothing so far.
TWO RHETORICAL QUESTIONS
Then he asked two questions. They are both rhetorical questions. They don't look like rhetorical questions, but they are. "What can this tell us about the future of global modern civilisation?" Not much. "Are the lessons of agrarian empires applicable to our post-18th Century period of industrial capitalism?" No.
I would argue that they are. Societies of the past and present are just complex systems composed of people and technology. The theory of “normal accidents” suggests that complex technological systems regularly give way to failure. So collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and stage.
I don't know anything about "the theory of normal accidents," but I can tell you that trained historians would be disinclined to believe it.
Accidents are normal. That's why we can buy insurance policies. But there is insufficient evidence to show that there is such a thing as a normal accident that causes the collapse of a civilization. When historians look at the decline -- not collapse -- of even one civilization, they usually come up with so many hypotheses that virtually nobody can remember all of them, let alone the arguments in favor of them.
The last I heard, there are at least 20 theories regarding the fall of the Roman Empire. (There is a Wikipedia article on the various theories that historians have used to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. There is no agreement, of course. I commend it to you if you are at all interested in the topic.) I recommend starting with Augustine's City of God.
THE NONSENSE BEGINS
Then he writes this.
We may be more technologically advanced now. But this gives little ground to believe that we are immune to the threats that undid our ancestors. Our newfound technological abilities even bring new, unprecedented challenges to the mix.And while our scale may now be global, collapse appears to happen to both sprawling empires and fledgling kingdoms alike. There is no reason to believe that greater size is armour against societal dissolution. Our tightly-coupled, globalised economic system is, if anything, more likely to make crisis spread.
This is the heart of the nonsense. He is making a huge conceptual mistake. He is implicitly equating empire and civilization. They are not the same.
There is such a thing as Western civilization, but what is unique about this civilization is this: no single political entity has been the source of it. On the contrary, it has been decentralized on a scale unique in human history.
It is becoming more decentralized every day. The smartphone is doing more to decentralize civilization than any other technology ever has. Yet the smartphone is only 12 years old. When Amazon, Google, Facebook, or all three start offering free Wi-Fi across the face of the earth to anybody who wants to plug into it, decentralization is going to increase again. We have never seen anything like this.
When we get real-time language translation software, we will see another leap forward in this process of decentralization. The best and the brightest minds in villages are going to be able to work with the brightest minds of urban civilization. This is going to accelerate the decentralization process. Soon.
The author does not discuss the historical decentralization of Western civilization, yet dealing with this is crucial for his thesis on collapse. Decentralized systems do not collapse. They change. Parts of them may go bankrupt. Some ways of doing things may be abandoned in less than a generation. But if we are talking about collapse, there has to be a crucial weak link. This weak link has to be hit by something that turns it into a broken link. Then the system will collapse. In a decentralized system, what weak link could this be?
I am not talking about global nuclear war. We all know that could happen. But it is a long-shot. I am talking about something inherent in our civilization that is vulnerable to something else that is inherent in it. The more decentralized a system is, the less likely are such vulnerabilities. The system as a whole is resilient.
I understand the argument about the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence system that takes over the world. The robots and the algorithms then eliminate humanity. But that is not what he is talking about. In any case, the robotics Armageddon is not the collapse of a civilization. It is the disappearance of the human race. That is a completely different argument. People line up on both sides of it. It is a religious debate more than it is a technological debate. It is a debate about eschatology, not inherent vulnerabilities in Western civilization. He does not invoke this argument. He knows that there is no centrally planned political answer to it, so he ignores it.
LEFTIST APOCALYPSES
He then invokes several beloved arguments of the knee-jerk Left.
While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses happen, historians, anthropologists and others have proposed various explanations, including:CLIMATIC CHANGE: When climatic stability changes, the results can be disastrous, resulting in crop failure, starvation and desertification. The collapse of the Anasazi, the Tiwanaku civilisation, the Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others have all coincided with abrupt climatic changes, usually droughts.
First, there just is not much scientifically uncontested evidence for climatic change, AKA global warming. At least 30,000 scientists oppose the thesis. Climatic change is going on all the time. There is no agreed-upon evidence that indicates that something unique has been taking place in the last 200 years with respect to global warming. There have been similar periods in the past. They last a few centuries. They have always been followed by periods of global cooling.
Second, if global warming really is taking place today, what is the evidence of anything that mankind has done has caused this?
Third, if mankind (a decentralized collective) really has caused this, what can a decentralized system of 200+ independent nation-states do about it? Nothing so far. There is no plan. There is no world government to enforce such a plan. Meanwhile, support for political secessionist movements is growing in Western Europe.
Fourth, decentralized free market responses around the world will compensate for specific economic crises that take place in specific geographical areas. This is the number-one advantage of decentralization. We do not have famines anymore. The free market's price system and its transportation system make famines essentially impossible today except regionally in wars in Sub-Saharan Africa and in socialist states like Venezuela. We have not had a famine in the West since 1845-50 in Ireland.
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION: Collapse can occur when societies overshoot the carrying capacity of their environment. This ecological collapse theory, which has been the subject of bestselling books, points to excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation and the loss of biodiversity as precipitating causes.
What about environmental degradation? Around the world, there is less and less of it in most areas. There is the constant process of the expansion of the Sahara desert. This is nothing new. In any case, it is a threat only to sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, positive changes are taking place there. Sub-Saharan Africans over the next generation are going to be richer, healthier, and longer lived than they have ever been before. The combination of free market economics, low-cost Internet-based communications, cheap solar panels, and decentralized education is changing the dark continent as never before.
INEQUALITY AND OLIGARCHY: Wealth and political inequality can be central drivers of social disintegration, as can oligarchy and centralisation of power among leaders. This not only causes social distress, but handicaps a society’s ability to respond to ecological, social and economic problems.
What evidence is there that inequality is greater in the West today than it was when Vilfredo Pareto did his investigations in the late 19th century? I am aware of no such evidence.
In any case, so what? The greatest economic growth in man's history has taken place in a period of Pareto's 20/80 wealth distribution curve. In the midst of this has been massive technological and economic progress. Inequality in a period of rapid economic growth is not a threat. These critics are driven by envy. They resent the process of economic growth and decreasing poverty specifically because the rich are getting richer faster, despite the fact that the poor are also getting richer than they've ever been in history. The famines are gone. The plagues are gone. Economic growth for all societies is increasing. Poverty has been eliminated around the world in the last three decades.
Starvation-level poverty will probably be a thing of the past within 15 years. And this guy sits on the sidelines, wailing about the threat to civilization.
Not content with these three, he offers three more. These are equally nonsensical.
COMPLEXITY: Collapse expert and historian Joseph Tainter has proposed that societies eventually collapse under the weight of their own accumulated complexity and bureaucracy. Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues. However, the returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. After this point, collapse will eventually ensue.
He seems unaware of economic theory. He ignores F. A. Hayek's 1945 article on the increase of knowledge in a free market, which is regarded as a classic in the economics profession: "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Complexity is increasing because of the extension of accurate knowledge. As the free society becomes more complex, knowledge becomes more specialized. Output increases. Per capita wealth increases. The system is far less vulnerable than ever before to unexpected events. Why? Because of better knowledge and specific solutions offered by profit-seeking entrepreneurs.
Here is reality: increasing complexity is a threat only to military empires and centrally planned economies. It is not a threat to free-market societies in which property rights are spreading, wealth is spreading, and knowledge is spreading. A complex system becomes ever less vulnerable to an unexpected change precisely because it is complex. No single event or process threatens it. This immunity from natural disasters describes Western society over the last 150 years. The last centrally planned military empire went belly-up in 1991: the USSR. Here today. Gone tomorrow.
EXTERNAL SHOCKS: In other words, the “four horsemen”: war, natural disasters, famine and plagues. The Aztec Empire, for example, was brought to an end by Spanish invaders. Most early agrarian states were fleeting due to deadly epidemics. The concentration of humans and cattle in walled settlements with poor hygiene made disease outbreaks unavoidable and catastrophic. Sometimes disasters combined, as was the case with the Spanish introducing salmonella to the Americas.
Only one of these four horses is a threat today: nuclear war. But it would probably be limited to North America and Russia. The rest of the world would survive. The Internet would hold. That is what DARPA designed it to do: survive nuclear war. The Web would continue to spread. Knowledge would continue to spread. There would be economic recovery within 20 years. Only if the nuclear war were truly global would it be a threat to world civilization.
Natural disasters are less and less of a problem. This is also because of decentralization. Famine has not been a problem in the West since 1850. The price of food keeps falling. As for plagues, the last big one was the Black Death: 1348 to 1350. It was the bubonic/pneumonic plague, and it did change Western European society. Wages started rising immediately after it, due to population decline. Technological innovation continued. Trade continued to increase.
RANDOMNESS/BAD LUCK: Statistical analysis on empires suggests that collapse is random and independent of age. Evolutionary biologist and data scientist Indre Zliobaite and her colleagues have observed a similar pattern in the evolutionary record of species. A common explanation of this apparent randomness is the “Red Queen Effect”: if species are constantly fighting for survival in a changing environment with numerous competitors, extinction is a consistent possibility.
Whenever anybody appeals to randomness and bad luck, you know he is scraping the bottom of his ideological barrel.
In a growing worldwide economy driven by decentralized technological innovation, randomness and good luck are overwhelmingly dominant. I don't believe in randomness or good luck. I am just making a point in terms of his categories. Good luck accompanies the spread of private property. Amazing, isn't it? The Left cannot deal with this fact, so it pretends that the process is not taking place constantly under their noses.
THE THREAT OF PROGRESS
He admits that things are improving. Then he says this is a threat.
While we are becoming more economically powerful and resilient, our technological capabilities also present unprecedented threats that no civilisation has had to contend with. For example, the climatic changes we face are of a different nature to what undid the Maya or Anazasi. They are global, human-driven, quicker, and more severe.
He tries to scare us with stories from short-lived empires from five centuries ago. We know almost nothing about these empires. There is no agreement among historians and archaeologists about exactly what it was that undermined these empires. The history is almost closed to us. We don't have the data to make these kinds of judgments. But that doesn't stop him.
Assistance in our self-imposed ruin will not come from hostile neighbors, but from our own technological powers. Collapse, in our case, would be a progress trap.
This is his thesis. It requires evidence. He doesn't offer anything of substance. It would take several fat volumes to make any such judgment. He does not cite even one.
Then, without warning, he backs off.
The collapse of our civilisation is not inevitable. History suggests it is likely, but we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past.
Why? Because the article is an exercise in bait and switch selling.
Bait and switch is a sales technique used by unscrupulous sellers. They advertise a product at a cheap price, but when buyers arrive, they are told that the product is out of stock. Then the salesman tries to sell an overpriced product. The author of this article got us into the store by telling us that a collapse is likely. Then he tries to sell us an overpriced product that we would not have come into the store to buy, except for the fact that he scared us with his headlines and his rhetoric.
What is he trying to sell? A program of government central planning. (No details are offered.)
We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified. The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past.
The two sales strategies are these: sell greed or sell fear. He is selling fear.
His problem is two-fold. First, he offers no plausible reason to be afraid. Second, there is no chance that his recommended solution, i.e., central planning by a world government, is going to come into existence. The opposite is far more likely: political fragmentation.
CONCLUSION
As a historian, I will simply say this: this is not detached scholarship. This is propaganda. It is third-rate propaganda.
The author has equated political empires with civilizations. This is his fundamental mistake. They are not the same.
The triumph of Western civilization has been unprecedented geographically in world history. Its triumph has been based overwhelmingly on the spread of private property rights. This decentralization process has led to increases in technological innovation. This has come about because of capitalism's profit-and-loss system. It has been based on the free market's most effective strategy of conquest, price competition. Annual per capita economic growth has been maintained at 2% ever since about 1800. Some nations have had higher rates of growth. (Read Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms. Its evidence is as good as its title.)
We are seeing the opposite of what he is predicting: no famines, no plagues, and no region that cannot be supplied with whatever it needs in a crisis to deal with a catastrophe. The spread of instant communications, the decline of transportation costs, and the spread of international capital markets have combined to overcome poverty steadily in our era. (On the decline of poverty, see Wikipedia.)
Socialism has produced economic decline, not the free market. Socialism has produced mass poverty, not the free market. Central planning has failed, not the free market's price system. Think "Venezuela." The government has lots of oil. Its urban masses have food shortages and hyperinflation. Compare Venezuela's economy with Chile's.
Leftists choose not to accept these facts, but that really doesn't matter. They are steadily losing influence around the world. Only in academia do they maintain their hold in tenured security from budget cuts. Eventually, when the modern welfare state goes belly-up because of massive unfunded liabilities to oldsters, academia will experience the long-delayed budget cuts.
I end with a warning to the leftist propagandists who believe in such nonsense as this article promotes: "Here today. Gone tomorrow."