Charles in Charge

The atmosphere crackles with energy. Literally. Right now. Fearsome forces compete to wipe us off the earth: electromagnetic waves bombard us incessantly; climate changes endanger our physical wellbeing; food sources are shifting.

Once again, I’m feeling that life is a microscopic coating of slime on a bullet aimed at some great barrier. Contact will result in an “explosion” for want of a better word. We know this because this phenomenon has happened many times already (Rome, Maya and Aztecs, French Revolution, American Revolution, World Wars, etc.). Unfortunately, like previous occurrences, we can’t know with certainty the outcome. (This state of affairs is a basic Prigogene Bifurcation, if you ask me. All the various systems, both physical and social, are in high-energy, increasingly chaotic states. Pretty soon, supernova.)

As I try to assess fairly my external environment and wonder if I might be a hint overly pessimistic in my take on the future, I remember what I consider to be a near perfect description of situations today:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

If that doesn’t delineate today perfectly, I’m not sure anything can. We can thank Charles Dickens’ opening to A Tale of Two Cities for describing exactly what our present circumstances seem to be (thereby providing an information link between his age and ours). Even though these “times” of which Dickens writes were 156 years ago, the lead paragraph of his book could be describing today.

If we see his words as an accurate description of our reality now, I dread the likelihood that the rest of his tale will be predictive as well. The world he describes up to and beyond the French Revolution is not something I would like to experience in any transcription from that age to this. I hope that societal conditions only seem to be identical, but are really different enough that outcomes don’t have to be the same. Butterfly Effect and all that.

It’s pretty easy to self-doubt one’s opinions about how the universe works, given how often that very universe goes out of its way to prove I know nothing at all—about anything.

I bring up Dickens because I think his is a literary description of what I’ve been referring to—and here we are again—a Prigogene Bifurcation: A system becomes overly unstable, explodes and transforms into something radically different without any way to control the “different.”

Constantly on the prowl for any information that might relate to the change I think is taking place right now, I came across “This is why we’re so f*cked: Our politics are only going to get worse” by Paul Rosenberg for Salon on 11/23/15.

Despite the crudeness of the title, the piece is a terrific discussion of the work of Peter Turchin, a former theoretical biologist who devised something called Cliodynamics which seeks to treat history as a dynamical science.

Turchin has authored several books expressing his theories, one of which is Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. I checked out his work on Amazon and found this to be the outline of that book:

Ch. 1 Statement of the Problem 1

Ch. 2 Geopolitics 9

Ch. 3 Collective Solidarity 29

Ch. 4 The Metaethnic Frontier Theory 50

Ch. 5 An Empirical Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory 78

Ch. 6 Ethnokinetics 94

Ch. 7 The Demographic-Structural Theory 118

Ch. 8 Secular Cycles in Population Numbers 150

Ch. 9 Case Studies 170

Ch. 10 Conclusion 197

App. A: Mathematical Appendix 205

App. B Data Summaries for the Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory 214

Bibliography 226

Index 243

No offense to the author but that looks like some pretty heavy sledding. (Metaethnic Frontier Theory? Ethnokinetics?) I respect mathematicians of all ilk, and think they should be celebrated—perhaps even venerated—for the insights they provide about all kinds of things, but there’s no way I’m going to be absorbing much of this even if I wanted to. (In the time it would take to get from Algebra I to beyond calculus into some pretty mind-boggling specialty math, might come the death of the universe. So even if Turchin’s book shows some kind of math underlying a transformation phase event I’ve been calling a PB, I will never be able to see it for myself.)

Which makes Rosenberg’s piece a goldmine of digestible info about Turchin and what he believes.

A smattering:

(Quoted from Rosenberg’s Salon article)

“As with any study of dynamical systems—from the simplest to the most complex—it’s logical to focus on critical indicators of when such systems shift from one regime (stability, say, or expansion) to another (instability, or decline). So it was perfectly apt that Turkin wrote a 2010 letter to  warning of “growing instability” over the next decade, citing a number of “leading indicators of looming political instability” including “stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt.”

“In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020,” with all the relevant cycles—including a “youth bulge” of people in their 20s—“set to peak in the years around 2020.”

“In fact, Turkin (sic) argues that what we’re seeing now represents an unraveling of what makes civilization possible.”

“There are not enough positions, power positions governing, in business and government, to satisfy all elite aspirants. And that’s when inter-elite competition starts to take uglier forms.” That can be measured in terms of “overproduction of law degrees, because that’s a direct route into government, or the overproduction of MBAs,” and, higher up, in the increased competition for House and Senate seats, where the money spent on such contests spirals ever upwards.”

“So the competition intensifies, and when competition intensifies, there are losers. There are many more losers now than there were 40 or 50 years ago,” Turkin said, and “Many of them are not good losers,” meaning they devote themselves to frustrating others, further eroding the cooperative ethos societies need to keep functioning.”

There is way more. Mr. Rosenberg wrote about a tough subject in a pretty insightful way.