There are disturbing hints that Western civilisation is star

There are disturbing hints that Western
civilisation is starting to crumble.

Laura Spinney investigates

AH, the good old days, when predictions
that “the end is nigh” were seen only
on sandwich boards, and the doommongers
who carried them were easy enough
to ignore.
If only things had stayed so simple. The
sandwich boards have mostly gone and the
world is still here, but the gloomy predictions
keep coming, and not all of them are based
on creative interpretations of religious texts.
Scientists, historians and politicians alike have
begun to warn that Western culture is reaching
a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and
resource use are heading for a tipping point
that in many past civilisations precipitated
political unrest, war and finally collapse.
For the most part, though, people are
carrying on as usual, shopping for their next
holiday or posing on social media. In fact,
many people seem blissfully unaware that
collapse might be imminent. Are Westerners
doing the modern equivalent of sitting around
eating grapes while the barbarians hammer
on the doors? And more importantly, does
science have any ideas about what is really
going on, what might happen next and how
people could turn things around?
The idea that Western power and influence
is in gradual decline, perhaps as a prelude to
a precipitous fall, has been around for a while.
But it has gained a new urgency with recent
political events, not least the election of
US president Donald Trump. For some, his
turning away from international commitments
is part of fulfilling his promise to “make
America great again” by concentrating on its
own interests. For others, it’s a dangerous
move that threatens to undermine the whole
world order. Meanwhile, over in the old world,
Europe is mired in its own problems.
Using science to predict the future isn’t
easy, not least because both “collapse” and
“Western civilisation” are difficult to define.
We talk about the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the middle of the first millennium,
for example, but there is plenty of evidence
that the empire existed in some form for
centuries afterwards and that its influence
lingers today. The end of Ancient Egypt was
more of a change in the balance of power than
a catastrophic event in which everyone died.
So, when we talk about collapse, do we mean
that people lose everything and go back to the
dark ages? Or that it’s going to be socially and
politically turbulent for a while?
Western civilisation is a similarly slippery
concept. Roughly speaking, it covers parts of
the world where the dominant cultural norms
originated in Western Europe, including North
America, Australia and New Zealand. Beyond
that, though, the lines get blurrier. Other
civilisations, such as China, were built on
different sets of cultural norms, yet thanks
to globalisation, defining where Western
culture starts and ends is far from easy.
Despite these difficulties, some scientists
and historians are analysing the rise and fall of
ancient civilisations to look for patterns that
might give us a heads-up on what is coming.
So is there any evidence that the West is
reaching its end game? According to Peter
Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the
University of Connecticut, there are certainly
some worrying signs. Turchin was a population
biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in
predator and prey animals when he realised
that the equations he was using could also
describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.
In the late 1990s, he began to apply these
equations to historical data, looking for
patterns that link social factors such as wealth
and health inequality to political instability.
Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient
Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two
recurring cycles that are linked to regular
era-defining periods of unrest.
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three
centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society,
then, as the population grows, the supply of
labour begins to outstrip demand and so
becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while
the living standards of the workers fall. As
the society becomes more unequal, the cycle
enters a more destructive phase, in which the
misery of the lowest strata and infighting
between elites contribute to social turbulence
and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a
second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and
made up of two generations – one peaceful
and one turbulent.
Looking at US history Turchin spotted
peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse,
he predicts that the end of the next 50-year
cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the
turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a
period of political unrest that is at least on
a par with what happened around 1970, at the
peak of the civil rights movement and protests
against the Vietnam war.
This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by
two amateur historians called William Strauss
and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth
Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed
that in about 2008 the US would enter a period
of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim
said to have made a powerful impression on
US president Donald Trump’s former chief
strategist, Steve Bannon.
Turchin made his predictions in 2010,
before the election of Donald Trump and
the political infighting that surrounded his
election, but he has since pointed out that
current levels of inequality and political
divisions in the US are clear signs that it is
entering the downward phase of the cycle.
Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is
not the only part of the West to feel the strain.
As for what will happen next, Turchin can’t
say. He points out that his model operates at
the level of large-scale forces, and can’t predict
exactly what might tip unease over into
unrest and how bad things might get.
How and why turbulence sometimes
turns into collapse is something that concerns
Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the
University of Maryland. He noticed that while,
in nature, some prey always survive to keep
the cycle going, some societies that collapsed,
such as the Maya, the Minoans and the
Hittites, never recovered.

Borrowed time

To find out why, he first modelled human
populations as if they were predators and
natural resources were prey. Then he split
the “predators” into two unequal groups,
wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
This showed that either extreme inequality
or resource depletion could push a society to
collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when
the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each
other,” says Motesharrei.
Part of the reason is that the “haves” are
buffered by their wealth from the effects of
resource depletion for longer than the “havenots”
and so resist calls for a change of strategy
until it is too late.
This doesn’t bode well for Western
societies, which are dangerously unequal.
According to a recent analysis, the world’s
richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth,
and the gap between the super-rich and
everyone else has been growing since the
financial crisis of 2008.
The West might already be living on
borrowed time. Motesharrei’s group has
shown that by rapidly using non-renewable
resources such as fossil fuels, a society can
grow by an order of magnitude beyond what
would have been supported by renewables
alone, and so is able to postpone its collapse.
“But when the collapse happens,”
they concluded, “it is much deeper.”
Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at Utah
State University, and author of The Collapse
of Complex Societies, offers a similarly bleak
outlook. He sees the worst-case scenario as a
rupture in fossil fuel availability, causing food
and water supplies to fail and millions to die
within a few weeks.
That sounds disastrous. But not everyone
agrees that the boom-and-bust model applies
to modern society. It might have worked
when societies were smaller and more
isolated, critics say, but now? Can we really
imagine the US dissolving in an internal war
that would leave no one standing? There are
armies of scientists and engineers working on
solutions, and in theory we can avoid past
societies’ mistakes. Plus, globalisation makes
us robust, right?
This comes back to what we mean by
collapse. Motesharrei’s group defines
historical societies according to strict
geographical limits, so that if some people
survived and migrated to find new natural
resources they would constitute a new society.
By this criterion, even very advanced societies
have collapsed irreversibly and the West could
too. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean
annihilation.
For that reason, many researchers avoid the
word collapse, and talk instead about a rapid
loss of complexity. When the Roman Empire
broke up, new societies emerged, but their
hierarchies, cultures and economies were
less sophisticated, and people lived shorter,
unhealthier lives. That kind of across-theboard
loss of complexity is unlikely today,
says Turchin, but he doesn’t rule out milder
versions of it: the break-up of the European
Union, say, or the US losing its empire in
the form of NATO and close allies such as
South Korea.
On the other hand, some people, such as
Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex
Systems Institute in Massachusetts, see this
kind of global change as a shift up in
complexity, with highly centralised structures
such as national governments giving way to
less centralised, overarching networks of
control. “The world is becoming an integrated
whole,” says Bar-Yam.
Some scientists, Bar-Yam included, are
even predicting a future where the nation
state gives way to fuzzy borders and global
networks of interlocking organisations,
with our cultural identity split between
our immediate locality and global
regulatory bodies.
However things pan out, almost nobody
thinks the outlook for the West is good.
“You’ve got to be very optimistic to think that
the West’s current difficulties are just a blip
on the screen,” says historian Ian Morris of
Stanford University in California, author of
Why the West Rules – For Now. So, can we do
anything to soften the blow?
Turchin says that by manipulating the
forces that fuel the cycles, by, for example,
introducing more progressive taxes to address
income equality and the exploding public
debt, it might be possible to avert disaster.
And Motesharrei thinks we should rein in
population growth to levels his model
indicates are sustainable. These exact levels
vary over time, depending on how many
resources are left and how sustainably –
or otherwise – we use them.
The problem with these kinds of solutions,
however, is that humans haven’t proved
themselves to be great at playing the
long game. New psychology research may
help to explain why that is the case.
Cognitive scientists recognise two
broad modes of thought – a fast, automatic,
relatively inflexible mode, and a slower,
more analytical, flexible one. Each has its uses,
depending on the context, and their relative
frequency in a population has long been
assumed to be stable. David Rand,
a psychologist at Yale University, though,
argues that populations might actually
cycle between the two over time.
Say a society has a transportation
problem. A small group of individuals thinks
analytically and invents the car. The problem
is solved, not only for them but for millions
of others besides, and because a far larger
number of people have been relieved of
thinking analytically – at least in this one
domain – there is a shift in the population
towards automatic thinking.
This happens every time a new technology
is invented that renders the environment
more hospitable. Once large numbers of
people use the technology without foresight,
problems start to stack up. Climate change
resulting from the excess use of fossil fuels is
just one example. Others include overuse of
antibiotics leading to microbial resistance,
and failing to save for retirement.
Jonathan Cohen, a psychologist at Princeton
University who developed the theory with
Rand, says it could help solve a long-standing
puzzle regarding societies heading for ruin:
why did they keep up their self-destructive
behaviour even though the more analytical
people must have seen the danger ahead? “The
train had left the station,” says Cohen, and the
forward-thinking folk were not steering it.
This is the first time anyone has attempted
to link the evolution of societies with human
psychology, and the researchers admit their
model is simple, for now. And while Rand
and his colleagues make no attempt to guide
policy, they do think their model suggests
a general direction we might look in for
remedies. “Education has got to be part of
the answer,” says Cohen, adding that there
could be more emphasis on analytical
thinking in the classroom.
But Tainter says trying to instil more
forethought might be a pipe dream. If
behavioural economics has taught us
anything, he says, it is that human beings are
much more emotional than rational when it
comes to decision-making. He thinks a more
pressing issue to tackle is the dwindling rate
of invention relative to investment in R & D,
as the world’s problems become harder to
solve. he says.
So, is the West really on the ropes? Perhaps.
But ultimately its survival will depend on the
speed at which people can adapt. If we don’t
reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, tackle
inequality and find a way to stop elites from
squabbling among themselves, things will not
end well. In Tainter’s view, if the West makes it
through, it will be more by luck than by good
judgement. “We are a species that muddles
through,” he says. “That’s all we’ve ever done,
and all we’ll ever do.”