Decline & Fall in the 21st Century: A Review of Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls

Perhaps it started with a place called Manti, located in the countryside outside of my home town of Shenandoah. It had a small pond for fishing and a cemetery. The untended gravestones from the late 19^th century lay overwhelmed by the exuberant grasses and weeds. You could walk among those gravestones, looking at the dates of birth and deaths of those long dead residents, and then look around and you see nothing but Nature. A village of the dead. 

I’m not alone in holding a fascination with the sense of ruin. Visits to Anasazi ruins in New Mexico; to Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and Guatemala; to those of the Incas in Peru; to the abandoned Moghul city of Fatehpur Sikri in India; to the Coliseum and Forum in Rome—one never finds oneself alone. Crowds swarm through the grand ruins. We behold and contemplate. The list of ruins is like a school’s honor roll of deceased alumni and serves as a haunting memento mori writ large. For us, for our civilization. 

For those interested in decay, decline, collapse—the terms vary, but the experience remains—the sources are legion. Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, and just about every serious political thinker in the Western canon addresses this issue. Medieval Islam gives us the insights of Ibn Khaldun, while the Enlightenment provides us with Gibbon. In the 20^th century, we have Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin among a host of others, many of them writing today, such as Peter Turchin. Francis Fukuyama will publish a new volume at the end of this month entitled Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. The parade of reflection on this phenomenon continues. Some—those with the courage to look at our present situation and consider the real binds that we face—have a grim message for us. Such is the case with William (a/k/a Patrick) Ophuls. 

I recently reviewed Plato’s Revenge, which assumes the decline of our contemporary industrial civilization and that provides a guidebook of sorts about how we should model the successor to our civilization. In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (2013) Ophuls argues that decline is inevitable—discoveries of new fossil fuel reserves or reductions in climate change magnitude notwithstanding. It’s here. It’s happening. It’s happened before. And there are several reasons why. It’s like going to the doctor feeling young, fit, and trim, and she concludes the exam by telling you that you’re going to die. That’s an inarguably true statement. Sooner or later, you’re going to die. The difference with Dr. Ophuls is that he believes that his patient (industrial civilization) has already reached civilizational senility and that we’d best get our affairs  in order to make life better for our heirs. He’s right. 

Dr. Ophuls—and he really is a doctor—of the Ph.D. in political science variety—identifies several disease processes that doom our civilization as they have doomed those before us. Ophuls does not develop any new or unique theories of civilizational decline in his book, but he does an excellent job of identifying and arguing the existing theories. Also, as a sound social scientist or historian, he doesn’t wed himself to a single, grand theory, but he appreciates that multiple causes drive the process of change. He begins his diagnosis, as he began Plato’s Revenge, with the basic science involved. 

Entropy, ecology, and complexity all entail natural, physical limits on human capacities. Each level of analysis—physical, biological, and social—faces tangible constraints. At the most basic level, entropy requires any life form to feed upon outside sources of energy. Whether for our bodies or for our machines, we must continuously tap new sources of energy. But the law of entropy establishes that energy degrades when used (chaos replaces order) and that eventually, traditional energy sources will not yield a sufficient return on the investment needed to gather and use the energy. As Ophuls notes, Joseph Tainter builds his entire theory of civilizational collapse on the increasing marginal cost of a unit of energy, or conversely, on the declining energy return on investment (EROI). Complexity may delay, but cannot avoid, this conundrum. But complexity, too, has its limits: those implicit in the environment and in the human brain. 

As Ophuls notes: 

. . . .  [O]ur minds and language are linear and sequential, but systems happen all at once and overwhelm us intellectually: Systems surprise us because our minds like to think about single causes neatly producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at a time…. But we live in a world in which many causes routinely come together to produce many effects.

. . . .

In short, limited, fallible human beings are bound to bungle the job of managing complex systems. What they can neither understand nor predict, they cannot expect to control, so failure is inevitable at some point.

Ophuls, William (2012-12-28). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (p. 37). CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.

In addition to our limited cognitive ability to encompass the complexity of systems, we also have the problem that we’re incarnate human beings with some—shall we say—unfortunate traits that are only overcome—if at all—through a great deal of effort. And effort, the struggle for civilization, for civility, invariably decreases as civilizations grow more prosperous. Add to this the common traits of humans, and we can see our problem. Ophuls quotes Edmund Burke: 

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

Ophuls, William (2012-12-28). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (p. 54). CreateSpace. Kindle Edition, quoting Burke (citation in notes)

Add to this the fact that humans are “are not innately wise, especially in crowds” (id. 41), to put it mildly, and that democracy, at its worst, crowdsources difficult political problems to a less than qualified and informed electorate. With this situation, you have the making of a cascade of troubles on the horizon. Politicians are driven to the lowest denominator of popular prejudices and provide bread and circuses, entitlements and inflation, to stave off discontent. The ability to say “no” and to reason together all but disappears. Sound familiar? 

Ophuls concludes his reflections about the Ponzi scheme of civilization (“as a process, civilization resembles a long-running economic bubble.” Id. 9.) with the observation that our civilization—industrial civilization—is nearly universal. This near universality (well, really speaking just of Earth) means that nowhere in this world of ours will we find an apparent successor of equal power and glory to replace industrial civilization. No Rome to replace Greece, no Byzantium to preserve Rome. We face a new Dark Ages. Can we avoid this? 

Ophuls notes that Ian Morris, in his Why the West Rules—For Now (the title belies the scope, magnitude, and sophistication of the work) concludes with the idea that we will either gain “The Singularity” of technological and cognitive control of our environment and our history, or we will descend into the collapse of “Nightfall.” But before plunging into Morris, ThomasHomer-Dixon, or Joseph Tainter (if you haven’t already)—or even if you have—I recommend this brief and incisive primer about how we’re in for a rough ride ahead, just like our ancestors.

rev'd 08.14.19

A Review of Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies by John Kemp

 

I discovered courtesy of the Social Evolution Forum that back in Iowa City a physician at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics has produced a book that looks into a number of issues that interest me, so, although in China at the time, I downloaded it to my Kindle and began reading. The book looks at what it means to be a “highly adaptive society” (adaptive in the Darwinian sense). It identifies basic characteristics and surveys nations around the world, gauging their relative adaptability viz. the factors that he identifies as crucial to highly adaptive societies. These factors are “a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.” (Kemp, John (2013-06-11). Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies (Kindle Locations 68-70). Kindle Edition.) After further discussing these factors, which one can recognize as common factors that many scholars identify as crucial the rise of Western domination of the world in the last 500 years, Dr. Kemp looks more carefully at nations and societies around the world to gauge their adaptability according to these standards. Finally, he addresses some of the challenges that the remainder of the 21^st century will present to such societies.

This summary of the book is short because I want to get to what made it fun for me to read. This book really got my juices flowing. As you will see, I have a number of criticisms and suggestions that I set forth below, but this is a terrific project and it really goes to the heart of what we have to do in the years to come. Accordingly, here’s a list of thoughts that this book has generated and which I hope will contribute to the project. (Based on memory and with no pretense to scholarship or form, I randomly cite some thinkers and books that I believe pertinent to any particular point in my discussion below.) 

1.      Dr. Kemp is an optimist. He seems to believe in Progress or a variation of the Whig theory of history (that history is moving inevitably toward liberal institutions). In his inventory of nations, for he opines that most of them are moving toward becoming “highly adoptive societies” (hereinafter HAS). I am less optimistic, or at least less certain. I agree that overall, his discernment of the general direction of change is correct; however, his available data set is short. That is, the advanced nations of today (Morris, Why West Rules—For Now) are very recent developments. The Industrial Revolution is only about 250 years old. Given this short time span against about 10,000 years of agriculture and civilization (i.e., cities), this is a brief period in human history. Can we say that Progress, in this case defined as movement toward HAS, will prove inevitable? I sense an assumption of inevitability in the tenor of the book, although it’s not an explicit argument. I don’t believe that representative government is the inevitable result of human change. Germany came close to prevailing in the Second World War (before the entry of the U.S.) (J. Lukacs), or perhaps Communism could have prevailed before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. or the change in China (look at the persistence of N. Korea & Cube, for instance).

2.    A key question, I think best formed by Peter Turchin and his work (War & Peace & War), is whether the historical cycles (“secular cycles”) that he’s identified in agricultural civilizations will continue to apply in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Age. Turchin recognizes this is a key issue. I note that Turchin has done some preliminary work on cycles in U.S. history, most of which encompasses the Industrial Age and qualifies as an HAS. Perhaps it will address to what extent we might be really different from the past and therefore exempt from the social gravity that has dragged down earlier societies.

3.    I think that the term HAS is misused, or at least misplaced. It strikes me that the most highly adaptive societies were those of the hunter-gathers, who really did have to adapt to their natural environment. With the advent of agriculture, humans really begin, tentatively, to shape their environment. With the Modern Age (beginning, shall we stipulate, around 1600), humans significantly begin to change their environment, a project that truly takes off with industrialization. Thus, what Dr. Kemp identifies has HAS should, I think, be dubbed Highly Transformative Societies (HTS). The Modern Age marks the transformation of society and (not always intentionally) the transformation of the natural world as well. If we think of adaptation, what has the Modern Age adapted to?

4.    Dr. Kemp refers often to the “fragmentation of power”. I don’t like this term for several reasons. As a term, I think that several options are more appropriate, such as “de-centralization of power” or “devolution of power” (Khanna), or “disbursement of power”. The connotation of “fragmentation” is not a good one, but it does lead us to a deeper issue. I agree with the general proposition that de-centralized decision making, such as we find in markets (Hayek) and democracy are usually the best ways of decision-making in complex societies. However, if we understand power as the ability to make decisions and effect change through speech (and not through force) (Arendt, Habermas), then too much fragmentation damages power in a society. With too much fragmentation, anarchy (in the non-philosophical sense) or political impotency become problems. For instance, the U.S. Constitution came about as a result of the excessive fragmentation of power inherent in the Articles of Confederation. The Civil War came about from an attempt to fragment power (the secession of the Confederate States). Indeed, much of post-Civil War U.S. history shows a trend toward centralization of power in the federal government, which on the whole, I judge to have been beneficial. Today, we see a strong fragmentation sentiment in the Tea Party and Radical Republicans (Wills) who want to strip the federal government of much of its power and role in American life. For the better? I don’t think so, although finding the right balance between centralized (coordinating) power and de-centralized decision-making is not an easy issue or one given to bright lines. (See Coase’s theory of the firm, which I think has applications in political theory, and, of course, The Federalist Papers.)

5.     The book doesn’t address directly the theory of complexity as applied to societies (see, e.g. Gaddis, The Landscape of History; Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth). Whether we can model societies successfully seems to me crucial to gaining a sense of how we can successfully shape the future. It will also help us understand how things might not go the way we want. (Or is this wishful thinking? Theories of the cycles of history have been around almost as long as history itself, yet societies seem to be immune to their insights—historians have just been so many Cassandras to the extent that they might have hoped to alter the course of events.)

6.    The book’s seeming faith in progress (movement towards HAS) is not balanced by a consideration of how things might go amiss, both in countries that have achieved a high level of development and those who might hope to achieve it. Some nations get stuck in an unfavorable equilibrium and have a hard time getting out of it. As a current resident of India, I perceive that despite some strong economic growth recently, it’s hard to see how this society will gain traction in the near future. Corruption, extreme poverty, poor infrastructure, political fragmentation (in the negative sense): all of these factors make me much less optimistic that what I take Dr. Kemp to be from his discussion of India. Having just spent a month in China, I was amazed at the overall level of development, but much of the cost has been externalized (some horrible air pollution and apparently even greater problems of water quality and quantity). These facts serve to cancel much of my amazement at the terrific infrastructure improvements and astonishing commercial development. The prospects of democracy in China are uncertain at best, and the model of centralized power seems to growing in popularity for some. (See M. Pettis, Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring, on prospects and problems for the Chinese economy.) 

7.     How do societies avoid the collapses or declines described by Turchin, Tainter, Diamond, P. Kennedy, Homer-Dixon, Toynbee, et al.? (This list could go on at some length.) This, to my mind, is the ultimate adaptation that any society can aspire to, which assumes that the society has achieved a satisfactory level of equilibrium. (Has any society ever achieved this?) We need to address not only factors of collapse identified in past societies (as controversial and elusive as these causes can be), but we also need to contemplate new threats to social survival. Nuclear war (hey, I’m a child of the 50’s & 60’s), as well as human-caused global climate change pop to mind, but certainly others exist. (Local climate change has certainly altered and contributed to the collapse of many social orders.)

8.    What will drive future adaptation? War, along with economic competition, drove much of the European change (Ferguson, Civilization). What will drive change in the future? If war becomes the driver, it could destroy much of social development achieved to date. (The physical survival of the U.S. allowed Europe to recover after WWII; compare what happened in Europe after WWI). Can we continue to compete in economics with the same system that we have now? (See #9 below.) There have to be ecological limits to growth (Julian Simon notwithstanding). 

9.    We have to figure out how consumer capitalism will morph into a sustainable equilibrium. Can consumer capitalism come to such a state? One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to believe that this system is unsustainable (although Marx had some insights; also see John Stuart Mill). This is the visionary aspect of a program for thinking about future societies.

I’ve said enough for now. I hope it’s apparent that the book has certainly stimulated my thinking, and the parts of the projects that I’ve suggested need further development are a huge challenge, especially given that Dr. Kemp has a day job. I hope that as an amateur who has not ventured such a demanding project as writing a book on such an important topic, my writing this this review isn’t too galling. Think of this, please, as cheerleading, or egging on, if you will.

If you’re interested in this topic—what our future holds and how we might shape it—start with this book and join the conversation!

David Christian & Really Big History

This is my year (or two, or three) of reading big history. Iam Morris's Why the West Rules--For Now is probably my biggest, widest angle look so far (and I should mention 1493 and The Better Angels of Our Nature as recent additions), but David Christian dwarfs Morris's tour, which runs from the beginning of humankind to our possible futures. In this TED talk, Christian begins at the Big Bang! Now that's big history! And quite a fascinating tour it is: from the first nanosecond of creation to the present is a story of increasing complexity and "Goldilocks" (just right) circumstances that bring us to our present. Just right--and quite fragile. Anyway, the tour is fascinating. He and some of his colleagues have put together "The Big History Project" at this webpage for use as a high school curriculum. What a great idea and organizing theme to look at our past through both the physical and social sciences, and a great way to learn and teach complexity. Consider the desirability of learning history through this kind of lens, and not as just "one damn thing after another", as it is too often taught. No one remembers disjointed events well, but add a story (narrative) and they'll remember; make it a detective story (as history really is), and you've got them hooked.

P.S. How wonderfully nerdy is this? After initially posting, I found a short talk by Bill Gates on the Big History Project website home page. The ultimate nerd endorsement!

Maureen Dowd on Newt

Two thoughts:
1. And this guy wants to us to vote for him to become President?

2. Asimov's Foundation series: Paul Krugman, Ian Morris (I think), and Peter Turchin (I think), along with Newt Gingrich, all claim to have been affected and led into the professional study of history or the social sciences (Krugman) by reading about Asimov's hero, Hari Seldon. I missed all this, although I was an avid reader of Asimov the science teacher (if history was my first love, medicine & biology was my second as a nerdy boy). Interesting.

The Genie: Capitalism & Human Values by Frank S. Robinson

Fellow blogger Frank Robinson has posted a link to a spirited and well-argued defense of capitalism that he published (link above). Robinson makes what I consider a Churchillian argument. As Churchill is reported to have said about democracy--"it's the worst form of government, except when compared to all of the others"--so Robinson seems to be arguing for capitalism. (Side note: I prefer the term "market economy" to "capitalism" because of the strong emotional valance "capitalism" holds in some quarters, left and right, but this is a small quibble.) Robinson readily admits the shortcomings of capitalism, but it has brought us untold wealth. It has not brought us heaven on earth, but we should not expect it to do so. By the way, neither has any other form of economy, socialism, mercantilism, or the agricultural society that dominated humankind up until about 225 years ago. Compare yourself the the most powerful and wealthiest persons in history and it's likely that you enjoy a higher standard of life than any such person. A Vanderbilt, a Rothschild (19th century version), not to mention a Napoleon, any king, a caesar: all pale compared to the standard of life and wealth that the average American enjoys today, albeit without all of the social prestige. Do you want social prestige or a medical system that can treat you and a car or jet to travel rather than a horse and buggy?

So is there anything to further to ponder? The genie of capitalism, or more broadly the fruits of capitalism, economic growth, has given us a whole new way of life, full of opportunities and brave new worlds. But can we control this genie? Having unleashed the genie of unprecedented economic growth in the last 225 years or so, can we continue to live with it? As Ian Morris discusses in The Why the West Rules, we can imagine at least two very different scenarios of the future that might play out: one "nightfall" and the other, "the singularity". Which scenario will likely play out? Or will we continue to muddle through? I question whether we can continue to dump growing amounts of carbon into our atmosphere with impunity. I'd begun to think that nuclear energy might be an answer, but now the catastrophe in Japan demonstrates how the best laid plans can not anticipate all of the threats. (Fire, by the way, posed similar threats and wrecked havoc on earlier civilizations on a huge scale, but not on a scale for area and duration that compares to nuclear catastrophes.) As I'm of an age to recall Three Mile Island (not really so bad), Chernobyl (really bad), and "The China Syndrome" (scary and kind of relevant to what's happening here), I can't rest easy with this situation.

Considering the perspectives of Thomas Homer-Dixon, I wonder if we've developed an ingenuity gap that we may not prove able to bridge, or that our energy needs, the lifeblood of any human group, have grown too large and chaotic to manage and continue. During the the first 40 or so years of my life, I feared the genie of atomic weaponry, which seems to be back in the bottle, but really it's only resting in silos--we hope. Can we control the fruits of modernity and capitalism, such as atomic energy? The problem stems from the fact that we as a species haven't changed all that much since leaving the savannas of Africa about 100,000 years ago. We still have most of the same instincts and biases, the same perspectives and limitations. We've come a long way, but have we come far enough?

Can we continue to grow in knowledge and power? Can we continue to grow something that we call "the economy"? I hope so, but we should be considering how we can tame this genie lest it get the better of us.

Deirdre McCloskey: Explaining the Birth of the Modern Economy

This is an interesting interview because, I think, McCloskey has an interesting project: understanding the incredible change since about 1600 that allowed the modern world to emerge. McCloskey, at one time a faculty member at Iowa, really seems to have a very wide-angle perspective and a humanist sense of economics; i.e., of economics that really looks at it's roots in Hume, Smith, Mill, and others. For a sense of her take on this immense change, which is the subject of the Ian Morris book that I'm reading, as well as a forthcoming book by Niall Ferguson, I recommend this relatively brief interview. I've got her first book in this projected series on my reading list, and I'm look forward to following her investigation into this topic.

Freeman Dyson & the Hubris of Humankind

I read this article with great interest, as I'd known of Dyson's skeptical attitude towards global climate change (or more accurately called, I think, "global weirding"), and I know of his genius. This article tries to make sense of his position. The header sets the tone of the article:

In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein--a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics o medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science. How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment? The answer lies in his almost religious faith in the power of man and science to bring nature to heel.

The author, Kenneth Brower, I might add, knows Dyson and has obvious admiration and appreciation of Dysons's skills and merits. This is not a hatchet job, but a carefully considered assessment of Dyson's peculiar attitude. In the end, Brower believes that Dyson is (almost literally) a man of the cosmos, and not a mere terrestrial being.

However, the article really caught my attention because, like my comments on Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, I'm skeptical of humankind's ability to tame Nature. In this perspective, I am a skeptic and conservative. I'm conservative in the Burkean sense, except that I'm less skeptical about social change than I am about environmental change (or better yet, I see social change as a species of environmental change). Burke didn't have to address the huge environmental changes that industrialization has wrought since his lifetime. To compare to a more contemporary figure, as far as the environment is concerned, I side more with the perspective of Nassim Taleb, who, I believe, shares a very cautious attitude toward the environment, as well as toward financial and economic systems. Also, Thomas Homer-Dixon has also written about what could be our Ingenuity Gap. As Brower writes, we have lots of technological schemes to address global climate change, and they're very pie-in-the-sky (or something in the sky or the ocean, etc.). We don't even have a public that thinks we have a problem, whether caused by humans or not.

This leads to my last thought: reading Morris's Why the West Rules--For Now, which goes back to the earliest humans, we have survived, but it often seems we did so despite ourselves. Since I'm listening to a Jack Kornfield recording currently, speaking of the Buddhist perspective of innate goodness, I want to believe that, and I do believe we have some grounds for this perspective. However, I also have my inner Calvinist (hey, my dad was a Presbyterian!). Frankly, the weight of the evidence is against us. Take Exhibit A, Dyson, a genius of incredible stature, seems really out to lunch on this crucial issue. If he's out to lunch, where are we mortals? Well, perhaps something less than genius intelligence--or a different array of multiple intelligences--is rather a good thing. Anyway, we fiddle while Earth burns. Are we the Nero species? How on earth (pun intended) can we change this? Advice welcome.

Niall Ferguson on the West & China: Past, Present, and Future

This article really deals with two topics. First, how "the West" came to such a great lead in development over Asia, and second, how that's now changing very quickly. The first question about the history of development is one that I'm reading about currently in Ian Morris's Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future , a very extensive history of human development from paleolithic times to the present and into the future. Very good, but more about it later. ( Ferguson gave it a shout out in this review in Foreign Affairs.) The second part of Ferguson's article deals with current developments. This, too, is fascinating, as we're seeing a new challenge to U.S. and Western leadership. How we address these issues will prove a real challenge to our leadership.