LONG CYCLES
I’ve come across a few readings now on long cycles—patterns that repeat across history.
These ideas are similar to each and well-reasoned, and they recur with similarity in fiction and non-fiction, so I’m convinced there is a deeper wisdom here.
Here they are in very brief form to show the commonalities (at the expense of details of each).
Cycles as explored through in-depth studies:
“The Changing World Order” by Ray Dalio. There’s a roughly 240 year cycle.
In the early stages, a country (or empire, kingdom, dynasty, etc.) prospers “because there are a) relatively low levels of indebtedness, b) relatively small wealth, values, and political gaps, c) people working effectively together to produce prosperity, d) good education and infrastructure, e) strong and capable leadership, and f) a peaceful world order that is guided by one or more dominant world powers.”
Then, it declines because of “a) high levels of indebtedness, b) large wealth, values, and political gaps, c) different factions of people unable to work well together, d) poor education and poor infrastructure, and e) the struggle to maintain an overextended empire under the challenge of emerging powerful rivals.” (Source)
The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Major shifts in technology drive major shifts in the economic structure of society that, in turn, drive major shifts in the structure of society.
There have been four major stages of human economic life:
(1) hunting-and-gathering societies;
(2) agricultural societies;
(3) industrial societies; and, most recently,
(4) information societies.
As each of the first three stages emerged, it was associated with a dramatic change in the logic of violence—the optimal means by which society protected itself.
This, in turn, dictated the optimal structure for society. Specifically:
Hunting and gathering societies → mobile, easy escape, little surplus, little individual property → low incentive for violence → small, egalitarian tribes
Agricultural societies → farmland, property → incentive for theft, need for protection (soldiers), need for organizer (tribal head) → feudal structures
Industrial societies → large scale infrastructure (production, mining) → need for large scale protection (militaries, soldiers) → nation states
Information societies → decentralized knowledge and corporations → decreasing returns to violence → smaller scale communities (end of nation state?)
Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin. All large scale, state level historical societies have experienced waves of political instability. These tend to be about two centuries for a full cycle. Layered on this wave is a second wave of instability that lasts about fifty years. For the US, Turchin identifies 1870, 1920, and 1970—thereby, predicting 2020 as the next one. (The book was written in 2016.)
Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. A central theme of Fukuyama’s book is that political structures consistently aim to prevent patrimonialism—the tendency of groups in power to structure society’s rules to favor their family and friends. Political structures adapt to a particular set of conditions when they work, counterbalancing this tendency. But they often have difficulty adjusting when those conditions change, and patrimonial networks emerge in that breakdown, reasserting themselves.
The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Given the book is itself a beautifully-written summary of their eleven volume The Story of Civilization, they characterize the dynamic crisply: “We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution, In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.”
A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee’s theory is one of challenge and response. Civilizations emerge from primitive ones when they successfully respond to challenges in their environment. The successful responses are often driven by creative minorities within the society. When society is unable to harness the response of creative minorities, which happens for a variety of reasons, society stagnates and declines.
Cycles as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and mythology:
** Warning: major spoilers throughout **
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. The opening lines of this Chinese classic from the 14th century are: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been”
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I believe that the book is an allegory for Chinese history. Its reference to Stable Eras an Chaotic Eras in the orbits of the planet are references to China’s eras of peace and unity as compared to the eras of war and disunity. The search for the equation that will help the Trisolarians understand their orbit and thus continue their civilization is China’s search to understand how and why its empire has divided and united over millennia. (I should note that Ken Liu disagrees with me on this point, believing that the book is not an allegory for Chinese history but rather human civilization.)
“Taking Care of God” by Liu Cixin. The touching, hilarious, and thought-provoking premise of this short story by Liu Cixin (author of The Three-Body Problem) is that humanity’s ancestors arrive on earth. They’re an ancient race that seeded life on earth and introduced a species with their genes, which became modern humans—their descendants. They did this because their civilization was growing old and needed help. This is how they explain it:
“Think about it. Every person experiences childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, finally arriving at death. The stars are the same way. Indeed, everything in the universe goes through the same process. Even the universe itself will have to terminate one day. Why would civilization be an exception? No, a civilization will also grow old and die.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. The entire story is self-referential, with repetition and circularity throughout—the names of characters, traits of characters, repetitive events, and so on.
“Sunstone” by Octavio Paz. Octavio Paz, like Gabriel García Márquez, is a Latin American author that won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The amazing poem ends with the same lines with which it began. It makes me wonder if the circularity of time, life, and events is a major theme in Latin American writing and the region’s subconscious.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Campbell ties his theory that all major myths have the same structure, the hero’s journey, to a core idea—that the journey is one a hero undertakes to provide society with the means to break through some blockage. The blockage is the archetypal tyrant, Holdfast, who hoards the benefits of society and causes it to stagnate, keeping it from moving forward and renewing itself.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. A major theme of the book is the inevitability of history. Tolstoy felt there were “laws of history,” though he could only show that these existed in the negative—by showing that other theories of history were invalid.