Image caption: Do societies become more fragile over time?Article information
- Author, Luke Kemp
- Role, BBC
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2 hours ago
A study based on an analysis of the situation in hundreds of countries during the pre-modern period concluded that there are lessons that today’s global powers, which are suffering from aging, can benefit from.
The idea of the rise and fall of great powers has been repeated throughout history, and many people talk about the fact that civilizations, countries, or peoples grow and then decline, until that idea took root in people’s minds. Is this true?
A group of archaeologists and historians decided to study the idea, which prompted them to conduct the largest study to date to see if it is possible to detect signs of the aging of a certain society in historical records.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that countries are aging and becoming more vulnerable to collapse over time. Let another question be asked: Can we draw lessons from this in our days?
Country deaths
It is difficult to establish a precise definition of civilizations or societies, so the study was limited to “pre-modern states,” that is, centralized systems of government that imposed rules on a specific region and population (which these days are closer to the United States and China).
A statistical approach was determined through two different databases, creating a special dataset related to “country deaths” (named “Moros”, after the Greek god of death) which includes 324 countries over a period of 3000 years (during the period from 2000 BC AD to 1800 AD).
Information was also collected from many other databases, as well as the use of an encyclopedia concerned with studying the history of empires, and various other sources. The study relied on the “Sishat” information bank, the largest database of historical information in the world on the Internet with the participation of archaeologists and historians, and includes 291 political systems. .
The study also used a method called “survival analysis”, which was able to limit and analyze the age range of a number of countries. In the event that it was not possible to detect an effect of aging, the study predicted a “non-aging” distribution of countries.
A previous study, which included 42 empires, had reached the same conclusion. However, the larger data set revealed a different pattern. Through the two databases, the risk of collapse was observed to increase during the first two centuries, with it later stabilizing at higher levels.
The study’s findings highlight another recent analysis of more than 168 events behind historical crises. The average age of political regimes in its crisis database was about 201 years.
The aging trend also continued to be apparent even when ruling families were excluded, which are families linked by family blood ties, which often collapse due to succession disputes over power or the removal of a ruling family from power.
The findings support ambitious studies related to what is known as “acute decline.” Before a complex governance system undergoes a large-scale transformation in its structure, or what we call a “tipping point,” it often begins to slowly recover from the turmoil, more like… In the human body as we age, this is what we notice from the longer period of injury to the body in old age compared to the same injury in youth.
Image caption: For societies that suffered complete collapse, many others survived and even flourished.
We now have evidence of such a sharp decline for two different historical groups: the early farmers of Neolithic Europe and the Pueblo peoples of the southwestern United States.
About 4 to 8 thousand years ago, Neolithic farmers spread throughout modern Turkey across Europe, and went through continuous crises that led to the outbreak of conflicts and wars, followed by a decline in the population, a decline in the agricultural area, and a shift away from grain cultivation.
As for the Pueblo peoples, they are a group of corn farmers who built the largest tall buildings in the United States and Canada before the metal-framed skyscrapers of Chicago in the nineteenth century. The Pueblo people also went through several cycles of growth and contraction, ending in crises around the year 700. 890, 1145, and 1285 AD. During all these incidents, the population declined, urbanization declined, corn cultivation declined, and acts of violence grew correspondingly.
These cycles lasted an average of 200 years, according to a broader pattern observed in our study. For both early farmers in Europe and Pueblo peoples, populations recovered slowly from shocks, such as drought, just before collapsing.
Image caption Over time, the pueblo slowly recovered from societal shocks such as drought.
There are several observations that must be taken into account, the first of which is that the collapse of a state takes many forms. It may be represented by a mere shift in the ruling elite, for example through a warlord coup. Or it may represent a societal collapse involving losses of government, writing, archaeological buildings, and a decline in population, as occurred in Mycenaean Greece (a term referring to the late Bronze Age of ancient Greece 1600-1100 BC).
Even for societies that have suffered complete collapse, many others have survived and even thrived, so these endings are not necessarily bad.
Many pre-modern countries also suffered from inequality and plunder. According to one arithmetic, the Roman Empire in the West was, by its late years, three-quarters of the way toward the theoretical maximum level of wealth inequality.
Second, our numbers relied on widely accepted dates for the beginning and end of the state according to historical and archaeological accounts, which is often controversial. For example, did the Roman Empire in the East (the Byzantine Empire) end in 1453 AD with the fall of its capital, Constantinople, or because of the sack of it? Constantinople and the division of its lands by the Crusaders in 1204 AD, or because of a widespread decline of lands in favor of the Islamic Caliphate, during the seventh century? To help solve this problem, we used upper and lower estimates for both the beginning and end of the state.
The next steps were to determine what had enhanced the longevity of a given society, and what had caused it to become increasingly weak. Countries were likely to lose their resilience over time due to a variety of factors.
Widening inequality, the influence of acquisitive institutions, and conflicts between elites also exacerbate social friction over time. Environmental degradation may undermine the ecosystems on which political systems depend. Perhaps the risk of disease outbreaks and conflicts will increase as the density of urban areas increases? Or the loss of flexibility may be the result of a combination of different reasons.
Is our modern world aging?
Can the patterns of aging of countries in the pre-modern period be linked to the current situation in our contemporary world? We think so, but it is not clear that the entire global system today has fallen prey to the same patterns we have identified.
Despite this, the world is not immune to widening inequality, environmental degradation, and elite competition, all of which have been identified as precursors to collapse in human history.
Image caption Most countries today differ markedly from the empires of centuries past.
At the global level, the richest one percent own nearly half of the world’s wealth, and climate change today is described as unprecedented and much faster than the rise in temperatures that, in the worst estimates, caused a mass extinction in the history of the world. Planet, and conflict between economic elites has helped fuel polarization and mistrust within many countries.
In addition to the countries we studied, the world is now highly interconnected and globalized, which should not be a cause for comfort. The increasing fragility and end of one country’s lifespan would usually not matter to the wider world, but the instability of a great power, such as the United States, could lead to… Cumulative cross-border impact.
Both the 2019 coronavirus outbreak and the 2007-08 global financial crisis showed how interconnectedness can lead to increased shocks in times of crises, and we are observing this in many other complex systems.
Most states today differ markedly from the empires of past centuries, as industrial production, vast technological capabilities, as well as professional bureaucracies create more stable and resilient states.
However, our modern technologies also include new threats and vulnerabilities, such as nuclear weapons and the faster spread of pathogens, so we must be wary of entrenching authoritarian or malignant regimes. Resilience and longevity are not de facto positives.
We also hope that understanding long-term history will help avoid the mistakes of the past, including potential sources of aging societies.
