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“The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice”

– Rev. Martin Luther King, jr.

 

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

– Ariel Duran

 

“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

– Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour Speech

 

Winston Churchill was a big fan of the study of history: “the farther back one is able to look, the farther forward one is able to see.” (paraphrased, or some such thing). His point is valid but we also know two things about history: the first is that we don’t seem to learn from history and the second is that history doesn’t repeat itself – it is linear and moves in only one direction. So if we don’t learn from history and history doesn’t repeat itself, how is it that Churchill’s point is valid?

While history doesn’t repeat itself, the Mechanisms in Civics do repeat themselves, over and over again. They even repeat themselves over again in entirely different contexts. Perhaps the reason we do not profit, we do not learn from history is because we are failing to recognize these Mechanisms in Civics. And so we walk right back into them, eyes wide open, yet mystified at how we could allow another Great Depression or Great War to descend upon us.

There are simple  mechanisms and there are  complex mechanisms. The complex ones are made up of multiple simple (and complex)  mechanisms. There are fundamental mechanisms, both simple and complex, and esoteric ones.  The fundamental ones are the ones that influence so many parts of civic life.

The single most important mechanism in civics is “The Evolution of Cooperation/PrisonersDilemma/Tit-for-tat. These are really all different stages of the same mechanism and they are the foundation for the study of almost all of the social sciences.  (Tit-for-tat obviously represents the opposite of cooperation and prisoners dilemma represents the in between stage). Because it is so fundamental to the study of social sciences in general and civics specifically,  you maybe wondering why I’m starting off these discussions by introducing you to the “Catastrophe (or Doom) Continuum.”

Well, the “Catastrophe Continuum” as the name should suggest, has to do with man’s perpetual, continuous habit of bringing catastrohe or doom upon himself.  Avoiding such catastrophe is the entire reason for studying Social Science, history and civics in particular, in the first place. And we’re not doing a very good job of it.

The “Catastrophe Continuum”, is a complex mechanism, though I think it can be explained easy enough.

Essentially humanity started out in hunting and gathering  bands. We thrived in that way of life. It’s built into our DNA. We see it in our use of language to coordinate group action. We see it in our love of sports that celebrate the characteristics that helped us thrive as hunters (running, dodging, throwing). We got along great and became the only species to spread throughout the earth. But all was not rosy. Droughts could occur, the food supply was insecure, and few physical pains are worse than famine. So between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago some of us experienced the agricultural revolution, or the Neolithic revolution, which caused us to gain a greater control of our food supply.

For those who turned to farming, agriculture created a food surplus. Before agriculture nearly everyone had to engage in  the occupation of obtaining food; after agriculture not so much.

You can imagine what happened. Some starving hunters turned their skills for hunting and killing upon some fat and happy farmers to deprive them of their surplus and shift the burden of famine back upon the farmers. So one of the first things farming communities did was use their surplus to allow some members of their community to specialize in becoming warriors to protect them. The warriors had to select someone to become their coordinator, their leader, their war lord. So immediately we have stratification of society.  Farmers to make the food surplus, warriors to protect the food surplus, and soon, administrators  to count the food, a king to oversea the warriors and the entire operation, and priests to function as lubricant to keep everything going.

Things evolved quickly. From the farmers surplus civilization began to appear. In many cases, from administrators their evolved literacy, art and so forth.

While farming provided better food security, it was not perfect. That would be one lesson in history: human advance is generally speaking a two step forward, one back sort of affair. In years of poor rainfall, drought or pestilence, food could still become scarce. When this happened who went without? Who starved? The people who grew the food or the people who controlled the weapons?   I shouldn’t have to answer that question.

(And often the priests, whose job was to keep the whole thing going, found themselves having to justify the inequities. Sound familiar?)

Once the warrior and elite classes realized that they could take more and more from the farmers, they generally took more and more. Since civilization was founded on the surplus of the farmers, by starving the farmers out, the elites undermined the very foundation of their civilization. Catastrophe (or doom) soon followed. And so for the first 10,000 years or so of human civilization, societies and states were generally small and brittle and rarely lasted very long and rarely became very large. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, early Egyptian and one example of Chinese states being one of these.

So the Catastrophe or Doom Continuum is as follows: society emerges out of rough sense fairness that came with hunting and perhaps even pastoral existence. From this basis farming emerges and a civilization forms. From this basis an elite forms. Eventually the elite learn they can take more and more of the surplus from the farmers. But they, their society, and their civilization are all dependent upon the output of the farmers, and so indirectly, their well being. Eventually the elites take too much, or correspondingly famine produces too little but the elites still take the same as before, the farming class collapses or erupts, and so the civilization collapses or crumbles or is easily over run by some nomadic group invading from the flanks. (By the way, this can and does happen even though the rich are at least vaguely aware of the dynamics that are occurring – that’s the thing about wealth and/or  power – it is addictive. The wealthy and powerful are artful at creating justifications for what they simply cannot stop what they are doing). In any event these early societies never have the stability to get very big or last very long, either.

At this point we are “East of Eden.” We can’t go back to the harmonious days of hunting because hunting only supported a small population and agriculture caused populations to grow. So the question is: how can we have the harmony that we knew in hunting and gathering days and the food surplus of the neolithic revolution and thereby arrive at stability?

An answer finally did arrive. It took nearly 10,000 years but  it came almost simultaneously throughout the Eurasian periphery in civilizations that were distinct,  isolated and not really in contact with each other, all between around 650 b.c.e and 350 b.c.e. with a disproportionate amount of dynamism occurring very near 500 b.c.e.  So, this has been called the Axial Age – because you have different wheels (civilizations) seemingly spinning at nearly the same time in the same way in these different locations on the same sort of axle. What they did was develop ideologies based upon a universal concept of fairness.

Essentially what occurred: a partial, though not totally perfect, solution for the Neolithic crisis arose from the administrative and priestly classes of (most of these) societies, espousing the ethic of fairness, in short, “The Golden Rule”, almost simultaneously throughout the Eurasian periphery: Confucious and Lao Tze in China, Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Iran, Deuter-Isaiah in Bablyon-Judea and the Sophist philosophers in Greece. By the way, credit for being the first to utter the Golden Rule, or something very close to it goes to Confucius.  Essentially you have administrators turned philosophers and religious preachers articulating, teaching or preaching an ethic of fairness. And almost immediately thereafter, in all of these places, emerge the first super states, giant empires, some with some incredible staying power. Finally one of the last and most innovative responses to the Neolithic crisis in the axial age was the invention of Roman law and Rome’s constitution. That by the way came out as a byproduct to the “Evolution of Cooperation.” (You can read about that in the next entry after this one.)

Roman Law was never as fair as the Golden Rule, but it had one thing the Golden Rule did not have – the force of law behind it. Under the Golden Rule, I’m suppose to be fair but if I’m not, nothing happens, other than other people not liking me too much. (It turns out a lot of people don’t mind not being liked, especially if being liked gets in the way of getting more money, and anyway, if they have money they can attract people for other reasons.) Under Roman Law, if I do not act as the law proscribes, I go to jail. To a certain extent, this explains part of the ascendancy of Rome in the Mediterranean basin. They had a well thought out comprehensive constitutional and legal system that had a competitive advantage over their neighbors, and which, over time, their neighbors chose to join.

The Axial age also went under continuous refinement by later thinkers: of  great note was the Jewish Lawyer Hillel and the Jewish carpenter Jesus of Nazareth. However the Axial age did not stop the Doom Continuum. It merely slowed the process down, almost glacially at times, which allowed for the super-states to appear and fairly long periods of stability, but only to see them wither.

It took nearly a thousand years, but by the time of the fall of the Roman Empire wealth had concentrated so much that 6 senators owned half of North Africa  their was so little gold specie in circulation that trade had to be conducted by barter, causing the commercial economy to collapse.

Roman Law when it first appeared was  a compromised worked out on fairness. Immediately Rome begins to expand. However, by the fall of the Roman Empire wealth was so concentrated that 6 senators owned half of North Africa, and the holding of gold specie was so concentrated that trade became based upon barter, and farm labor became tied to the land (serfdom – laborers tied to the land, trading labor for rent to grow food).  Rome, which controlled all the resources of Western Civilization, when that civilization  included the Western Near-East, including Turkey and Egypt, and all of North-Africa, in addition to the best parts of Europe, fell to illiterate, landless nomads, who incidentally, enjoyed a much more egalitarian society – as everyone was poor. The dark age that followed lasted 500 years. (see “Structure and Change in Economic History” pages 100-115, by Nobel Laureate and Economic Historian Douglas C. North),

Rome wasn’t the only nation to succumb to the Catastrophe Continuum, post Axial age. The same thing happened to Byzantium in the 50 years in the run up to the battle of Manzikurt (it is a more complicated story). Similar events lead to the collapse of Medieval Japan, an island nation, the country just balkanized into anarchy and local warlords leading to a 200 year dark age and warring states period. Concentrated wealth played significant roles to the collapse of Hapsburg Spain, Bourbon France and Romanov Russia.

As each new  age came, such as the age of nation states, mercantilism, then democracy and capitalism, one might have wondered, well, has the Doom Continuum become passe?  This was the question Marx was pondering in the 19th century as liberalism, democracy, rule of law, industrialization and capitalism all came together and caused enormous increases in productivity and wealth creation. Would all that wealth get widely distributed and stabilize societies or would it concentrate and destabilize societies?  Marx noticed, under capitalism, that the rich accumulated wealth quicker than the economy grew (4% versus 2%). This could only suggest that the ancient Catastrophe Continuum remained a threat, even to the most modern of societies. For some reason, many of the rich capitalist have never forgiven Marx for pointing this out – as if he hadn’t pointed it out, it wouldn’t exist.

(Although, to be fair, while Marx’s criticism of capitalism is highly nuanced and insightful, his remedies were less so, and those who followed after him rarely succeeded in providing insight and nuance, however one who did was John Maynard Keynes. This obviously is another discussion but those who still want to pursue ever greater concentrations of wealth and power hate Keynes almost as much as Marx, perhaps because of his insight. Keynes remedy became the 1st world norm from 1945 to 1980, triggering a doubling in global GNP in less than 30 years, that was broadly distributed, creating the first mass global middle class in 1st world societies everywhere, and a golden age that saw new peaks in nearly every sphere of human endeavor, culminating in a human landing on the Moon in 1969 but anyway, I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, we’ll get back to this in a moment).

In the late 1890s wealth concentration was becoming a serious problem, even in the United States. Wealth concentration then hit an all time high in American history 30 years later in the late 1920s, on the cusp of the Great Depression. In the 1920s, Western Civilization and American society in particular looked stronger and more robust than ever:  but it was at this point where it became most brittle. First the American economy, then the rest of the world’s, went horribly wrong. When the economy contracts, its like a game of musical chairs, some one is going to go without, and in the real world, going without is very ugly.  The mayhem that followed the collapse of 1929 lead directly to the conditions upon which Churchill made his “Finest Hour” speech where he surmised the situation with stunning accuracy: a new dark age or a new golden age.

The sentence that proceeds the quote above reads: “If we can stand up to [Hitler], all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”

You see, the Great  Depression was a confrontation with a Catastrophe or Doom Continuum in its day. Only its worst manifestations popped up on Continental Europe, especially Germany.  Both Germany and Japan, impelled by armaments expenditures, were some of the first nations to claw out of the Great Depression but the pain of the Great Depression had lead them to rogue leadership who used their early advantage to make war on their neighbors, initially with great and ominus success, all of which lead to Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech, with civilization teetering on a new dark age. Indeed, while Britain and America fought on, the lands of German occupation were in deep,  deep darkness, under the most savage conditions and the most massive amount of genocide ever seen in human history. The stakes of the outcome of  World War II were quite drastic.

As it happened, the British managed to stand up to Hitler. Then the United States and Russia also joined in the fight against him. As it happened, they found a way out of the crisis, the mixed economic system that Keynes had helped define, or at least, articulate. As it happened, the 28 years that followed the World War II, as Churchill promised, were History’s most golden of golden ages: in the free world incomes doubled in every economic sector – poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class and upper class. Essentially the world’s economy grew faster in the 28 years following the end of World War II than it had the prior roughly 14,000 years of Human history since the Neolithic/Agricultural revolution. Moreover, the economic growth was almost perfectly even among all sectors of society, and in every sphere of human endeavor human accomplishment hit new heights: literature, music, science, architecture, medicine, agriculture, film, (but not art, unless you like Jackson Pollock), culminating in a man landing on the moon and, perhaps my favorite part, the Beatles singing “yeah, yeah, yeah” and “koo koo ka chu” as a kind of celebration of such a promising and progressive age.

Now the bad news. Since 1972, the median wage  in the United States has remained flat while GNP continued to grow. Gainful employment leading to a middle class existence in the United States has remained flat since the dot.com implosion in 1998, essentially locking nearly half of the millennial generation out of access to a middle class existence, which has lead to new concentrations of wealth and already one Great Recession and the threat of another in the hopper while millions of people live in the angst of economic uncertainty.

The current age is really quite like that of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression, only the cast of characters are different, and events are moving along slower – perhaps because the Great Recession while not as deep as the Great Recession has certainly been more drawn out over time, such that, the total volume of woe may be of an equivalent volume. Also, it appears that no lessons were learned from the Great Recession.

Avoiding the Catastrophe Continuum (or Doom Continuum, whichever you prefer) and perpetuating Golden Ages, has to be the very purpose and business of the study of the social sciences.

To a social scientist, nothing else matters.

We can count on the humanities and metaphysics to give us richer and more meaningful life, to counter the banality of material prosperity but by all means we must work to avoid catastrophes and the Doom Continuum, and the conditions that presage it, concentrated wealth.

The Golden Age of the post World War era did that by redistributing bargaining power, and the money and resources then followed the distribution of that bargaining power. The age that followed the golden age has seen a retrenchment on the broad distribution of bargaining power triggering the concentration of wealth and power to dangerous and brittle heights. This is perhaps a stunning case of willful ignorance at the behest of elites.  This, occurs, in part, because the wealthy think of themselves immune to the Doom or the catastrophes that might follow, and either way, are addicted to accumulating more.

(Since this is pretty much true of all humans, there’s no point in blaming the wealthy, in all likelihood, if you were rich, you would do the same, the question is, what will you do now to get your bargaining  power back and what will it take? How much pain and ache will occur in the mean time?) In a word, we are  all playing with fire.

Martin Luther King Junior’s idea that the arc of history was long but bend towards  justices fails to emphasize that an arc touches down at  two points, and remains aloft for a considerable extent. If it bends toward justice, at some point it bent away. The bending away part, that’s called the Doom or Catastrophe Continuum, it represents unnecessary pain, and it continues. Perhaps the study of mechanisms in civics will keep that arc more grounded for a longer period of time. We have to understand these mechanisms to develop the proper organizational arrangements (social structures) that will further slow down, or prevent altogether, the arrival of catastrophes or even worse, doom.

Let me conclude by stating more succinctly and repeating that the Doom Continuum is the process where humans come together under amicable and roughly fair terms, this leads to the creation of great productivity, but eventually that productivity leads  to stratification to facilitate the means of specialization of tasks. Eventually that stratification of task (or specialization of tasks), leads to stratification of bargaining power whereby it becomes uneven, and those that have more, use it to get more still. So wealth soon flows to where the bargaining power concentrates, vacating the masses and at some point the system becomes too top heavy, like an upside down pyramid, inherently unstable, and collapses upon itself, or becomes vulnerable enough to be invaded from the outside. Another outcome is those who have lost their bargaining power turning and placing their faith in rogues who promise to restore them their bargaining power: as happened to Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the twenty-teens.

Let me say, once again, avoiding the Catastrophe/Doom Continuum is the very purpose of the study of the Social Sciences and Civics in particular. This means we must always maintain a partial eye on this mechanism while we are engaged in the study of  Civics, History, other mechanisms, and most of the other Social Sciences.