August 17, 2023
Troy D. Smith
“Learning from the Cycles of History”
I appreciate those of you who humored me over the summer as
I did a historical and sociological deep dive on these pages. I will soon get
back to responding to current political events, but there is one more “history
nerd” topic I want to discuss first. To wit, a new book that is making a lot of
waves: “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political
Disintegration” by Peter Turchin.
Back in 2010, several media sources were asking scientists
to predict what the next decade would bring. Most of the prognostications were
pretty rosy, but Turchin’s stood out as different. He predicted that, according
to his calculations, the U.S. was due for a major political upheaval. By 2020,
he said, there would be an “unprecedented collapse of social norms governing
civilized discourse” leading to a decade (the 2020s) of violent rhetoric and
action.
I’d say he called it.
Turchin was born in the Soviet Union, and his family
defected to the U.S. when he was young. He grew up to be a professor
specializing in environmental mathematics. Specifically, early in his career,
his work consisted of looking at population trends of predators and prey to see
what that could tell us about a specific environment. After the USSR’s
collapse, he started wondering if the same principles could apply to human
societies. In the late 90s, he and several colleagues started working on a
project that involved building a massive database of historical facts
concerning nations and states around the world, over thousands of years. They
were then able to use computers to determine trends.
We’ve all heard the expression “history repeats itself.” I
prefer another quote: “history doesn’t really repeat itself, but it often
rhymes.” That is, history never repeats itself in the exact same way, as there
are too many variables (see “chaos theory”)… but, in the aggregate, you can
often discern themes and trends (see “complex system theory”). That is what
Turchin and company endeavor to do. The book is an explanation of their
methodology, and -of more concern to the lay reader -what they discovered.
Every society has elites and non-elites (common folk, if you
will). There are four kinds of elites: military, political, economic, and
ideological. Societies function well when there are a small number of elites,
working toward the benefit of the common people. Things start to fall apart
when the elites take more for themselves, thus depriving the common people and
causing them to suffer. Turchin calls this a “wealth pump.” It causes
increasing discontent among the people. At the same time, as more resources
flow to the top (and away from the bottom), there is not enough to go around to
keep everyone at the top happy, leading to an “overproduction of elites.” When
these two factors both happen -discontent and “immiserated” common folk and a
class of wannabe-elites for whom there are not enough elite spots to fill
-things fall apart. Turchin argues that our current situation of income
inequality (almost at the level it was right before the great stock market crash
of 1929) paired with overproduction of law degrees, proliferation of social
media political figures, and other factors, has set the stage for discord. He
also argues that this tends to happen about every fifty years: one generation
experiences it, the next generation learns from it, and the next generation
forgets all about it and repeats the same mistakes.
By the way, I hate to keep harping on Bacon’s Rebellion,
but… angry poor people and some frustrated rich guys who were cut out of what
they considered their rightful due led to that incident. Just saying.
The bad news is, when societies reach this stage they
usually either topple or have to weather a destructive period, even civil war.
The good news is, it can be avoided if people listen to the warning.
Which no one ever does.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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