The End Of A Cycle

We've been here before. That's the lesson of Andrew Nikiforuk's latest column in The Tyee:

The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. They, too, connected far-flung geographies in innovative ways. None of it, however, ended particularly well.

By trading in all manner of peoples, plants, germs and animals, these empires diligently tested the limits of globalization and its growing complexity by seeding their own disintegration.

The corona pandemic, a pretty mild affair in the scheme of things, is telling us that we are now in the middle of a historic cycle where hyper-connectivity combined with hyper-complexity could rapidly lead to decline, if not collapse.

In fact, pandemics are not black swans, but predictable and natural events that often appear like clockwork in the evolution of human empires. They trigger other crises or partner up with them.

According to the Russian historian, Peter Turchin, we are at the end of a recurring three hundred years cycle:

Peter Turchin, a Russian historian, has long argued that civilizations expand and contract in distinct waves or what he calls “secular cycles” that last about 300 years.

Here’s my rough sketch of his sharp thinking: In the initial wave, a troop of united elites marshal the masses to go forth and connect parts of the world with newfangled trade and political networks.

But as wealth and populations peak, the elites turn on each other as they seek to monopolize the spoils. (Turchin calls this a case of “elite overproduction.”) And then the cycle of expansionist thinking and radical growth comes to a crashing end with a roaring pandemic and other mayhem.

The Roman stoic Seneca observed that things do not perish as slowly as they come into being. Instead, “the way to ruin is rapid.” And pandemics prove the point.

According to Turchin, every growth cycle or pulsation comes in four distinct phases. A period of population growth, good eating and consensual elites is followed by stagflation, which begets some sort of economic or biological crisis that ends in a depression. And then the cycle renews itself.

Epidemics tend to erupt during the stagflation period for several reasons. That’s when populations peak and economic misery increases. It is also a period when long-distance trade connects everything; cities get too crowded and migrants clog the highways.

History provides specific examples:

The Black Death, for example, found Europe in a dismal state of misery in the 14th century. The pathogen travelled down the Silk Road, a highway revived by the expanding Mongol empire, a flourishing global concern if there ever was one.

The Roman Empire offers another pandemic tale. At its height Augustus established the Principate in 27 BC. The Romans were such grand globalists that 400 African and Asian perennials can still be found sprouting on the grounds of the Colosseum.

The plague exposed the fragility of the empire’s connectedness. Growing poverty and the hoarding of wealth by elites was followed by decades of civil wars and a population collapse. A new cycle began with the late Roman Empire centred in Constantinople. But that cycle ended in part due to the impact of another epidemic, the plague of Justinian.

Over the long term, it appears that we learn nothing.

Image: Evensi