Nature
Human cycles: History as science
Advocates of 'cliodynamics' say that they can use scientific methods to
illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.
* _Laura Spinney_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#auth-1) _1_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#a1)
01 August 2012 Corrected:
1. _08 August 2012_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#correction1)
(http://www.nature.com/news/488024a-i1-0-jpg-7.5563?article=1.11078)
SOURCE: REF. 1
Sometimes, history really does seem to repeat itself. After the US Civil
War, for example, a wave of urban violence fueled by ethnic and class
resentment swept across the country, peaking in about 1870. Internal strife
spiked again in around 1920, when race riots, workers' strikes and a surge of
anti-Communist feeling led many people to think that revolution was imminent.
And in around 1970, unrest crested once more, with violent student
demonstrations, political assassinations, riots and terrorism (see _'Cycles of
violence'_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#cycles) ).
To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of
Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability
at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years,
Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to
track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human
history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity,
demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has
come to
the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way_1_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#b1) .
The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least
as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,” he
adds.
Turchin's approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient
Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply
scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social
forces
that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an
attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”,
says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British
historian Arnold Toynbee.
Cliodynamics is viewed with deep scepticism by most academic historians,
who tend to see history as a complex stew of chance, individual foibles and
one-of-a-kind situations that no broad-brush 'science of history' will ever
capture. “After a century of grand theory, from Marxism and social
Darwinism to structuralism and postmodernism, most historians have abandoned
the
belief in general laws,” said Robert Darnton, a cultural historian at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a column written in 1999.
Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be
understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened —
always
looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each
outbreak emerged from a particular time and place. “We're doing what can be
done,
as opposed to aspiring after what can't,” says Daniel Szechi, who studies
early-modern history at the University of Manchester, UK. “We're just too
ignorant” to identify meaningful cycles, he adds.
But Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general
laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can
model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and
informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of
historical information. And for some academics, at least, cliodynamics can't
come a moment too soon. “Historians need to abandon the habit of thinking
that it's enough to informally point to a sample of cases and to claim that
observations generalize,” says Joseph Bulbulia, who studies the evolution of
religion at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
>From ecology to history
Turchin conceived cliodynamics during what he jokingly calls a midlife
crisis: it was 1997, he was 40 years old, and he had come to feel that all the
major ecological questions about population dynamics had been answered.
History seemed to be the next frontier — perhaps because his father, the
Russian computer scientist Valentin Turchin, had also wondered about the
existence of general laws governing societies. (The elder Turchin's dissident
writings about the origins of totalitarianism were among the reasons that the
Soviet Union exiled him in 1977, after which he moved his family to the
United States.)
What is new about cliodynamics isn't the search for patterns, Turchin
explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as
political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What
is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically
collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the
mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.
In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics
focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state
strength and political instability. [ Not enough variables, and to exclude
religion/culture is absolutely fatal to model reliability. So is exclusion of
demography and geography -BR comment ] Each variable is measured in several
ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health
inequality — measured using proxies including quantitative data on life
expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest
fortune
to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge,
because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the
researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least
two
proxies for each variable.
Then, drawing on all the sources they can find — historical databases,
newspaper archives, ethnographic studies — Turchin and his colleagues plot
these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical
patterns and markers of future events. For example, it seems that indicators
of
corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of
instability or violence is imminent. Such analysis also allows the
researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can
tease out
useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations.
Endless cycles
When Turchin refined the concept of cliodynamics with two colleagues —
Sergey Nefedov of the Institute of History and Archaeology in Yekaterinburg,
Russia, and Andrey Korotayev of the Russian State University for the
Humanities in Moscow — the researchers found that two trends dominate the data
on
political instability. The first, which they call the secular cycle, extends
over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian
society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time,
the
population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the
living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes
top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability
ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.
Superimposed on that secular trend, the researchers observe a shorter cycle
that spans 50 years — roughly two generations. Turchin calls this the
fathers-and-sons cycle: the father responds violently to a perceived social
injustice; the son lives with the miserable legacy of the resulting conflict
and abstains; the third generation begins again. Turchin likens this cycle
to a forest fire that ignites and burns out, until a sufficient amount of
underbrush accumulates and the cycle recommences.
These two interacting cycles, he says, fit patterns of instability across
Europe and Asia from the fifth century BC onwards. Together, they describe
the bumpy transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire in the first
century BC. He sees the same patterns in ancient Egypt, China and Russia,
and says that they explain the timing of last year's Egyptian uprising,
which took the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak by surprise. At the
time, the Egyptian economy was growing and poverty levels were among the
lowest
in the developing world, so the regime could reasonably have expected
stability. In the decade leading up to the revolution, however, the country
saw
a quadrupling of graduates with no prospects — a marker of elite
overproduction and hence, Turchin argues, trouble.
Turchin has also applied this approach to other historical puzzles, such as
how religions grow. Several models have been proposed. One is that they
grow in a linear fashion as nonbelievers spontaneously 'see the light'.
Another model holds that the number of converts increases exponentially, like
infections with a contagious disease, as outsiders come into contact with
growing numbers of converts. Using several independent proxies, Turchin has
mapped conversions to Islam in medieval Iran and Spain, and found that the
data fit the contagion model most closely_2_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#b2) .
Using the same techniques, he has
also shown that the model describes the expansion of Christianity in the
first century AD, and of Mormonism since the Second World War.
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computer social scientist at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia, welcomes cliodynamics as a natural complement
to
his own field: doing simulations using 'agent-based' computer models.
Cioffi-Revilla and his team are developing one such model to capture the
effects
of modern-day climate change on the Rift Valley region in East Africa, a
populous area that is in the grip of a drought. The model starts with a
series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact,
following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances.
The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to
drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to
predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots.
Cioffi-Revilla says that cliodynamics could strengthen the model by providing
the agents
with rules extracted from historical data.
Global trends
Cliodynamics has another ally in Jack Goldstone, director of the Center for
Global Policy at George Mason University and a member of the Political
Instability Task Force, which is funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency
to forecast events outside the United States. Goldstone has searched for
cliodynamic patterns in past revolutions, and predicts that Egypt will face a
few more years of struggle between radicals and moderates and 5–10 years
of institution-building before it can regain stability. “It is possible but
rare for revolutions to resolve rapidly,” he says. “Average time to build
a new state is around a dozen years, and many take longer.”
But Goldstone cautions that cliodynamics is useful only for looking at
broad trends. “For some aspects of history, a scientific or cliodynamic
approach is suitable, natural and fruitful,” he says. For example, “when we
map
the frequency versus magnitude of an event — deaths in various battles in a
war, casualties in natural disasters, years to rebuild a state — we find
that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes,
and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise
mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as
the
Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as
Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian's approach of
assembling a
narrative based on evidence is still best.
Herbert Gintis, a retired economist who is still actively researching the
evolution of social complexity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
also doubts that cliodynamics can predict specific historical events. But he
thinks that the patterns and causal connections that it reveals can teach
policy-makers valuable lessons about pitfalls to avoid, and actions that
might forestall trouble. He offers the analogy of aviation: “You certainly
can't predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black
box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and
that's why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”
None of these arguments, however, has done much to soften scepticism among
historians in general. The essential weakness of any attempt to make
predictions based on trends, says Szechi, is the appalling patchiness of
historical information. Records can be preserved or destroyed by chance: in
1922,
for example, fighting in the Four Courts area of Dublin during the Irish
Civil War led to a fire that destroyed the country's entire medieval archive.
More generally, says Szechi, knowledge tends to pool around narrow subject
areas. “We can tell you in great detail what the grain prices were in a few
towns in southern England in the Middle Ages,” he says. “But we can't
tell you how most ordinary people lived their lives.”
Concerted efforts are now under way to fill those holes. Harvey Whitehouse,
an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, is overseeing the cons
truction of a database of information about rituals, social structure and
conflict around the globe since records began. It is a huge undertaking,
involving historians, archaeologists, religious scholars, social scientists and
even neuroscientists, and it will take decades to complete — assuming that
funding can be found beyond the UK government's current 5-year commitment.
But Whitehouse believes that the research that is feeding the database
will complement Turchin's approach by throwing light on the immediate triggers
of political violence. He argues_3_
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#b3) , for
example, that for such violence to
happen, individuals must begin to identify strongly with a political group.
One powerful way for groups to cement that identification is through
rituals, especially frightening, painful or otherwise emotional ones that
create
a body of vivid, shared memories.
“People form the impression that the most profound insights they have into
their own personal history are shared by other people,” says Whitehouse,
who explored this fusion of identities in an as-yet unpublished survey of
revolutionary brigades in Misrata, Libya, last December, along with his
colleague Brian McQuinn, an anthropologist at Oxford who studies civil wars.
Only once such fusion has occurred do people become willing to fight and die
for the group, he says. Therefore, if Turchin's prediction of unrest in the
United States around 2020 is correct, Whitehouse would expect the next few
years to see an increase in tightly knit US groups whose rituals have a
threatening quality but promise great rewards.
Turchin can't say who those groups might be, what cause they will be
fighting for or what form the violence will take. Previous bouts of turbulence
were not dominated by any one issue, he says. But he already sees the warning
signs of social strife, including a surplus of graduates and increasing
inequality. “Inequality is almost always a bad thing for societies,” he
says.
That said, Turchin insists that the violence is no more inevitable than an
outbreak of measles. Just as an epidemic can be averted by an effective
vaccine, violence can be prevented if society is prepared to learn from
history — if the US government creates more jobs for graduates, say, or acts
decisively to reduce inequality.
But perhaps revolution is the best, if not the only, remedy for severe
social stresses. Gintis points out that he is old enough to have taken part in
the most recent period of turbulence in the United States, which helped to
secure civil rights for women and black people. Elites have been known to
give power back to the majority, he says, but only under duress, to help
restore order after a period of turmoil. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he
says. “That's why we are where we are.”
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