It’s a rare book that not only vastly informs you on a particular issue, but in so doing overturns many prior conceptions you had on the general subjects. Now, Pomeranz is not a good writer. The text is slow and turgid, and readable only by dint of my interest in the subject. Many potential counter-arguments go unanswered (which is not to say that they sink the overall theory, as I will try to prove in this review). All that said, I have little choice but to give it a 5*/5, as this a truly counter-intuitive and deeply contextualizing work that overturns many of the triumphalist post hoc narratives of Western chauvinism.

This book attempts to answer the big question of world economic history: Why Europe? It does this by systematically comparing Europe with other leading world regions in the pre-industrial age such as Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and India. The first big finding is that – contrary to the conventional wisdom – there were far more similarities than differences, at least between Britain and the most advanced Chinese region, the Yangtze Delta.

Essential Similarities Between Old World Cores

It is sometimes argued that special European demographic patterns, such as marrying late and a celibate clergy, had the effect of lowering its fertility and mitigating the Malthusian impoverishment held to be prevalent elsewhere. Another, often complementary, view is that European consumption markets were already far more developed than in China, which allowed it to hit the ground running (so to speak) once the preconditions for industrial revolution were fulfilled. However, China also saw fertility postponement, and there is ample evidence that at least until the mid-19th century the average quality of life in China as measured by life expectancy, median incomes, availability of consumer goods, etc. was at least as good as in Europe, probably higher, and as good as Britain in its most advanced region, the Yangtze Delta.

Although Europe was technologically ahead in some spheres – most visibly, guns, clock making, optics – China had a clear lead in irrigation, soil preservation and land management, and medicine (yields per acre in Europe only approached Chinese levels by the late 19th century). This is of no small consequence in pre-industrial societies hewing to the laws of Malthus. As in China, per capita food and fuel availability declined in Europe up until the mid-19th century century; only in Britain was this in significant part mitigated from 1800 by the windfall of “coal and colonies” (much more on this later).

Finally, there’s the argument that European capitalist institutions and markets were better developed and thus kick-started its growth. But again, the evidence Pomeranz marshals convinces that, if anything, China was substantially more “capitalist” (in the laissez-faire sense) than Europe. There were far fewer monopolies, and no internal trade barriers – contrast this, for example, with ancient regime France – and as a consequence, the volume of trade flows (in grains, sugar, timber, etc) were far higher within China than in continental Europe. The civil service was professional and meritocratic, whereas in Europe this only came to be in the 19th century. Markets for labor and products were freer in China; guilds had much less political influence than in Europe. Bound labor and feudal obligations remained prevalent far longer in Europe (and India) than in China, where it had long ago become marginal; for instance, the settlement of Taiwan for the cultivation of sugar – China’s equivalent of the Caribbean islands – was done by free labor. Though credit was cheaper in Europe – or, at least, in Holland and Britain – but to cut a long story short, there is (1) no evidence that this made crucial industrial activities unprofitable or impeded further pro-industrial mechanization, and (2) the credit system was more developed in India relative to China and Japan, although it was far more backward in general.

One major factor that Pomeranz glosses over is the impact of the Scientific Revolution. Though Chinese scientific achievements are under-appreciated – for instance, it matched Western mathematical achievements up to and including those of 16th century Italy – it is undeniable that Europe took a commanding lead from about the mid-16th century. There was to be no Chinese Kepler or Newton. But impressive as it was, you do not need calculus or laws of planetary motion to produce coal and iron (“as late as 1827 and 1842, two separate British observers claimed that Indian bar iron was as good or betterthan English iron”), and you certainly don’t need them to more efficiently produce textiles. As first textiles, and then coal and iron, constituted the first stages of the Industrial Revolution – up to the 1860′s or so – the European scientific base was almost entirely incidental to the initial industrial takeoff. Now obviously this scientific base did become vastly more important by the late 19th century, which saw the flowering of the electric, chemical, and international combustion engine industries; and those countries with particularly powerful research establishments, such as the US and Germany, did very well, catching up to Britain. However, by then China was already hugely behind.

Addendum 7/31: I almost forgot to mention this. This is probably obvious, but Pomeranz says nary a word about the contribution of cultural differences to the Great Divergence (in contrast to people like Landes who make it a centerpiece of their analysis, waxing poetic on the influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, distinctive Western values of separation of church and state, etc). And rightly so. Culture is an intangible, and has very little explanatory power; furthermore, such explanations are frequently contradictory in time and place (for instance, whereas “Confucian values” may be cited as holding Chinese society back, they are now frequently invoked to explain the meteoric rise of the Asian tigers; you can’t have it both ways, folks).

The European “Miracle”: Coal and Colonies

Why then did Europe, and more specifically Britain, industrialize while China fell into an ecological impasse in which food production barely kept up with population growth? Pomeranz argues (convincingly, IMO) that the crux of the matter was a fortunate conjunctures and contingencies that overwhelmingly favored Europe.

First, colonies. Many recent scholars have dismissed their contribution; according to one article, overseas coercion could not have been responsible for more than 7% of gross investment in late 18th century Britain (and far less in Europe). But this neglects the vital role of the New World colonies – with their near endless land and natural resources - at relieving ecological bottlenecks in Europe, and in particular Britain. These included sugar (which acted as an additional source of calories as well as a hunger suppressant) and cotton (for clothing, and indirectly relieving pressure on pastures and timber for heating), and later in the 19th century, massive grain exports. All this “ghost acreage” allowed the British isles to support a far larger population than its existing carrying capacity could have, a highly urbanized one and relatively comfortable too (hence no Malthusian stress as in late Qing China, with its debilitating effects on political and social cohesion).

(Furthermore, even the aforementioned 7% figure could have been significant in a pre-industrial world. Due to high rates of capital depreciation, the net accumulation in capital stock then was only a small fraction of the overall savings rate. For instance, according to one calculation, that hypothetical 7% in “super-profits” – an increment to gross savings not purchased at the expense of consumption – could have significantly increased an otherwise minimal rate of net capital accumulation.)

And these goods – cotton, sugar, etc. – could be imported at very favorable terms of trade, because of another set of favorable conjunctures. The decimation of Native Americans due to European epidemiological superiority cleared the way for settlers, who supplied the Caribbean colonies with food and Britain with timber (thus relieving its Malthusian stress). Furthermore, the slave labor on the Caribbean islands – apart from the implicit coercion (and “super-profits” it enabled) – prevented them from developing their own proto-industrial sectors that could undercut British exports.

This is in contrast to what happened naturally in China, largely by dint of its free labor markets (as opposed to New World slavery or East European serfdom). The inner provinces began to expand their handicrafts and textiles industries, thus undercutting the (more advanced) proto-industrialization of the Yangtze Delta. This was a form of “import substitution,” and economically natural in those times because of far higher transport costs than is the case today. This was accompanied by a growing population in the inner regions. Unable to increase its industrial exports, and facing declining imports of rice, timber, etc., the most advanced Chinese regions, the Yangtze Delta and Lingnan, had to increase the labor intensity of their agriculture so as to keep food production abreast of their own population.

Obviously, the conditions did not exist for a Caribbean turn towards import substitution. The slaves themselves had no choice, and neither did the owners; they needed to produce commodities for export in order to pay for replacing slaves. And this all provided a growing (as opposed to declining) demand stimulus for British industry.

One additional New World advantage covered in some length by Pomeranz is the windfall of New World silver – which was, in large part, a free gift to Europe on account of the slave labor and monopolies used in its extraction. This allowed it to easily balance the books with trade in China for silk, porcelain, etc., which in turn could be used to pay for African slaves and New World resources. And Chinese demand for silver was huge, since it was remonetizing its economy to run on silver during the early modern period. Indirectly, it contributed to the formation of the Atlantic economy.

The second great British advantage was coal – that is, as an alternative to wood, located close to its main industrial centers (China too had coal, but it was far away from its main industrial centers, and transport costs were prohibitive). Coal relieved pressure on woodlands, which were in rapid decline, and – due to its virtually limitless nature – unbound the production possibilities of iron. Steam power was crucial to this expansion, not only by powering other processes but by permitting a huge expansion of coal-mining itself. “The Chinese had long understood the basic scientific principle involved – the existence of atmospheric pressure – and had long since mastered (as part of their “box bellows”) a double-acting piston/cylinder system much like Watt’s, as well as a system for transforming rotary motion to linear motion that was as good as any known anywhere before the twentieth century. ll that remained was to use the piston to turn the wheel rather than vice versa.” So the relevant technical skills were not unique to Europe. In fact, northern China had a huge coke and iron complex as early as the 11th century under the Song dynasty, though it was brought low by the multiple perturbations of the 12th-15th centuries (Jurchen and Mongol invasions, etc). The rest is worth quoting in extenso:

However, a number of factors militated against widespread Chinese (re)adoption of coal as a major fuel source. First, the reorientation of the center of Chinese development to the east and south meant by the Qing dynasty meant that its industrial cores were now located far from the big coal deposits in the north-west; the advantages of linking these regions by transport are only evident ex ante. Second, the best artisans were concentrated in the (low coal) Yangtze Delta or along the south-east coast, and serving a huge public demand for clocks and other mechanical toys. Third, “even if mine operators had seen how to improve their mining techniques, they had no reason to think that extracting more coal would allow them to capture a vastly expanded market.” Finally, and most importantly, the technical nature of extracting Chinese coal was profoundly different from that of extracting British coal; in fact, it made the deep extraction that enabled Britain to boost its output all but impossible.

English mines tended to fill with water, so a strong pump was needed to remove that water. Chinese coal mines had much less of a water problem; instead they were so arid that spontaneous combustion was a constant threat. It was this problem – one that required ventilation rather than powerful pumps – that preoccupied the compiler of the most important Chinese technical manual of the period… Even if still better ventilation had ameliorated this problem—or if people wanted coal badly enough to pay for this high level of danger – ventilation techniques would not have also helped solve the problem of transporting coal (and things in general) as the steam engines that pumped out Britain’s mines did. Thus, while overall skill, resource, and economic conditions in “China,” taken as an abstract whole, may not have been much less conducive to a coal/steam revolution than those in “Europe” as a whole, the distribution of those endowments made the chances of such a revolution much dimmer.

In contrast, some of Europe’s largest coal deposits were located in a much more promising area: in Britain. This placed them near excellent water transport, Europe’s most commercially dynamic economy, lots of skilled craftspeople in other areas, and – to give the problems of getting and using coal some additional urgency – a society that had faced a major shortage of firewood by 1600 if not before. And although timber and timber-based products were imported by sea, this was far more expensive than receiving logs floated down a river, as the Yangzi Delta did; the incentives to use (and learn more about) comparatively accessible coal were correspondingly greater.

Much of the knowledge about how to extract and use coal had been accumulated by craftsmen and was not written down even in the nineteenth century… Harris shows that French attempts to copy various coal-using processes foundered, even when they reproduced the equipment, because the production of, say, a heat-resistant crucible required very detailed knowledge and split-second timing acquired through experience – and the financial losses from making a mistake could be very large… Only when whole teams of English workers were brought over (mostly after 1830) was the necessary knowledge effectively transferred.

Thus we see that technological expertise was essential to Europe’s coalbreakthrough, but the development of that expertise depended on long experience (and many failures along the way) with abundant, cheap supplies. This experience was possible because artisan skill, consumer demand, and coal itselfwere all concentrated near each other. Without such geographic good luck, one could easily develop lots of expertise in an area with a limited future (e.g.,in using and improving wood furnaces) and not proceed along the track that eventually led to tapping vast new supplies of energy.

Furthermore, the adoption of the steam engine – whose synthesis with coal was what really generated the Industrial Revolution – was also highly contingent. It was the result of 200 years of use on British coal fields, which was both economical (free coal due to zero transport costs) and proximate to mechanics-minded artisans which could offer improvements. Nonetheless, it took until 1830 for the costs of energy per unit of power for steam-run textile machinery to decline precipitously; until then, water remained competitive with steam engines!

Take away some of the incremental advantage conferred by skill transfers from nearby artisans in other fields, the learning by doing made possible by the application to nearby coal fields, and the low cost of coal itself, and – as incredible as it seems to us today – the steam engine could have seemed not worth promoting.

So, in conclusion, Britain enjoyed two major advantages that the Yangtze Delta, the Lingnan region, and Japan did not: (1) a colonial system that allowed it to massively increase its effective carrying capacity while simultaneously stimulating its industrial production, and (2) conveniently located coal reserves in damp places.

Apart from Britain, Europe as a whole was nowhere close to an industrial takeoff at the dawn of the 19th century; and though the relative inefficiency of its land usage – and the gains from ameliorating that – allowed it to avoid a crisis for a few decades after 1800 (what Pomeranz calls the ecological “advantages of backwardness”), it was nonetheless approaching an an ecological bottleneck as in China (the 1840′s in particular are known as a time of dearth). This was at a time when the Industrial Revolution had scarcely began on the mainland, and if it had continued it would have required the diversion of more and more labor to working the land intensively, instead of industry. Could industrialization then have been sustained without coal, New World surpluses, and the already existing industrialization of Great Britain?

The general impression one gets is that not only was the “European miracle” in fact just a matter of fortunate conjunctures and contingencies, but that there was nothing especially preordained about the Industrial Revolution. No colonial surpluses; no easily-reachable coal or mechanical culture; perhaps, even no slavery (to enhance the efficiency with which colonial surpluses were extracted) – no industrial revolution. At least, not a few more centuries.

Additional Thoughts for Consideration

(1) Needless to say, I now largely reject my previous theory Walled Off By Complexity: Did China Stagnate Because Of Its Writing System? I don’t think the hieroglyphics system did China any good, but they certainly can’t explain The Great Divergence.

(2) One important factor that I didn’t see Pomeranz mention – the Atlantic is much narrower than the Pacific! China was building ships as advanced as that of the European Golden Age of Navigation as early as the 15th century, and in huge numbers far exceeding the capacity of any single European state. Navigation itself wasn’t a problem either (note that it was China that invented the compass, topographic maps, etc). But it didn’t practice overseas slave-trading, and those Chinese that settled new lands – be they in Taiwan, or the inner provinces – tended to develop their own proto-industrial economies, which in the presence of conditions of free trade and free markets for labor and products eventually undermined the volume of trade.

(3) The “rise of the West” was in large part built on systems – mercantilism, military-fiscal competition, etc. – that universal Western ideology now condemns. Ironically, the BRIC’s (including most prominently China) are the ones using mercantile strategies to catch up to the West.

(4) What’s even more curious is that it wasn’t only Britain, and then the rest of Western Europe that overtook China; so did Russia. Now Russia was undoubtedly far, far behind both China and the West practically since its inception until (relative to China) about the late 19th century. It had serfdom, very small urban class, a very de-commercialized economy, with luxury consumption being indulged in by a tiny elite, etc. Nonetheless, despite this backwardness – an inevitable one, due to ecological reasons I have written a lot on this blog about – the state did nonetheless successfully leverage what meager surpluses it had to maintain a rough military parity with the West and play the role of a Great Power. So, yet more evidence that strict adherence to neoclassical economic development isn’t all that it’s hyped up to be.

(5) An interesting counter-factual to consider – what if there had been no easily accessible coal in Britain or the Rhineland, and if Columbus had found no New World and instead sunk somewhere in the middle of a globe-spanning World Ocean? Could there have been an industrial revolution? Is industrial revolution contingent on “coal and colonies”?

Or would Europe instead have become something like Qing China in the 19th century, increasingly politically debilitated, and economically stagnant – any improvements in land management and increasing labor intensity swallowed up by an inexorably growing population? Could it, indeed, have collapsed, perhaps after it grew critically weak and was invaded by the Russian Army much like China was by the Jurchens, the Mongols, the Manchus, etc., and pillaged by British pirates much like Japanese pirates preyed on a weak China in the 17th century Ming twilight? Indeed, could it eventually have collapsed into yet another Dark Age as followed the Roman Empire, in which much of the vaunted knowledge of the Scientific Revolution would be lost to memory, with the 18th century to early 19th century coming to be seen as a bygone “Golden Age”?

PS. H/t to Doug M. for bringing this book to my attention in the first place.

China - not only toys, but tokamaks too.

Four cables from Cathay, courtesy of this excellent Cable Search tool.

The first cable (Cable 1) is one of the last dispatches of Ambassador to the PRC Clark T. Randt, a long, analytical piece from January 2009. But it’s also perhaps the least interesting of the four.  This is because it is only a rehashing of the standard narrative that can be found on most editorials on the subject: the post-Mao economic liberalization; fast industrial expansion; pollution and demographic problems; etc. China’s prospects are underestimated, as I’ve argued in the past. For instance, he cites projections that China will overtake Japan in five years years and “could rival the United States in overall scale” by the late 2030′s. But these are surely very, very pollyannish (from the US perspective) since in actuality China overtook Japan this year (2010) and its real GDP is already 70% of America’s.

The real threat to Chinese – AND global – growth prospects are resource constraints. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a US government official, Randt cites estimates having China reach peak oil in the early 2010′s and peak coal “in the next 15 to 25 years” (I think coal production will plateau as early as 2015). However, these shortages will be partly mitigated by huge alternative programs – he cites China as being the world’s largest producer of renewable power and Cable 3 mentions plans to construct 70 new nuclear power plants in the next decade. He is almost certainly wrong in his optimistic ideas that China will buy into the US global order, rather than seeking to remake it in its own images (as all aspiring hegemons try to do). To take an example, the wish that China will make itself into a “reliable partner” for the US and other donor countries is put into question by Cable 4 from the very same embassy, in which a Kenyan ambassador expresses an African preference for Chinese aid over Western “conferences and seminars”. The cable finishes with some platitudes about the US needing to “push for the expansion of individual freedoms, respect for the rule of law and the establishment of a truly free and independent judiciary and press”, which must surely have the publisher of this cable spinning in his British prison cell.

The second cable (Cable 2), from July 2009, is a very informative, but short (so recommended reading), introduction to three major interpretations of Chinese politics: as “akin to… the executive suite of a large corporation, as determined by the interplay of powerful interests, or as shaped by competition between “princelings” with family ties to party elders and “shopkeepers” who have risen through the ranks of the Party.” In the first interpretation, Party General Secretary Hu Jintao is the CEO, with the 25 other members of the Politburo aiming for consensus in decision making. The Politburo members are also oligarchs in practice, having their own vested interests and administrative-economic clans. (BTW, this political system of corporate clans and fusions of economic and political power bears some resemblance to Russia’s).

Many casual observers continue to see China as a sweatshop manufactory of cheap, unreliable goods (poisonous toys, etc) produced by exploited workers on starvation wages, but this is very rapidly diverging from reality. The third cable (Cable 3), from February 2010, has a few examples. With just a fraction of the science and technology funding of developed country universities, Chinese institutions are managing to produce ground-breaking work in esoteric spheres such as nuclear fusion, quantum communications and nanotechnology. Of course, not all of them are “pleasant” advances, and reflect the Orwellian instincts of the Chinese state, such as a biometric sensor designed to identify people by how they walk. An authoritarian state, but one with hi-tech visions that are fast becoming realities.

The final cable (Cable 4), from February 2010, can be summarized by one quote: “[Kenyan Ambassador to China] Sunkuli claimed that Africa was better off thanks to China’s practical, bilateral approach to development assistance and was concerned that this would be changed by “Western” interference. He said he saw no concrete benefit for Africa in even minimal cooperation. Sunkuli said Africans were frustrated by Western insistence on capacity building, which translated, in his eyes, into conferences and seminars. They instead preferred China’s focus on infrastructure and tangible projects.”

Finally, one more piece of news on China, not Cablegate-related. As regular blog readers know, I think that educational capital and more broadly average IQ levels are one of the key – and frequently under-appreciated due to political correctness – determinants of economic development and whether or not convergence to developed country levels is even possible. Its much higher educational capital is one of the key reasons why I think China will continue doing much better than India in development, regardless of its “democratic deficit.” However, many people argue that China’s human capital must actually be quite low, because it doesn’t spend much on education, resources are bare in the provinces, statistical fudging under unaccountable governors, etc.

The recent results from the international standardized PISA tests in math, reading and science will make this an increasingly untenable position. Shanghai got by far the best results out of all the OECD countries (never mind the developing ones). Now while you might (rightly) argue Shanghai draws much of the elite of the Yangtze river delta, the Financial Times has more: “Citing further, as-yet unpublished OECD research, Mr Schleicher said: “We have actually done Pisa in 12 of the provinces in China. Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.””

Since countries like the US and France get scores “close to the OECD average”, this means that the workforces soon to be entering China’s economy, even from its poorest regions, will be no less skilled than those of leading Western economies (note too that the numbers of Chinese university graduates are soaring). And with China’s massive population, four times bigger than America’s, its road to superpowerdom must be all but guaranteed.

Cable 1

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR THE SECRETARY, DEPUTY SECRETARY, EAP A/S
HILL, S/P, EAP/CM
NSC FOR DWILDER

EO 12958 DECL: 01/05/2034
TAGS PREL, PGOV, ECON, EFIN, MARR, MASS, CH
SUBJECT: LOOKING AT THE NEXT 30 YEARS OF THE U.S.-CHINA
RELATIONSHIP

Classified By: Ambassador Clark T. Randt. Reasons 1.4 (b/d)

¶1. (C) January 1, 2009, marked the 30th Anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This anniversary followed the PRC commemoration of roughly 30 years of China’s “reform and opening” policy under Deng Xiaoping, which led to China’s staggering economic growth.

¶2. (C) Thirty years ago, China was just emerging from the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of fratricidal misrule. China’s economy was crippled by years of disastrous policies like the Great Leap Forward. The population was coming to terms with the world’s most draconian population controls enacted in 1976 after decades of Maoist state-subsidies encouraging large families. Chinese foreign relations tended to be more influenced by ideological yardsticks than economic links since China had very few commercial links with the outside world. In 1979, Chinese urbanites on average made the equivalent of five dollars per month.

¶3. (C) Just as no one in 1979 would have predicted that China would become the United States’ most important relationship in thirty years, no one today can predict with certainty where our relations with Beijing will be thirty years hence. However, given the current significance of the bilateral relationship and the risk of missing opportunities to jointly address ongoing and predictable future challenges, below we look at trends currently affecting China with an eye to how those trends might affect relations. Several issues leap out, including China’ insatiable resource needs, our growing economic interdependence, China’s rapid military modernization, a surge in Chinese nationalism, China’s demographic challenges, and the PRC’s increasing influence and confidence on the world stage.

¶4. (C) China has been plagued over the millennia by unforeseen events that devastated formerly prosperous regimes. Mongol invasion, the Black Death, uncountable peasant uprisings, warlords, tax revolts, communist dictatorship, colonialism, famine, earthquakes and other plagues were largely unforeseen by the China watchers of the past. This report focuses generally on more optimistic projections. Given China’s history, however, the United States should also gird itself for the possibility that China will fall short of today’s mostly sanguine forecasts.

Resource Consumption

¶5. (C) Popular and scholarly works in recent years highlight China’s growing demand for natural resources and the possible impact that China’s pursuit of resources will have on its foreign policy. Since economic reforms began in the late 1970s, industrial and exchange rate policies have fueled investment in resource-intensive heavy industries in China’s coastal region, which currently account for approximately 55 percent of the country’s total energy consumption today. A construction boom over the past decade has also stimulated growth in heavy industries. China is now a leading steel producer and currently accounts for 50 percent of the world’s annual cement production. Reflecting China’s emphasis on resource-intensive industries, China’s energy utilization rate grew faster than its GDP between 2002 and 2006. In 1990, China consumed 27 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy, accounting for 7.8 percent of global consumption. In 2006, it consumed 68.6 quadrillion BTUs or 15.6 percent of the global total. According to U.S. Department of Energy statistics, by 2030 China will account for 145.5 quadrillion BTUs or 20.7 percent of global energy consumption.

¶6. (C) China’s oil demand has grown substantially over the last 30 years. In 1980, China consumed 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, almost all of which was produced domestically. In 2006, China consumed 7.4 million barrels per day, second only to the United States. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China’s oil consumption will reach 16.5 million barrels per day in 2030. More than two thirds of the increased demand will come from the transport sector as vehicle ownership rates rise. China became a net importer of oil in 1993, and it now relies on imports to meet a growing portion of its fossil fuel needs. The IEA forecasts that China’s oil import dependence will rise from 50 percent this year to 80 percent by 2030, as domestic oil production peaks early in the next decade. To strengthen the country’s future energy security, the Chinese Government has adopted a “go out” policy that encourages national oil companies (NOCs) to acquire equity stakes in foreign oil and gas production. Today, state-owned Chinese oil giants CNPC/PetroChina, CNOOC, and Sinopec can be found in Sudan, Iran, Kazakhstan,

Venezuela, Angola, and the Caspian Basin.

¶7. (C) China has also increased its reliance on imported minerals, and many analysts have attributed the global commodities boom of recent years in part to China’s growing demand. Between 1980 and 2006, China became the world’s largest consumer of iron, copper and aluminum. Chinese conglomerates are ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa exploiting mineral wealth there, and Chinese multinationals have significant investments in Australian mineral and uranium production.

¶8. (C) China’s reliance on coal has come at an appalling environmental cost. This year, China surpassed the United States in carbon emissions, and it will soon become the world’s biggest energy consumer. Between now and 2030, the IEA estimates, China will need to add 1,312 gigawatts of power generating capacity, more than the total current installed capacity in the United States. Coal-fired power generation, a major source of air pollution, accounts for approximately 78 percent of China’s total electricity supply, and it will likely remain the predominant fuel in electricity generation for at least the next 20 years. Analysts predict that domestic coal production will peak in the next 15 to 25 years. China already became a net importer of coal in 2007, and coal imports are expected to grow in the coming decades to meet growing demand in China’s coastal provinces.

¶9. (C) The Chinese Government recognizes the need to reduce dependence on coal, and it is pursuing policies to diversify its energy mix. China is already the largest producer of renewable energy in the world, with major investments in large-scale hydro and wind power projects. Nuclear and natural gas power will also account for a greater proportion of energy production, but under current projections, efforts to diversify China’s energy mix will not have a large enough impact to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth.

¶10. (C) China’s energy intensive growth has also had tragic consequences for public health. By most measurements, at least half of the world’s most polluted major cities are in China. Rural residents, in particular farmers, have been affected by water pollution and dwindling water supplies, which are frequently redirected for industrial use. Respiratory disease, water-borne illness and tainted food scares are facts of modern life in the country. According to a recent WHO study, diseases caused by indoor and outdoor air pollution kill 656,000 Chinese citizens every year. Another 95,600 deaths are attributed annually to polluted drinking water.

¶11. (C) China’s increasing reliance on imported natural resources has foreign policy ramifications and provides opportunities for the United States. A China that is increasingly dependent on Middle Eastern oil might be more likely to support policies that do not destabilize the Middle East. Take Iran, for instance. We have long been frustrated that China has resisted (with Russia) tough sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program. In the future, a China increasingly dependent on foreign energy supplies may recalculate the risk a nuclear Iran would pose to the greater Persian Gulf region’s capacity to export oil.

¶12. (C) Another opportunity presented by China’s increasing resource consumption is in the joint development of technological responses to reduce carbon emissions and to diminish the public health impact of industrial growth. Scientific publications around the world conclude that the projected rate of global energy and natural resource consumption is unsustainable. Experts warn that we must find alternative forms of energy in order to avert calamities posed by global climate change. International efforts to develop and significantly utilize renewable energy, clean up our shared global environment, and conserve our remaining raw materials will not be effective without meaningful Chinese participation. As the world’s preeminent technological power and as a leader in multilateral energy and scientific organizations, the United States is in a unique position to work with China to overcome these challenges.

Economic Interdependence and Chinese Demographics

¶13. (C) In the next fifteen years, while China’s overall population is predicted to stabilize, its urban population will likely grow to almost 1 billion, an increase (of 300 million people) equal to the entire current population of the United States. China plans to build 20,000 to 50,000 new skyscrapers over the next two decades — as many as ten New York cities. More than 170 Chinese cities will need mass transit systems by 2025, more than twice the number now present in all of Europe. China is now surpassing Germany as the world’s third largest economy and is projected to overtake Japan within the next five years. By the end of the next thirty years, China’s economy could rival the United States in overall scale (although its per capita income will likely only be one quarter of the United States’).

¶14. (C) Behind these outward symbols of success will be an increasingly complicated economic picture. Since 1979, by reversing the misguided economic policies of the Mao era, liberalizing labor markets and prices, opening to foreign investment, and taking advantage of the West’s consumer-driven policies, China has maintained fast growth. However, the set of circumstances that allowed such impressive growth rates will no longer exist in the future.

¶15. (C) Many speculate that China has reached the limit to easy productivity gains by rationalizing the state-planned economy. The Economist Intelligence Unit expects China’s annual growth to slow from around 10 percent in the last 30 years to 4.5 percent by 2020. After 2015 when the labor force peaks as a share of the population, labor costs will rise faster. This will increasingly make other countries like India and Vietnam more attractive for labor-intensive investment. In addition, workers will have to support a growing number of retirees. Early retirement ages combined with the urban one-child limits creates the so-called “4-2-1” social dilemma: each worker will have to support four grandparents, two parents and one child. Savings rates will start falling as the elderly draw down their retirement funds.

¶16. (C) China will have to manage an economy increasingly dependent on domestic consumption and service industries for growth. Already, urbanites are buying 1,000 new cars per day, making China the world’s largest Internet and luxury goods market, and traveling abroad in growing numbers. By 2025, China will have the world’s largest middle class, and China will likely have completed the transition from the majority rural population of today to a majority urban population. These consumers of tomorrow will likely flock to products from around the world as their North American, European and Japanese counterparts do today, providing new opportunities for American business. If incomes continue to grow, it is likely that the Chinese middle class will react like educated urbanites in other countries by exerting pressure on the Government to improve its dismal performance on environmental protection, food and product safety. We are already seeing increased public activism over such issues today.

¶17. (C) China will face a challenge in the next thirty years encouraging this urban consumption while dealing with the social equality issues inherent in a rural population where over 200 million people still live on less than a dollar a day. China will also have to find a way to improve the lot of between 150 and 230 million migrant workers who today must leave their children and aging parents behind in their home villages to travel to the industrial centers of the relatively developed coastal regions to work in factories or on construction projects.

¶18. (C) With China’s phenomenal growth has come increased economic interdependence. This will likely increase, although some of the less-balanced elements of China’s economic interactions should be mitigated. Rising consumption rates should work to lower China’s trade surplus as well as its overabundance of foreign exchange reserves. More assets controlled by corporations and individuals, as opposed to the government, will diversify outward investment, reducing political control by Beijing, but also the utility of political suasion for U.S. policymakers interested in effecting the flow of capital to international hotspots.

Chinese Nationalism and Confidence on the International Stage

¶19. (C) As one of two main pillars of post-Mao Chinese Communist Party rule (the other being sustained economic growth), Chinese nationalism is growing and should be monitored closely. As witnessed during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chinese are increasingly proud of the tremendous strides their country has made in recent years. More and more young people see China as having “arrived” and might possess the confidence and willingness to assume the responsibilities of a major power. However, as was evident during protests over the 1999 mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the 2004 protests over Japanese textbooks, and more recently the anti-France diatribes that followed the roughing-up of a disabled Olympic torch bearer in Paris by Free Tibet supporters, this nationalism can also lead to jingoism. Chinese leaders of a system with few outlets to express political sentiments are faced with trying to give vent to the occasional uprising of nationalistic anger without letting it get out of hand or allowing it to focus on the failings of the central leadership.

¶20. (C) With notable exceptions like Zhou Enlai, Chinese foreign policy practitioners thirty years ago had little practical experience dealing with the West. Since then, Chinese diplomats and subject matter experts are increasingly well-educated, well-traveled and well-respected. Chinese diplomats at international fora such as the UN and the WTO have become adept at using procedural rules to attain diplomatic or commercial ends. This trend will likely continue in the coming decades, increasing the likelihood of American decision makers finding more able adversaries when we disagree on issues, but also more able partners where we can agree to jointly tackle a problem of mutual concern such as nonproliferation, alternative energy or pandemic influenza.

¶21. (C) While still reluctant to claim China is a global leader, Chinese officials are gradually gaining confidence as a regional power. By the end of the next 30 years, China should no longer be able to portray itself as the representative of lesser developed countries. This does not mean that it will necessarily identify with the more developed, mainly Western countries; it well might choose to pursue some uniquely Chinese path. In the coming 30 years, a U.S. President might be involved in negotiations with a Chinese leader seeking to reshape global financial institutions like the IMF or the WTO or establish rival institutions for non-Western countries in order to mitigate domestic Chinese concerns. Even so, China’s growing position as a nation increasingly distinct from the less-developed world may expand our common interests and make it easier for the United States to convince China to act like a responsible global stakeholder.

¶22. (C) Foreign assistance coordination is another area of opportunity. China is rapidly ramping up its global economic presence, not only via resource extraction ventures and cheap exports, but increasingly via direct investment and assistance. This investment and assistance are welcome in most less-developed countries, whether in Africa or Southeast Asia, and particularly in countries where China’s longstanding policy of “no strings attached no political interference” appeals to democratically-challenged dictators and kleptocrats. However, China is already facing blowback as a result of its more cavalier approach to issues that more scrupulous donors have wrestled with for decades. Scant attention paid to worker safety, job opportunities for local people, environmental protection, and political legitimacy has had negative consequences for China on multiple occasions, from a tarnished international image and being used as a political whipping boy by opposition groups in democratic countries to unpaid loans, expropriated investments, and even the deaths of Chinese expatriates. As a result, China is beginning to understand the merits of international assistance standards not for altruistic reasons, but for achieving China’s own bottom-line imperatives of a more secure international position and better-protected economic interests in third countries. This realization, coupled with China’s growing economic clout on the world stage, make it quite possible that, in the next 30 years, China will come to be identified by the average citizen in less developed countries not as “one of us” but as “one of them.”

¶23. (C) In all likelihood, a new-found (if still somewhat grudging) PRC interest in internationally accepted donor principles such as transparency, good governance, environmental and labor protections, and corporate social responsibility will have matured in 30 years’ time, making China a reliable partner for the United States, other donor countries, and international organizations in alleviating poverty, developing infrastructure, improving education and fighting infectious disease. And as one of the world’s premier economic powers, China can be expected to have all but discarded its over-worn and outdated “non-interference” rhetoric in the face of massive Chinese investment assets and other economic interests abroad.

¶24. (C) As evidenced by Chinese policies toward pariah states like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and Iran, China is still willing to put its need for markets and raw materials above the need to promote internationally accepted norms of behavior. However, the possible secession of southern Sudan (where much of the country’s oil is found) from the repressive Khartoum-based Bashir regime, the erratic treatment of foreign economic interests in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe, the dangers to regional safety and stability posed by Burma’s dysfunctional military junta, and the threat to China’s energy security that a nuclear-armed Iran would represent have given Beijing cause to re-calibrate its previously uncritical stance toward these international outlaws. If China’s integration into global economic and security structures continues apace, we would expect its tolerance for these sorts of disruptive players to decrease proportionately.

¶25. (C) China’s work in the Six-Party Talks and the Shanghai Cooperative Organization may provide guidance as to how to accelerate this trend. China plays a leading and often responsible and constructive role in both of these multilateral groups. Future U.S. policy-makers might usefully consider additional international mechanisms that include both U.S. and Chinese membership such as the proposed Northeast Asia Peace and Security Mechanism that may grow out of the Six-Party Talks. The Chinese themselves have suggested a Six-Party Talks-like grouping to address the Iran nuclear issue, perhaps a P5-plus-1-plus-Iran. In the future, we may wish to consider the United States joining the East Asia Summit (EAS).

¶26. (C) Likewise, as the Chinese economy takes up a larger portion of the global economy, it inevitably will become increasingly affected by the decisions of international economic and financial institutions. Similarly, China’s economic decisions will have global implications, and its cooperation will become essential to solving global-scale problems. Drawing China constructively into regional and global economic and environmental dialogues and institutions will be essential. More and more experts see the utility of establishing an Asia-Pacific G-8, to include China, Japan, and the United States plus India, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia; others say the time is ripe to include China as a member of a G-9. Giving China a greater voice is seen as a way to encourage China to assume a larger burden in supporting the international economic and financial system.

Role of the Military

¶27. (C) The disparate possibilities exist that in the coming decades the PLA will evolve into a major competitor, maintain only a regional presence or become a partner capable of joining us and others to address peacekeeping, peace-enforcing, humanitarian relief and disaster mitigation roles around the world. China may be content to remain only a regional power, but Deng Xiaoping’s maxim urging China to hide its capabilities while biding its time should caution us against predicting that the PLA’s long-term objectives are modest. In the years to come, our defense experts will need to closely monitor China’s contingency plans and we will need to use every diplomatic and strategic tool we have to prevent intimidating moves toward Taiwan. In the coming years, Chinese defense capabilities will continue to improve. The PLA thirty years from today will likely have sophisticated anti-satellite weapons, state-of-the-art aircraft, aircraft carriers and an ability to project force into strategic sea lanes.

¶28. (C) Thirty years ago the PLA was a bloated political organization with antiquated equipment and tactics. Today, the PLA is leaner and is becoming a modern force. Chinese military and paramilitary units have participated in UN-sponsored peacekeeping missions in East Timor, Kosovo, Haiti and Africa. In December 2008, for the first time, the PLA Navy deployed beyond the immediate waters surrounding the country to participate in anything beyond a goodwill tour to combat piracy off the Horn of Africa. It is likely that China will continue to support UN-sponsored PKOs, and if the piracy expedition is successful, China might follow up with expeditions to future piracy hotspots such as the Strait of Malacca or elsewhere.

¶29. (C) Over the past thirty years, Chinese officials have come to begrudgingly acknowledge the benefits to East Asia resulting from the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, especially the extent that a U.S. presence in the Pacific is an alternative to a more robust Japanese military presence. A peaceful resolution of the threat posed by North Korea might cause China to call for an end to the U.S. base presence on the Korean Peninsula. Perceived threats to China’s security posed by Japan’s participation in missile defense or by future high-tech U.S. military technologies might cause tomorrow’s Chinese leaders to change their assessment and to exert economic pressures on U.S. allies like Thailand or the Philippines to choose between Beijing and Washington.

¶30. (C) Whatever the state of our future relations with China, we will need to understand more about the Chinese military. Multilateral training and exercises are constructive ways to promote understanding and develop joint capabilities that could be used in real-life situations. In the coming years, the Chinese may be called upon to participate in regional peacekeeping and humanitarian relief exercises. Some of these could be handled under UN auspices, but others could be bilateral or multilateral. For instance, Cobra Gold, which is held every year in Thailand, is America’s foremost military exercise in Asia. It has a peacekeeping component and since the December 2004 tsunami in Indian Ocean has included a humanitarian relief element. With proper buy-in by the Pentagon and PACOM, we could create a program to engage the PLA more directly both with our military and with friendly militaries in the region. Modest efforts at expanding search and rescue capabilities on the high seas, developing common forensic techniques for use in mass casualty events, conducting exercises with PLA units tasked with responding to civil nuclear emergencies, or table-top exercises for U.S. and Chinese junior officers could be steps that promote trust with little risk. At the same time, more frequent, regularly scheduled high-level reciprocal visits between Chinese and U.S. security officials might eventually lead to a constructive strategic security policy dialogue on nonproliferation, counterterrorism and other issues.

Taiwan and Human Rights

¶31. (C) Taiwan was the most vexing issue holding up the establishment of relations 30 years ago and remains the toughest issue for U.S.-China relations despite significant improvement in cross-Strait relations since the election of Taiwan President Ma. It will remain a delicate topic for the foreseeable future. We should continue to support Taiwan and Mainland efforts to reduce tension by increasing Taiwan’s “international space” and reducing the Mainland’s military build-up across from Taiwan.

¶32. (C) Thirty years ago, the Chinese state interfered in virtually every aspect of its citizens’ lives. An individual’s work unit provided housing, education, medical care and a burial plot. Reeducation sessions and thought reform were common, churches and temples were closed, and average citizens had little access to the outside world. Today, Chinese have far greater ability to travel, read foreign media and worship. Nonetheless, the overall human rights situation falls well short of international norms. Today, China’s growing cadre of well-educated urbanites generally avoids politics and seems more interested in fashion and consumerism than in ideology; after all, outside-the-box political thinking, much less activism, remains dangerous. However, any number of factors in the future ranging from rising unemployment among recent college graduates, or growing discontent over the income divide separating rich urbanites from poor peasants, to discontent among the mass of migrant workers could lead to unrest and increased political activism. The Chinese Government still responds with brutal force to any social, religious, political or ideological movement it perceives as a potential threat. Chinese political leaders’ occasional nods toward the need for political reform and increased democracy suggest a realization that the current one-party authoritarianism has its weak points, but do not promise sufficient relaxation of party control to create a more dynamically stable polity in the long term.

¶33. (C) While the U.S. model of democracy is not the only example of a tolerant open society, we should continue to push for the expansion of individual freedoms, respect for the rule of law and the establishment of a truly free and independent judiciary and press as being necessities for a thriving, modern society and, as such, in China’s own interests. Someday, China will realize political reform. When that day comes, we will want to be remembered by Chinese for having helped China to advance. Randt

Cable 2

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 BEIJING 002112

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/23/2034
TAGS: PGOV CH
SUBJECT: TOP LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS DRIVEN BY CONSENSUS,
INTERESTS, CONTACTS SAY

REF: A. BEIJING 2063
¶B. BEIJING 2040

Classified By: Political Minister Counselor Aubrey Carlson. Reasons 1.
4 (b/d).

Summary

¶1. (C) The need for consensus and the desire to protect vested interests are the main drivers of Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) decision-making and Chinese leadership dynamics in general, according to Embassy contacts with access to leadership circles. Contacts have variously described relations at the top of China’s Party-state structure as akin to those in the executive suite of a large corporation, as determined by the interplay of powerful interests, or as shaped by competition between “princelings” with family ties to party elders and “shopkeepers” who have
risen through the ranks of the Party. End Summary.

Hu Jintao as Chairman of the Board?

¶2. (C) Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo decision-making is similar to executive decision-making in a large company, two well-connected contacts say. xxxxx that Party General Secretary Hu Jintao could be compared to the Chairman of the Board or CEO of a big corporation.xxxxx, used the same analogy in a May 18 meeting with PolOffs. xxxxx said that PBSC decision making was akin to a corporation in which the greater the stock ownership the greater the voice in decisions. “Hu Jintao holds the most stock, so his views carry the greatest weight,” and so on down the hierarchy, but the PBSC did not formally vote, xxxxx. “It is a consensus system,” he maintained, “in which members can exercise veto power.”

¶3. (C) xxxxx had told PolOff previously that he knew “on very good authority” that “major policies,” such as the country’s core policy on Taiwan or North Korea, had to be decided by the full 25-member Politburo. Other more specific matters, he said, were decided by the nine-member PBSC alone. Some issues were put to a formal vote, while others were merely discussed until a consensus was reached. Either way, xxxxx stated sarcastically, the Politburo was the “most democratic body in the world,” the only place in China where true democracy existed. xxxxx said that although there was ”something” to the notion of a rough factional balancing at the top between the Jiang Zemin-Shanghai group and the Hu-Wen group, neither group was dominant, and major issues had to be decided by consensus.

Leadership Dynamics: Driven by Vested Interests

¶4. (C) xxxxx asserted to PolOff March 12 that the Party should be viewed primarily as a collection of interest groups. There was no “reform wing,” xxxxx claimed.xxxxx made the same argument in several discussions with PolOff over the past year, asserting that China’s top leadership had carved up China’s economic “pie,” creating an ossified system in which ”vested interests” drove decision-making and impeded reform as leaders maneuvered to ensure that those interests were not threatened. It was “well known,” xxxxx stated, that former Premier Li Peng and his family controlled all electric power interests; PBSC member and security czar Zhou Yongkang and associates controlled the oil interests; the late former top leader Chen Yun’s family controlled most of the PRC’s banking sector; PBSC member and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Jia Qinglin was the main interest behind major Beijing real estate developments; Hu Jintao’s son-in -law ran Sina.com; and Wen Jiabao’s wife controlled China’s precious gems sector.

¶5. (SBU) Note: In a development that could fan the “vested interest” rumor mill, China-related websites in the United States this week were reporting that a Chinese security technology company with links to Hu’s eldest son, Hu Haifeng, was being investigated in Namibia on charges of corruption. A July 19 article in a Malaysian paper, cited by a U.S.-based dissident website, wenxuecity.com, reported that Hu Haifeng was a “potential witness” in the case but was not himself a suspect. The report said that the younger Hu was a former CEO of Nuctech and currently the Party Secretary of its parent company, Tsinghua Holding Co. Ltd. According to the China Digital Times website at the University of California Berkeley’s China Internet Project, the Central Propaganda Department on July 21 issued orders to block any reference to the case in the PRC media. End note.

¶6. (C) xxxxx, had told PolOff earlier that leaders had close ties to powerful economic actors, especially real estate developers and corporate leaders, who in some cases were officials themselves. The same was true at the local level, xxxxx stated. He claimed that these interest networks had policy implications since most local leaders had “bought” their positions and wanted an immediate financial “return” on their investment. They always supported fast-growth policies and opposed reform efforts that might harm their interests, xxxxx. Vested interests were especially inclined to oppose media openness, he said, lest someone question the shady deals behind land transactions. As a result, the proponents of “growth first” would always be in a stronger position than those who favored controlling inflation or taking care of the poor, xxxxx.

¶7. (C) xxxxx that the central feature of leadership politics was the need to protect oneself and one’s family from attack after leaving office. Thus, current leaders carefully cultivated proteges who would defend their interests once they stepped down. It was natural, xxxxx said, that someone like Xi Jinping, who maintained a non-threatening low profile and had never made enemies, would be elevated by Jiang Zemin and Zeng Qinghong. Xi would act to ensure that Jiang was not harassed or that Jiang’s corrupt son would not be arrested, xxxxx.

Princelings vs. Shopkeepers

¶8. (C)xxxxx, separately described leadership alignments at the top of the CCP as shaped largely by one’s “princeling” or “shopkeeper” lineage. In separate conversations in recent months, xxxxx said that some argued that China’s ”princelings,” the sons and daughters of prominent Communist Party officials, including many who helped found the PRC, shared a perception that they, as the descendents of those who shed blood in the name of the Communist revolution, had a ”right” to continue to lead China and protect the fruits of that revolution. Such a mindset could potentially place the ”princelings” at odds with Party members who do not have similar pedigrees, xxxxx, such as President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and Party members with a CYL background, who were derisively referred to as “shopkeepers’ sons.” xxxxx had heard some princeling families denounce those without revolutionary pedigrees by saying, “While my father was bleeding and dying for China, your father was selling shoelaces.”

Goldberg

Cable 3

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 BEIJING 000263

C O R R E C T E D C O P Y – (ADDED SECSTATE ADDRESS)

SIPDIS

STATE FOR EAP/CM-BRAUNOHLER
STATE FOR EAP/CM
STATE FOR ISN/NESS
USDOE FOR NNSA/SCHEIMAN, GOOREVICH, WHITNEY
USDOE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY-MCGINNIS
STATE PASS TO NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (DOANE)
USDOE FOR INTERNATIONAL/YOSHIDA, BISCONTI, HUANGFU
NSC FOR HOLGATE

EO 12958 DECL: 01/20/2035
TAGS CH, ENRG, KPWR, MNUC, OSCI, PINR, PINS, SENV, TPHY,
TSPL

SUBJECT: PRC: NUCLEAR RESEARCH AT CHINESE ACADEMY OF
SCIENCES
BEIJING 00000263 001.4 OF 002

Classified By: BRENT CHRISTENSEN, ESTH COUNSELOR. REASON: 1.4(b,d,e)

1.(SBU) Summary: In response to an invitation by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), ESTH officer traveled to Hefei, Anhui Province, in December 2009 to visit several Chinese government-sponsored scientific institutions. During this time, ESTH officer learned of the below information through official presentations, personal observation, and informal/discreet conversations with CAS staff members. Most significantly, the Institute of Plasma Physics continues to conduct research on how to use nuclear fusion as a sustainable means to produce energy. At the same time, China is expanding its use of nuclear fission as an energy source and plans to open at least 70 nuclear fission power Qnts within the next 10 years. In 2009, CAS’s Institute of Plasma Physics budget was USD$20 million. Additionally, other CAS institutes are conducting research in biometrics, computational physics and material science, nanoscience and nanomaterials, soft-matter physics, environmental spectrometry, fiber optic wave-length division multiplexing, quantum communications, superconductors and spintroncis, and cognitive sciences. End Summary.

Institute of Plasma Physics – Nuclear Research

¶2. (C) In mid-December 2009, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Hefei, Anhui Province was preparing for another cycle of experiments with its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). EAST was designed to be a controlled nuclear fusion tokamark reactor with superconductive toroidal and poloidal field magnets and a D-shaped cross-section. One of the experimental goals of this device was to prove that a nuclear fusion reaction can be sustained indefinitely, at high enough temperatures, to produce energy in a cost-effective way. In 2009, IIP successfully maintained a 10 million degree Celsius plasma nuclear fusion reaction for 400 seconds. IIP also successfully maintained a 100 million degree Celsius plasma nuclear fusion reaction for 60 seconds. One of IIP’s immediate goals is now to maintain a 100 million degree Celsius plasma nuclear fusion reaction for over 400 seconds. Currently, IIP is also conducting research into hybrid fusion-fission nuclear reactors that may be able to sustain nuclear reactions indefinitely, and at sufficient temperatures, to cost-effectively produce energy. IIP officials stated that China has the explicit goal of building at least 70 nuclear fission power plants within the next 10 years. IIP scientists claimed current Chinese nuclear energy production efforts use Uranium 235, but research is being done to make Uranium 238 a feasible alternative. IIP’s 2009 budget was USD$20 million – a two-fold increase over the previous year – and IIP leadership expects their budget to increase again in 2010.

[AK: cut.]

Institute of Intelligent Machines – Biometrics Research

¶3. (C) The Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Institute of Intelligent Machines (IIM) in Hefei has developed a biometrics device that uses a person’s pace to identify them. The device measure weight and two-dimensional sheer forces applied by a person’s foot during walking to create a uniquely identifiable biometrics profile. The device can be covertly installed in a floor and is able to collect biometrics data on individuals covertly without their knowledge. When questioned about the device’s potential applications, IIM officials stated the device was being used by “secret” customers and was not available on the commercial market. IIM also said they were involved with China’s “Program 863.” (COMMENT: Program 863 is China’s national high-technology development plan that includes both military and civilian technology development programs; therefore, it is likely the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is one of the customers for whom this biometrics device was developed. END COMMENT)

Institute of Solid State Physics – Nanotechnology Research

¶4. (C) In mid-December 2009, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) in Hefei was conducting research in the fields of computational physics and material science, nanomaterials, and soft-matter physics. ISSP’s 2009 budget was roughly $6 million (USD). ISSP’s top priority projects are: one-dimensional nanomaterials, spin and charge research using perovskite manganese oxides, and the design and preparation of high-dampening materials. ISSP also conducts research on nanomaterials and nanostructures for China’s “Program 973.” (NOTE: Program 973 is China’s national plan for improving basic scientific research and development. END NOTE)

Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics – Spectrometry & Fiber Optic Research

¶5. (C) In mid-December 2009, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (IOFM) in Hefei was modifying environmental spectrometry technology to detect TATP explosives for use in counter-terrorism efforts. IOFM was also conducting fiber optic research on wave-length division multiplexing (WDM) technologies using pulsed and continuous laser sources at both single-mode and multi-mode wavelengths. A cursory walk through one of their labs revealed that IOFM was specifically conducting experiments in the 980-1150 nanometer range, and that they were conducting experiments using hydrogen-filled fiber optic communication lines. (COMMENT: Hydrogen-filled fiber optic lines are technologically challenging to manufacture, but provide many advantages; one of which is increased security and protection from tampering. END COMMENT)

University of Science and Technology of China – Organization & Research

¶6. (C) In mid-December 2009, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei had academic programs focusing on Math, Physics, Chemistry, Life Sciences, Nuclear Science, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Management, Humanities, and a department dedicated to the development of gifted young people. USTC has 37,000 staff and 40,000 graduate students. USTC oversees two national laboratories: the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale (HFNL). HFNL has 95 faculty members and roughly 400 graduate students. HFNL research focuses on quantum communication, nanoscience, superconductors, spintronics, and cognitive sciences. In the area of quantum communication, HFNL was conducting research in quantum teleportation and free space quantum cryptography that scientists hope will result in “totally secure” communications. USTC also oversees China’s “Program 178,” although they did not describe the nature of this program. (COMMENT: A cursory walk through their labs seemed to indicate they had already succeeded in single-particle quantum teleportation and are now trying to conduct dual-particle quantum teleportation. END COMMENT)

HUNTSMAN

Cable 4

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 BEIJING 000367

SIPDIS

STATE PASS USAID

EO 12958 DECL: 02/11/2020
TAGS PREL, ECON, EAID, EINV, CH, XA
SUBJECT: AFRICAN EMBASSIES SUSPICIOUS OF US-CHINA
DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION IN AFRICA

REF: (A) 09 BEIJING 955 (B) 09 BEIJING 1311 (C) 09 BEIJING 2836

Classified By: Economic Minister Counselor William Weinstein. Reasons 1.4 (b) and (d)

Summary

¶1. (C) African Embassy officials told EmbOffs that many in the African community were uncomfortable with the concept of US-China development cooperation in Africa. China’s fast, efficient, “no strings attached” bilateral approach is popular in the region, as is the PRC preference for infrastructure over governance projects. African officials fear that U.S. or European interference will slow down the assistance process and tie conditions to Chinese aid. In the past, the EU angered many African countries when it proposed trilateral cooperation. The Chinese subsequently backed out of discussions citing lack of African support. In addition, African officials believe that competition between donors has had positive consequences for African development, giving the African countries options after several decades of a largely “Western” development model. Despite apprehensions, one official believed that U.S.-China cooperation could be positive if carried out with active African participation. The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) was offered as an example of an organization that has managed to collaborate well with China in Africa. End summary.

Threatening the Chinese way

¶2. (C) During a February 8 lunch, Kenyan Ambassador to China Julius Ole Sunkuli said he and other Africans were wary of the U.S.-China dialogue on Africa and felt Africa had nothing to gain from China cooperating with the international donor community. Sunkuli claimed that Africa was better off thanks to China’s practical, bilateral approach to development assistance and was concerned that this would be changed by “Western” interference. He said he saw no concrete benefit for Africa in even minimal cooperation. Sunkuli said Africans were frustrated by Western insistence on capacity building, which translated, in his eyes, into conferences and seminars (REF C). They instead preferred China’s focus on infrastructure and tangible projects. He also worried that Africa would lose the benefit of having some leverage to negotiate with their donors if their development partners joined forces.

Lessons from the EU experience

¶3. (C) South African Minister Plenipotentiary Dave Malcolmson echoed the same reservations in a February 9 meeting. According to him, lessons could be learned from the EU experience in 2008. When the EU put together a policy paper on trilateral development cooperation in Africa, many African countries were annoyed because they were not consulted on the issue. They argued that the third party in these nominally trilateral discussions was conspicuously absent. They perceived this as a Western attempt to reign in China’s Africa assistance. Malcolmson said the African resistance prevented any concrete progress coming out of this initiative as the Chinese then subsequently backed out of the discussion, citing African opposition.

Africans don’t want conditions, they want options

¶4. (C) African countries principally fear that the U.S. and other Western countries will use trilateral cooperation to try to attach governance conditions to Chinese development. Malcolmson, who previously worked at the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) secretariat, recalled that governance projects received a lot more support from Western donor countries than infrastructure projects. He opined that although governance, peace and security are crucial to African growth, they must be accompanied by measures to reduce poverty and build infrastructure.

¶5. (C) Malcolmson echoed Sunkuli’s comment that African countries also fear losing their bargaining power. China’s emergence in Africa as a counterbalance to U.S. and European donors has been very positive for Africa by creating “competition” and giving African countries options. He recalled that after the 2006 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit, when China announced its commitments to Africa to much international media fanfare, traditional donors changed their attitude. They recognized that they had to measure up to China and “came calling.” The EU proposed infrastructure projects (after having defacto given up supporting these types of projects) and the World Bank began to support more agriculture projects.

The DFID example and recommendations for the future

¶6. (C) Malcolmson clarified that if U.S.-China cooperation leads to a real escalation of resources then it could be a positive step, but many Africans expect that it would slow down development. He cited the DFID’s relationship with China as an example of healthy cooperation. DFID’s success has come from focusing on small projects and working largely outside formal channels (REF A). Malcolmson recommended working through regional African organizations like the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) as a way to alleviate African concerns. If both China and the United States contribute resources to promising African development projects, then Africans will welcome trilateral cooperation. He said this would have the added benefit of encouraging the Chinese to venture beyond bilateral development assistance and support regional projects.

Comment

¶7. (C) Sunkuli and Malcolmson’s comments are a potential warning sign as the USG prepares for the upcoming U.S.-China Sub-Dialogue on Africa. As the PRC continues to stress a policy of “non- interference” in the internal affairs of other countries, China could well use any voiced African opposition as an excuse to stop or slow progress on further discussions or collaboration. We should be careful to pick projects that would have broad support within the African community, preferably African-initiated and led, to get the development cooperation dialogue started on the right foot. In addition, we should clearly articulate the benefits of our cooperation to our African counterparts and include African voices in the debate on the U.S.- China-Africa relationship.

HUNTSMAN

• The current atmosphere CO2 concentration (384ppm) correlates to the Pliocene 3mn years ago, when temperatures were 3C higher and the sea level was 25m higher. [No "hockey stick", no models even, involved; just paleoclimate].
• This degree of warming is now inevitable; if all emissions were to stop today, as a rule of thumb, it would take around 30 years for half of that projected warming to occur as the Earth system moves towards the new equilibrium. [Consequences of heat diffusion / laws of thermodynamics].
• Emissions aren’t stopping, but accelerating, and this will continue with the industrialization of China and India. [Economic growth as linchpin of the System].
• Global dimming, which had hitherto partially shielded us from the rising temperatures, will start playing a much lesser role. The effects of CO2 are cumulative, soot and SO2 particulates are washed out of the atmosphere within months.

• Beyond 2C of warming, the Earth will reach tipping points in which GW becomes self-sustaining. Such tipping points include the melting of the Arctic (reduces albedo), release of Siberian methane from melting permafrost, forests around the world turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources due to accelerated decomposition, the possible death of the Amazon rainforest, etc.
• Though geoengineering may work, as you point out, there are also many arguments against it. It will probably be tried in the end, but only as a last-ditch throw of the dice that cannot be guaranteed to succeed.
• Furthermore, innate human psychological features such as conservatism, denial, hedonism, and susceptibility to creeping normalcy and “landscape amnesia”, as well as the anarchic nature of the international system, means that the chances of any effective global action being taken in time is near zero.

The Copenhagen Summit, which failed to agree on anything substantial largely thanks to Chinese intransigence, is a good demonstration of the last point. The principle of state sovereignty is a prime value amongst the Chinese ruling elite, translating in practice into a zero-sum, mercantile view of global economic and political affairs, which will make compromise very difficult at a time when the country’s sights are set on breaking through into 21st century advanced industrialism (in which green technologies and geoengineering will probably play a major role). But it will not be able to achieve this breakthrough without its status as the “workshop of the world” (reliant on coal for most of its energy needs), which brings in the foreign currency needed to acquire the advanced technologies it needs to become a true superpower. Other factors to consider are 1) China’s need to maintain fast growth to soak up its growing, restless urban labor force, which requires the high economic growth that is driven by prodigious increases in fossil-fuel dependent energy usage, and 2) the risk of social and political instability if it really committed to firmer mitigation goals, with their implication of lesser growth rates.

And so on. Eventually, it will come to pass that the waning global industrial System, being increasingly overwhelmed by limits to growth, will embark on a “final gambit” in a search of a silver bullet to its energy-and-pollution predicament. Very soon geoengineering research will become a extremely important area - the process is already beginning – and within a few more decades, perhaps as soon as the 2030′s, actual physical construction will begin, probably by a coalition of countries like the US and China, etc.

For a variety of reasons, this is unlikely to work – one of my replies from a fascinating discussion on this topic at Sublime Oblivion Forums.

1. The science is poorly understood, and despite the research I doubt this will change cardinally – the Earth is an extremely complex system. Solutions may need to be far more extensive, and hence costly, by an order of magnitude. Or alternatively we might overcompensate – “Oops we released too many sulphate particles, we have an Ice Age, sorry Russia & Canada!”
2. Which brings me to another point - the potential for international conflict (i.e. your “unilateralism” point can be negative as easily as positive). Anything to do with blocking or diluting the Sun’s rays will have very big effect on regional climes, having the potential to cancel the El Nino system, stall the monsoons, induce desertification, drastically reduce photosynthetic potential, etc. It won’t matter if the aggrieved nations are small and weak, but if they are Great Powers they can lash out at the system. Weaponizing the climate becomes an accepted form of warfare (it kind of already is, but even more so).
3. Another important thing is that climate change is only one part of emerging limits to growth (LtG). Linearly projecting from today, substantial geoengineering projects *might* be inexpensive enough to be implemented without significant cuts in security / military, other investments, or the consumption needed to keep people satiated. In a world facing many other pressures, key amongst them the declining EROEI of energy and an uncertain food outlook, diverting resources for geoengineering may prove to be a significant, if necessary, further strain on the entire system. Everywhere citizens will be growing tired of the ever heavier burden of the state, which will be further reinforced by their perceived arrogance in trying to take control over the weather like some kind of god.
4. Furthermore, geoengineering can exacerbate some of the LtG stresses. If you follow thru on the releasing sulphate aerosols idea, this will reinforce global dimming and lead to reduced crop yields – a similar effect, ultimately, on food production that you would have had from the heat stress of global warming left unchecked. As I asked in The Dilemmas, would you prefer “Fire or darkness?”
5. Finally, there’s the fact that all these solution are fragile and vulnerable to disruption. Aggrieved states who suffer from its effects. Even terrorists. For instance, one of the things I think may be done is to combine a solar sunshade with space-based solar power (which is in principle 3x as efficient as ground-based, if you exclude the costs of getting the material into space). Combining them will make a powerful synthesis that could kill two birds with one stone. However, such a huge structure, whose location is always known (“L1″), will be very vulnerable to damage and destruction from Earth for any nation with advanced rocket and/or laser capabilities.

From commentator Martin:

So in particular space mirrors are firmly in SF domain and will remain so, sulfur/sulfate particles might work and lower temperatures by fraction of centigrade as long as we are going to load to stratosphere every year as much as Mt Pinatubo eruption did.
That is because sulfur is quickly washed down on earth (effects of Mt. Pinatubo eruption didn’t last more than a year and a bit).
On the other hand, if we are going to lower temperature by even 1.5*C, then our annual global production of sulfur will not do (for linear drop of temperature you need exponentially growing sulfur load).
So really sulfur based adventure have no prospect of success.
Another approach was based on ocean fertilization with iron with hope that it will deliver a lot of CO2 gobbling algi.
However experiments have shown that it is not the case because algal bloom is swiftly followed by other organisms which are eating algi and so it quickly fizzles out.
Ideas like artificial trees are good, if one want some research funds to waste and live comfortably meantime but above that they are completely useless.

So we are left with about only one hopeful project - “cloud ships” and this may or may not work and if it does, some unexpected and undesirable problems may easily emerge.

It is not even worth to discuss geoengineering from an angle of unilateral action.
We can easily end up with one nation deliberately cooling climate and another one deliberately warming it up.
Outcome would be unpredictable and most likely very unpleasant.
Without a political agreement of major global powers geoengineering is a no go area.

Another perspective from T. Greer:

Both Anatoly (in points #1 and #4) and Martin point out that the science of geoengineering is rather shaky – it is not as if we have a laboratory to practice terraforming experiments with, right?

I do not dispute this point. Nor do I dispute that geoenginnering will have unforeseeable consequences. It is also true that there are very few technologically viable geoengineering options at this moment in time.

None of this detracts from my over all point, however. Humanity has a history of dealing with problems of today without thought of the problems of tomorrow. (An idea at the center of Mr. Tainter’s studies, to choose a work popular here.) There is no reason to expect this to change in the future. If one country is one the brink of an existential climate-inspire subsistence crisis, I doubt that they will slow down to consider the possible unforeseen consequences their actions may have — there simply will not be enough time for such.

Likewise, I do not think India is going to give a wit for how Russia will fare in an ice age.

The possibility of conflict is thus very high. If the Russians think that the Indians are about to trigger an ice age then they will doubtlessly do all they can to stop the Indians from moving forward. If this involves the utilization of military force, then it shall be utilized.

The really frightening scenario, however, is one in which many countries are attempting to manipulate the climate at the same time. We both have mentioned this in our respective posts, but I think it merits further discussion. Retaliatory climate degradation might be the future of warfare; it may very well prove to be one of the more dangerous threats to face humanity. If multiple actors are playing with the climate, the chances of any one of them messing up on a grand and irreversible scale skyrockets.

Yet even if the technology appears, costs become realistic, and the geoengineering works, the results may well be like a “dystopic world out of a science fiction story” (Ken Caldeira):

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: We we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained … all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth … and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look less silly than it does.

Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.

Caldeira does the sci-fi angle. I’ll do the fantasy angle, if I may.

[The heroine of the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, in front of the despotic Lord Ruler's capital of Luthadel and one of the ashmounts that cool the world enough so as to allow human survival. Art by Mike King].

I recently read the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, an original fantasy series in which all the major tropes of the genre are inverted – it is a world in which the Dark Lord has won, in which the heroine’s own altruism is a tragic flaw, and in which the final apocalypse leads to utopia.

In this world, Scadriel, the landscape is dominated by the ashmounts – volcanoes streaming a never-ending sea of ash across a brown, desolate landscape. The so-called Final Empire, presided over by the tyrannical Lord Ruler, dominates the world through a brutal political system of bureaucratic surveillance, military coercion, and feudalistic obligation. The peasant slaves are hard-pressed to eke out a subsistence existing, let alone provide the surplus to maintain the Empire with its extensive socio-political complexity; yet provide they do, under the brutal knout of their noble masters.

Yet one of its most fascinating features is that it may well be an allegory for our future artificial, controlled world, in which nature’s formerly free ecological services would have to be provided by human effort. Far from being a reflection of the Lord Ruler’s evil, the ashmounts are, in fact, intended to cool the Earth, so as to prevent it from burning up. One thousand years ago, the Lord Ruler had used a source of near boundless power, the “Well of Ascension” (the fossil fuels that enabled the rise of industrialism) to protect the world from another evil force, the Deepness (our Malthusian past) – mists that crept out in the daylight and killed the crops by depriving them of sunlight. But in using this power, he rashly moved the Earth closer to the Sun in order to burn off those mists (geoengineering); he overestimated the shift, and to prevent a fiery cataclysm, had to hurriedly create the ashmounts, and re-engineer human physiology to be able to withstand the ash (bioengineering).

From this perspective, the Lord Ruler’s conservative totalitarianism, with its Asiatic mode of production-type economic system, becomes explainable and even justifiable. To maintain the Lord Ruler’s Empire, which held evil forces at bay and created massive underground retreats and food stockpiles, there needed to be 1) extensive exploitation to squeeze our the necessary surplus from a barren land, 2) the suppression of dangerous liberalism and innovation (see past experience), and 3) there needed to be extensive legitimization of his rule (the benefits of Empire, the religion of the Steel Ministry, etc) as well as coercion (the koloss armies). Like Stalin, the Lord Ruler was a despotic Messiah, who leads his people like the God of the Old Testament.

It is not too difficult to think of futurist parallels for our own world. Like Faustus and his pet demon Mephistopheles, humanity is recklessly using its overabundance of energy to transform the world in all ways, depleting its fossil fuels (just as the Lord Ruler depleted the Well of Ascension and had to wait for it to recharge for a millennium), while the resultant pollution spells doom for many of the stabilizing mechanisms and ecological services that make the world a Goldilocks planet perfect for human habitation. (This pollution, btw, could be analogous to the force “Ruin”, the primal antithesis to the force of “Preservation”. that is unleashed when the heroine Vin lets out the power in the Well of Ascension, instead of taking it for herself like the Lord Ruler did a thousand years ago). The ashmounts could be ashboats, or “cloud boats”, to spray seawater into the atmosphere to increase cloud albedo, or fertilize the world’s oceans with iron filaments; they keep the planet cool enough for human survival, at the cost of a global dimming that depresses crop yields.

Few people understand the real necessity of the Lord Ruler’s system for human survival (“You know not what I do for mankind!”, – his dying words before being killed by the heroine), and so too the common people will curse the NWO / “world government”, with its armies of bureaucrats (obligators / Inquisitors) and transnational elites (nobles), for their resource-intensive, aesthetically-ugly geoengineering projects. (Speaking of which, it will have to be a world government of some sort to build the consensus for and concentrate the requisite resources for massive geoengineering projects). Due to popular antagonism, even more resources will have to be devoted to legitimization of the regime (propaganda about the renewable, innovative society, drawing energy from wind mills and protecting the Earth from the scorching Sun), and to coercion (no doubt involving an extensive surveillance and militarized police apparatus – much of the framework already happens to be in place, anyway, and who knows, perhaps even bioconstruct armies like the koloss to crush any rebellious provinces). Any rebels will not believe the legitimizing arguments of the NWO, seeing them as self-serving; just as Vin and her rebel comrades did not see the Lord Ruler as the indispensable God that his religion proclaimed Him to be.

Collapse is not an option, despite the massive costs accruing to maintaining this high level of complexity. Quite simply, once the extensive industrial infrastructure of the System / NWO is no longer maintained, the land will go to chaos and population dieoff will begin. This will be made worse by our unleashed forces of Ruin – global warming, which will jumpstart with earnest once the power of Preservation (the geoengineering installations) ground to a halt. Perhaps, just as in the last minutes of the Mistborn trilogy, the world will experience truly runaway warming, as civilization falls apart, the oceans begin to boil away, and the Earth turns into Venus. What then? In Mistborn, Ruin lost the atium supplies that were the fundamental source of its ruinous power; the real-life equivalent could be a cloud of self-replicating nanobots designed to cleanse the atmosphere of CO2, a cache of which was build under the NWO to release should the worse come to pass (breakdown of the geoengineering system that keeps the world habitable). But that would present its own problems, such as overshoot (clearing away so much of the CO2 that we revert to Snowball Earth). An even more apocalyptic possibility is that the nanobots mutate into a “grey goo” that spreads uncontrollably, devouring all organic matter until the surface of the Earth is entirely covered by a film of dead, grey dust, the red Sun gleaming balefully through the roiling sea of inverted ashen waves hiding the star-spangled heavens above.

Eventually, Ruin will win over Preservation in our solar system, and eventually the universe. Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that. All order has a tendency to degenerate into chaos, though some interesting patterns and complex patterns like human civilization can appear in between. If you consider our current civilization to have some kind of positive worth or value, then it follows that it is worthwhile trying to minimize its chances of coming to a sticky, premature end. The most effective way of doing that is to embark on the road to Green Communism.

This state of affairs, however, is slowly ebbing away. Of course, from the earliest times, civilizational theorists like Ibn Khaldun, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee dreamed of rationalizing history, and their efforts were expounded upon by thinkers like Nikolai Kondratiev, Fernand Braudel, Joseph Schumpeter, and Heinz von Foerster. However, it is only with the most recent crop of pioneers like Andrei Korotayev, Sergey Nefedov, and Peter Turchin that a true, rigorous mathematized history is coming into being – a discipline recently christened cliodynamics.

As an introduction to this fascinating area of research, I will summarize, review, and run an active commentary on one of the most comprehensive and theoretical books on cliodynamics: Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Korotayev et al (it’s quite rare, as there’s only a single copy of it in the entire UC library system). The key insight is that world demographic / economic history can be modeled to a high degree of accuracy by just three basic trends: hyperbolic / exponential, cyclical, and stochastic*.

Korotayev, Andrei & Artemy Malkov, Daria Khaltourina – Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends (2006)
Category: cliodynamics, world systems; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: Andrei Korotayev (wiki); review @ cliodynamics.ru; a similar text на русском.

Introduction: Millennial Trends

Google Books has the first chapter Introduction: Millennial Trends.

In 1960, von Foerster showed that the world’s population at any given time between 1-1958 CE could be approximated by the simple equation below, where N is the population, t is time, C is a constant, and t(0) is a “doomsday” when the population becomes infinite (worked out to be 13 November, 2026).

(1)     N(t) = C / ( t(0) – t )

According to Korotayev et al, this simple formula of hyperbolic explains 99%+ of the micro-variation in world population from 1000 to 1970. Furthermore, a quadratic-hyperbolic equation of the same type accurately represents the increase in the GDP. Why?

He discusses the work of Michael Kremer, who attempted to build a model by making the Malthusian assumption that “population is limited by the available technology, so that the growth rate of population is proportional to the growth rate of technology”, and the “Kuznetsian” assumption that “high population spurs technological change because it increases the number of potential inventors”.

(2)     G = r*T*N^a

(3)     dT/dt = b*N*T

Above, G is gross output, T is technology, N is population, and a, b, and r are parameters. Note that dT, change in technology, is dependent on both N (indicates potential number of inventors) and T (a wider technological base enabled more inventions to be made on its basis). Solving this system of equations results in hyperbolic population growth, illustrated by the following loop: population growth → more potential inventors → faster tech growth → faster growth of Earth’s carrying capacity → faster population growth.

Korotayev then counters arguments dismissing such theories as “demographic adventures of physicists” that have no validity because the world system was not integrated until relatively recently. However, that is only if you use Wallerstein’s “bulk-good” criterion. If one instead uses the softer “information-network” criterion, noting that there is evidence for the “systematic spread of major innovations… throughout the North African – Eurasian Oikumene for a few millennia BCE” – and bearing in mind that this emerging belt of cultures of similar technological complexity contained the vast majority of the global human population since the Neolithic Revolution – then this can be interpreted as “a tangible result of the World System’s functioning”.

Then Korotayev et al present their own model that describes not only the hyperbolic world population growth, but also the macrodynamics of global GDP in the world system until 1973.

(4)     G = k1*T*N^a

(5)     dN/dt = k2*S*N

(6)     dT/dt = k3*N*T

Above, T is technology, N is population, S is surplus per person (and S = g – m, where g is production per person and m is the subsistence level required for zero population growth), and k1, k2, k3, and a are parameters. This can be simplified to:

(7)     dN/dt = a*S*N

(8)     dS/dt = b*N*S

(9)     G = m*N + S*N

As S should be proportional to N in the long run, S = k*N. Replace.

(10)     dN/dt = k*a*N^2

Recall that solving this differential equation gives us hyperbolic growth (1).

(11)     N(t) = C / ( t(0) – t )

Furthermore, replacing N(t) above with S = k*N gives (12), allowing us to work out the “surplus world product” S*N (13).

(12)     S = k*C / ( t(0) – t )

(13)     S*N = k*C^2 / ( t(0) – t )^2

Hence in the long-run, this suggests that global GDP growth can be approximated by a quadratic hyperbola. Other indices that can be described by these or similar models include literacy, urbanization, etc.

One finding is that after 1973, there world GDP growth rate itself falls (rather than just a slowing of the growth of the GDP growth rate, as predicted by the original model): the explanation is, “the literate population is more inclined to direct a larger share of its GDP to resource restoration and to prefer resource economizing strategies than is the illiterate one, which, on the one hand, paves the way towards a sustainable-development society, but, on the other hand, slows down the economic growth rate”. To take this into account, they build a modified model, according to which, “the World System’s divergence from the blow-up regime would stabilize the world population, the world GDP… technological growth, however, will continue, though in exponential rather than hyperbolic form”.**

The consequences for the future are that though GDP growth will reach an asymptote, technological improvements will continue raising the standard of living due to the “Nordhaus effect” (e.g. combine Moore’s Law – exponentially cheapening computing power, with the growing penetration of ever more physical goods by IT).

“It appears important to stress that the present-day decrease of the World System’s growth rates differs radically from the decreases that inhered in oscillations of the past… it is a phase transition to a new development regime that differs radically from the ones typical of all previous history”. As evidence, unlike in all past eras, the slowing of the world population growth rate after the 1960′s did not occur against a backdrop of catastrophically falling living standards (famine, plague, wars, etc); to the contrary, the causes are the fall in fertility due to social security, more literacy, family planning, etc. Similarly, the decrease in the urbanization and literacy growth rates is not associated this time by the onset of Malthusian problems, but is set against continuing high economic growth and the “closeness of the saturation level”.

(AK: This rosy-tinged analysis is persuasive and somewhat rigorous, but there is a gaping hole – they used only “technology” as a proxy for the carrying capacity. However, as Limits to Growth teaches us, part of what technology did is open up a windfall of energy resources – high-grade oil, coal, and natural gas – that have been used to fuel much of the post-1800 growth in carrying capacity (disguised as “technology” in this model), yet whose gains are not permanent because of their unsustainable exploitation. Furthermore, the modern technological base is underpinned by the material base, and cannot survive without it – you can’t have semiconductor factories without reliable electricity supplies – and generally speaking, the more complex the technology, the greater the material base that is needed to sustain it (this may constitute an ultimate limit on technological expansion). This major factor is also neglected in Korotayev’s millennial model. As such, the conclusion that the world has truly and permanently reached a sustainable-development regime does not follow. This is not to say that it is without merit, however – it’s just that it needs to be integrated with the work done by the Limits to Growth / peak oil / climate modelers.)

Chapter 1: Secular Cycles

Korotayev et al conclude that these millennial models are only useful on the millennial scale (duh!), and that typical agrarian political-demographic cycles follow Malthusian dynamics because in the shorter term, population tends to growth much more rapidly than technology / carrying capacity, which led to a plateauing of the population, growing stress due to repeated perturbations, and an eventual tipping point over into collapse / dieoff.

The basic logic of these models is as follows. After the population reaches the ceiling of the carrying capacity of land, its growth rate declines toward near-zero values. The system experiences significant stress with decline in the living standards of the common population, increasing the severity of famines, growing rebellions, etc. As has been shown by Nefedov, most complex agrarian systems had considerable reserves for stability, however, within 50–150 years these reserves were usually exhausted and the system experienced a demographic collapse (a Malthusian catastrophe), when increasingly severe famines, epidemics, increasing internal warfare and other disasters led to a considerable decline of population. As a result of this collapse, free resources became available, per capita production and consumption considerably increased, the population growth resumed and a new sociodemographic cycle started.

He notes that newer models are far more complex and predict the dynamics of variables such as elite overproduction, class struggle, urbanization, and wealth inequality with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy (e.g. see A Model of Demographic Cycles in a Traditional Society: The Case of Ancient China by Nefedov). Korotayev et al then list three major approaches to modeling agrarian political-demographic cycles: Turchin (2003), Chu & Lee (1994), and Nefedov (1999-2004).

1. Turchin has constructed an elegant “fiscal-demographic” model, in which the state plays a positive role by by a) maintaining armed order against banditry and lawlessness, and b) doing works such as roads, canals, irrigations systems, flood control, etc, – both of which increase the effective carrying capacity. However, as demographic growth brings the population to the carrying capacity of the land (in practice, the population plateaus somewhat below it due to elite predation), surpluses diminish. So do the state’s revenues, since the state taxes surpluses; meanwhile, expenditures keep on rising (because of the reasons identified by Tainter). Eventually, there sets in a fiscal crisis and the state must tax the future to pay for the present by drawing down the surpluses accumulated in better days; when those surpluses run out, the state can no longer function and collapses, which leads to a radical decline of the carrying capacity and population as the land falls into anarchy and irrigation and transport infrastructure decays. Applied to Russia, as I wrote in Russia’s Sisyphean Loop:

For the Empire is, at root, a social preservation mechanism to allow Russians to enjoy the benefits of sustained socio-political complexity – internal peace, a degree of security from foreign marauders, a large contiguous market space permitting economies of scale and autonomous economic development, and the aesthetic trappings of imperial splendor.

… once [crises] occur – given the amount of stress holding the system together – they tend to be extremely catastrophic… the real Russia outside the Kremlin crumbles reverts back to its natural state – the natural state, an anarchic state of stasis, decentralized Chaos; abandoning its cities, laws, and other accoutrements of civilization for the primeval mysticism of its endless plains, dark forests and Slavic skies.

2. The Chu and Lee model consists of rulers (including soldiers), peasants (grow food), and bandits (steal food). The peasants support the rulers to fight the bandits, while there is a constant flux between the peasants and bandits whose magnitude depends on the caloric & survivability payoffs to belonging in each respective class. However, it’s not a fully-formed model as its main function is to fill in the gaps in the historical record, by plugging in already-known historical data on warfare and climatic factors; they neglected to associate crop production with climatic variability (colder winters result in lesser crop yields) and the role of the state in food distribution (which staved off collapse for some time and was historically significant in China).

3. Nefedov has integrated stochasticity into his models, in which random climatic effects produce different year-to-year crop yields. One result is that as carrying capacity is reached, surpluses vanish and the effects of good and bad years play an increasingly important role – i.e. a closed system under stress suffers increasingly from perturbations. One bad year can lead to a critical number of people leaving the farms for the cities or banditry, initiating a cascading collapse. However, he neglects the “direct role of rebellion and internal warfare on cycle behavior”, so as the model is purely economic, each demographic collapse is, implausibly, immediately followed by a new rise.

The ultimate aim of Korotayev et al is to integrate the positive features of all three models (Chapter 3), but for now the take a closer look at the political-demographic history of China, the pre-industrial civilization that maintained the best records.

Chapter 2: Historical Population Dynamics in China – Some Observations

This chapter is available in Russian – Историческая макродинамика Китая.

Below is a graph of China’s population on a millennial scale. Note the magnitude and cyclical nature of its demographic collapses. Note also that such cycles are far from unique to Chinese civilization (see collapse of the Roman Empire), and reflect for a minute, even, on the profound difference between the modern world of permanent growth, and the pre-industrial, “Malthusian” world.

Since it would be futile to repeat the fine details of every political-demographic cycle in China’s, I will instead just list the main points.

• The cycles tend to be ones of a fast rise in population, when surpluses are high and people are prosperous. It plateaus and stagnates when the population reaches the carrying capacity, when there is overpopulation, much lowered consumption, increasing debilitation of state power, and rising social inequality and urbanization.
• Sometimes, such as in the middle Sung period, population stress did not lead to a collapse, but instead to a “radical rise of the carrying capacity of the land” through administrative and technological innovations. This increased the permanent ceiling of Chinese carrying capacity from 60mn to around 120mn souls, and in doing so alleviated the population stress until the early 12th century (AK: e.g. in Early Modern Britain, the problem of deforestation was solved by coal). At that point, China may have once again solved its problems, even escaping from its Malthusian trap (AK: some historians have noted that it had many of the prerequisites for an industrial revolution). That was not to be, as “the Sung cycle was interrupted quite artificially by exogenous forces, namely, by the Jurchen and finally Mongol conquests”.
• The Yuan dynasty would not reach the highs of the Sung because of the general bleakness of the 14th century – the end of the Medieval Warm Period, unprecedented floods and droughts in China, etc, which lowered the carrying capacity to a critical level. The resulting famines and rebellions led to the demographic collapse of the 1350′s, as well as the de facto collapse of the state, as China transitioned to warlordism.
• Carrying-capacity innovations under the Ming did not, eventually, outrun population growth, and it collapsed during the turmoil of the transition to the Qing dynasty. The innovations accelerated throughout the 18th century (e.g. New World crops, land reclamation, intensification of farming). Indications of subsistence stress as China entered the 19th century were a) declining life expectancies, b) rising staple prices, and c) a huge increase in female infanticide rates in the first half of the 18th century. By 1850, China was again under very severe subsistence stress and the state grew impotent just as Europeans began to encroach on the Celestial Empire.
• Huang 2002: 528-9, worthy of quotation in extenso. “Recent research in Chinese legal history suggests that the same subsistence pressures behind female infanticide led to widespread selling of women and girls… Another related social phenomenon was the rise of an unmarried “rogue male” population, a result of both poverty (because the men could not afford to get married) and of the imbalance in sex ratios that followed from female infanticide. Recent research shows that this symptom of the mounting social crisis led, among other things, to large changes in Qing legislation vis-à-vis illicit sex… Even more telling, perhaps, is the host of new legislation targeting specifically the ‘baresticks’ single males (guanggun) and related ‘criminal sticks’ of bandits (guntu, feitu), clearly a major social problem in the eyes of the authorities of the time”. See Diagram V.13. (AK: Interestingly, China’s one-child policy, by artificially restricting fertility in order to ward off a “Maoist dynasty” Malthusian crisis, has led to many of the same problems in the past two decades).
• Speaking of which… China had further dips in its population after during perturbations in the 1850′s (the millenarian Taiping Rebellion), the 1930′s (Japanese occupation), and 1959-62 (the Great Leap Forward), each progressively smaller than the last in its relative magnitude. For instance, the latter just formed a short plateau.

Korotayev et al conclude the chapter by running statistical tests on China’s historical population figures from 57-2003. In contrast to linear regression (R^2 = 0.398) and exponential regression (R^2 = 0.685), the simple hyperbolic growth model described in “Introduction: Millennial Trends” produces an almost perfect fit with the observed data (R^2 = 0.968). So in the very, very long-term, the effects of China’s secular cycles are swamped by the millennial trend of hyperbolic growth.

Finally, the authors describe in-depth the general pre-industrial Chinese demographic cycle. Below is a functional scheme I’ve reproduced from the book (click to enlarge).

The main points are:

• Fast population growth until it nears the carrying capacity, then a long period (100 years+) of a very slow and unsteady growth rate, accompanied by increasingly significant, but non-critical fluctuations in annual population growth due to climatic stochasticity (positive growth in good years, negative growth – along with dearth, minor epidemics, uprisings, etc – in bad years). These fluctuations get worse with time as the state’s counter-crisis potential degrades due to the drawdown of previously accumulated surpluses.
• According to Nefedov’s model and historical evidence, the fastest growth of cities occurred during the last phases of demographic cycles, as peasants were driven off the land and there appeared greater demand for city-made goods from the increasingly affluent landowners (who could charge exorbitant rates on their tenants). Furthermore, some peasants are drawn into debt bondage because the landowner had previously given them food at a time of dearth. Other peasants turn to banditry.
• Re-”elite overproduction → over-staffing of the state apparatus → decreasing ability of the state to provide relief during famines”. The system of state relief had been very effective earlier, e.g. in 1743-44 a state effort to prevent starvation in the drought-stricken North China core was successful. However: “By Chia-ch’ing times (1796-1820) this vast grain administration had been corrupted by the accumulation of superfluous personnel at all levels, and by the customary fees payable every time grain changed hands or passed an inspection point… The grain transport stations served as one of the focal points for patronage in official circles. Hundreds of expectant officials clustered at these points, salaried as deputies (ch’ai-wei or ts’ao-wei) of the central government. As the numbers of personnel in the grain tribute administration grew and as costs rose through the 18th century, the fees payable for each grain junk increased [from 130-200 taels per boat in 1732, to 300 taels in 1800, and to 700-800 taels by 1821]“. Similarly, the Yellow River Conservancy, whose task it was to prevent floods, degenerated into hedonistic corruption in the early 19th century; only 10% of its earmarked funds being spent legitimately.
• So what you have is an increasingly exploited peasantry, a growing (and volatile) urban artisan class – e.g., the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, and more banditry. The bandits create a climate of fear in the countryside and force more outmigration into the cities, and the abandonment of some lands. At the same time, state power – military and administrative – is on the wane, displaced by corruption. The effects of perturbations are magnified due to the system’s loss of resiliency. There eventually comes a critical tipping point after which there is a cascading collapse that involves a population dieoff, the fall of centralized power, and a prolonged period of internal warfare.
• Fast population growth does not resume immediately after collapse because things first need to settle down.

(AK: Pause for a moment… do you think this demographic cycle applies to modern China, or another country you can name, or even the world in general? If so, which stage are we at? And can you associate the stages of the above demographic cycle with the stages  of the psycho-spiritual “Malthusian Loop” within the Belief Matrix?

In my Facebook Note, Musings on the decline and fall of civilizations, I draw a link between the fast population increase / abundance of the “rise” period, and the concept of the “Golden Age” common to all civilizations. Also ventures a theory as to why cities (hedonism, conspicuous consumption, etc) have such a poor reputation as a harbinger of collapse… because they are, it’s just that the anti-poshlost preachers haven’t identified the right cause (i.e. overpopulation, not “moral decadence” per se).

Furthermore, a tentative explanation of the reason for differential Chinese – European technological growth rates (compare and contrast with Jared Diamond’s explanation):

Incidentally, a possible reason why Western Europe emerged as the world’s economic hegemon by the 19th century, instead of China, a civilization that at prior times had been significantly more advanced. But in China, the depth of the Malthusian collapses was deeper and more regular (once every 300 years, typically) than in W. Europe… Once the Yangtze / Yellow River irrigation systems failed, tens of millions of peasants were doomed; nothing on an equivalent scale in Europe, which is geographically and politically fragmented into many chunks and nowhere has anywhere near the same reliance on vulnerable hydraulic works for the maintenance of complex civilization (control over water was at the heart of “Oriental despotism” (Wittfogel); the Chinese word “zhi” means both “to regulate water” and “to rule”).

This theory that the reason China began to lag behind Western Europe technologically was because of its more frequent collapses / destructions of knowledge should be explored further.

Finally, about the nature of perturbations in a closed system under increasing stress… That is our world in the coming decades: even as Limits to Growth manifest themselves, there will be more (and greater) shocks of a climatic, terrorist, and military nature. The stochasticity will increase in amplitude even as the System becomes more fragile. As a result, polities will increase the level of legitimization and coercion, i.e. they will become more authoritarian.)

Chapter 3: A New Model of Pre-Industrial Political-Demographic Cycles

To address the shortcomings of other models and taking into account what happens in typical pre-industrial demographic cycles, Korotayev with Natalia Komarova construct their own model that includes the following three main elements:

(1) The Malthusian-type economic model, with elements of the state as tax collector (and counter-famine reservoir sponsor), and fluctuating annual harvest yields; this describes the logistic shape of population growth. It explains well the upward curve in the demographic cycle and saturation when the carrying capacity of land is reached. (2) Banditry and the rise of internal warfare in time of need are the main mechanism of demographic collapse. Personal decisions of peasants to leave their land and become warriors / bandits / rebels are influenced by economic factors. (3) The inertia of warfare (which manifests itself in the fear factor and the destruction of infrastructure) is responsible for a slow initial growth and the phenomenon of the “intercycle”.

Reproducing the model in detail will take up too much space, so just the main conclusions: “the main parameters affecting the period of the cycle are a) the annual proportions of resources accumulated for counter-famine reserves, b) the peasant-bandit transformation rate, and c) the magnitude of the climatic fluctuations. Hence, the lengths of cycles – and this is historically corroborated – is increased along with the growth of the counter-famine (more reserves) and law-enforcement (repress banditry) subsystems.

Chapter 4: Secular Cycles & Millennial Trends

Full version of Chapter 4: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends.

The chapter begins by modeling the role of warfare, and challenges recent anthropological findings that denser populations do not necessarily lead to more warfare.

• First, this is explained by the fact that it’s not a simple relation, but more of a predator-prey cycle described by a Volterra-Lotka equation. When warfare breaks out in a time of stress it leads to the immediate reduction of the carrying capacity and demographic collapse; however, warfare simmers on well into the post-collapse phase because groups continue to retaliate against each other.
• Second, the methodology is flawed because it treats all wars the same, whereas in fact they tend to be far less devastating for bigger polities than for small ones. This is because bigger polities have armies that are more professional, and the length of their “bleeding borders” relative to total territory, is much smaller than for territorially small chiefdoms, for whom even low-intensity wars are demographically devastating. As such, more politically complex polities fight wars more frequently more frequently than smaller ones, but tend to be far less damaged by them.
• Imperial expansions in territory coincide with periods of fast population growth and high per capita surpluses; later on, shrinking surpluses decimate the tax base and even defense proves increasingly hard (“imperial overstretch”). This correlation is very strong.

Now Korotayev et al combine their model from the last chapter with Kremer’s equation for technological growth (see the Introduction):

dT/dt = a*N*T

They also model a “Boserupian” effect, in which “relative overpopulation creates additional stimuli to generate and apply carrying-capacity-of-land-raising innovations”.

Indeed, if land shortage is absent, such stimuli are relatively weak, whereas in conditions of relative overpopulation the introduction of such innovations becomes literally a “question of life and death” for a major part of the population, and the intensity of the generation and diffusion of the carrying capacity enhancing innovations significantly increases.

Finally, they make the size of the harvest dependent not only on climatic fluctuations, but also on the level of technology.

Harvesti = H0*random numberi*Ti.

Running this model with some reasonable parameters produces the following diagram, which reproduces not only the cyclical, but also the hyperbolic macrodynamics.

Furthermore,

Note that it also describes the lengthening of growth phases detected in Chapter 2 for historical population dynamics in China, which was not described by our simple cyclical model. The mechanism that produces this lengthening in the model (and apparently in reality) is as follows: the later cycles are characterized by a higher technology, and, thus, higher carrying capacity and population, which, according to Kremer’s technological development equation embedded into our model, produces higher rates of technological (and, thus, carrying capacity) growth. Thus, with every new cycle it takes the population more and more time to approach the carrying capacity ceiling to a critical extent; finally it “fails” to do so, the technological growth rates begin to exceed systematically the population growth rates, and population escapes from the “Malthusian trap” (see Diagram 4.26):

MAFR = “minimum annual food ration, an amount of food that is barely sufficient to support one person forone year”.

AK: some confirmation for my rough explanation of why Chinese technological growth rate fell below Europe’s prior to the Industrial Revolution (see end of Chapter 2 in this post).

Of special importance is that our numerical investigation indicates that with shorter average period of cycles a system experiences a slower technological growth, and it takes a system longer to escape from the “Malthusian trap” than with a longer average cycle period.

Finally, they also add in an equation for literacy:

li+1 = li*b*dFi*li*(1 – li)

Which has the following effect on population growth:

Ni+1 = Ni*(1 + α × dF’)*(1 – l) – dRi – rob*Ni*Ri

And all added together, it produces the following stunning reproduction of China’s population dynamics from ancient past to today.

Of course, these models can be only regarded as first steps towards the development of effective models describing both secular cycles and millennial upward trend dynamics.

The Meaning of Cliodynamics

Turchin, Peter & Sergey Nefedov – Secular Cycles (2008)
Category: cliodynamics, world systems; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Read the whole book (PDF) or in chapters

This is a free online, quasi-popular book about eight different pre-industrial secular cycles (including Tudor England, the Roman Empire, Muscovy, and the Romanov Empire). Knowing the facts of history and the proximate causes of Revolutions – Lenin’s charisma, Tsarist incompetence, the collapse of morale and of the railway system, etc – is all well and good, but an entirely different perspective is opened up when looking at late Tsarist Russia through a Malthusian / cliodynamic prism. The interpretation shifts to one of how late imperial Russia was under a panoply of Malthusian pressure, and that the additional stresses and perturbations of WW1 “tipped” the system over into a state of collapsed anarchy – ushering in the vacuum that enabled Lenin to make his “Event”.

Finally, my reply to someone who sent me a message suggesting that cliodynamics may “make old school idiographic history redundant”.

I don’t think these trends will make idiographic history redundant, because there are many elements that are irreducible to mathematical analysis; furthermore, a major and inevitable weakness of cliodynamics is our lack of numbers for much of pre-mass literacy history. To the contrary, I think cliodynamics will end up complementing the “old school” rather than displacing it.

Footnotes

* Note that the null symbol ∅ – the logo of this site – can be said to represent both the exponential (a straight line on the logarithmic), which strives to break out of the cycle of repetition / Malthusian collapse / eternal return; whereas the circle, representing the cyclical, seeks to stifle any accumulative initiative that leads to exponential growth.

This makes it into a very universal symbol, in a sense. Back to its definition, it implies a profound nothingness (Void) – but all possible mathematical objects and their unions exist in the Void, including Reality. From What Might Be Is:

In a sense, the Void [nothingness] fulfills all the criteria of God. Null and unity, it transcends the human imagination, for human minds are finite in scope. It sidesteps the ‘who created the creator?” paradox, for it is. And was, and will be, though being outside Time, its directionality is meaningless. It is zero and infinity of cardinal infinity. What might be, is. All possible computations, exist, and are their own simulacra.

Yet at the ultimate scale, the cyclical is always dominant. No end to the loop.

Looking at this from the simple computational view, the state of the cellular automaton at the time of the Big Bang is perfect order. The immediate next state begins the transition to chaos with loss of entropy in the seething plasma of exotic particles. This mass cools down and forms itself into stars and planets. On some a localized growth in ordered complexity occurs, in contrast to the sea of randomness all around them, and perhaps culminating in the saturation of the whole cellular automaton. With time the delicate balance of order and randomness that is the intelligent universe will struggle to preserve itself against the crushing order of fire or the encroaching chaos of ice. In the former case, the loss in entropy will reverse and the universe will start contracting into the Big Crunch, with computation (and simulation of other worlds) soaring until the omega point is reached, closing the loop of existence. In the latter case, computation will slow down due to the unrelenting loss in entropy but will continue for a much longer time – until the last particles disintegrate, if reversible computing is perfected and utilized. Whether the universe dies by ice or fire, the end state reverts back to perfect order – and presumably, a new Big Bang and identical iteration, since all cellular automata will loop when they return to a state in which they once existed.

** Ray Kurzweil, one of the high priest of the singularitarian movement, extends Moore’s observations, to also model technological growth (computing power, to be precise) as double exponential, or even hyperbolic. See Appendix: The Law of Accelerating Returns Revisited,

On the other hand, Joseph Tainter noted that in many areas the rate of technological innovation is actually slowing down. This is an argument, mentioned above, that Kremer’s assumption that the rate of technological growth is linearly dependent on the product of the population and the size of the already-existing technological base is too simplistic.

These observations are supported by Planck’s Principle of Increasing Effort – “with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased” (i.e. you’re now unlikely to make new discoveries by flying a kite in a thunderstorm). Furthermore, “Exponential growth in size and costliness of science, in fact, is necessary simply to maintain a constant rate of progress”, and according to Rescher, “In natural science we are involved in a technological arms race: with every ‘victory over nature’ the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased”.

Diamond, Jared – Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
Category: world systems, history, anthropology; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel (wiki)

Having finished reading this book in November 2004, I came away impressed by its success in compressing 13,000 years of human history into a lucid and compelling explanation of why the rate of socio-economic development varied so significantly on different continents, without resorting to culturalist or racialist arguments. Jared Diamond succeeds spectacularly at proving why Eurasia had become by 1500 AD (the dawn of “Europe’s assault on the world”) the world’s most technologically advanced continent, far ahead of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and Australasia. In the final chapter, he extends the analysis to question why, within Eurasia, it was Europe that decisively overtook apparently better-endowed competitors (primarily China) within the next four hundred years and proceeded to “remake the world in its own image”.

The underlying thesis in this work is that the environment is the primary shaper of human societies – hence the title 0f Chapter 2, “A Natural Experiment of History”. Connected with Diamond’s general aim of transforming human history into a scientific discipline, it explains how the Austronesians who populated the Polynesian islands, despite sharing common ancestors in Fujian, China, went on to produce remarkably different societies – agricultural and hunter-gatherer, technologically adept and primitive, oligarchic and egalitarian.

In the next few chapters , he contends that the rise of statehood, and the consequent, self-catalysing technological expansion (producing steel and guns, amongst others) and evolution of germs, was linked to the shift of food-production away from hunter-gathering, which first happened in Eurasia. This is because Eurasia was blessed in possessing an abundant number of nutritious and highly-domesticable crops such as wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent and rice in China, and also because she possessed an area covered by the world’s largest and most varied Mediterranean climate in southern Europe and south-west Asia, and fertile soils and monsoon rains in China, India and Indochina. It is true that the Americas had corn, and the Africans sourghum – but the shift from hunter-gathering to food-production depends not on a single crop, but on a sufficient amount to offer a secure and balanced diet. The latter was lacking – for instance, of the world’s 56 large-seeded grass species, 32 were in the West Eurasian Mediterranean region, and only 11, 4 and 2 in the (geographically splintered) Americas, Africa and Australasia respectively.

Nor were the extra-Eurasian continents especially suitable for pastoral economies. Of the world’s 143 big wild herbivores, only 14 are domesticable and only five – sheep, goats, cows, pigs and horses – can thrive across a broad range of climates. These discrepencies are due to the so-called Anna Karenina principle, which states that a variety of factors can null the chances of an animal being domesticable – their growth rates, problems of captive breeding, nasty dispositions, tendency to panic, and social structure. According to Diamond, of the 5 major and 9 minor domesticable animals, 13 are indigenous to Eurasia and one (the llama) is indigenous to South America. Africa might have animals that could be tamed (e.g. the elephant), but none that has ever been domesticated. The dearth of big animals in general in the Americas and Australasia is due to the fact that humans, with refined hunting skills, arrived there only 11,000 and 40,000 years ago respectively, and hunted all of them down because the animals had not had time to get used to this. The “lethal gift of livestock” also gave Eurasian peoples germs (as most infectitious diseases originated from human interactions with animals – for instance, flu was derived from pigs and ducks, and measles, smallpox and tuberculosis all derive from cattle), and, consequently, stronger immune systems to the diseases. The resultant fact that the exchange of germs was virtually one-way largely explains successful European colonization of the Americas.

Eurasia, because of it’s main east-west axis, fostered much easier transferals of agricultural and epidemiological breakthroughs. Crops and livestock generally move much more easily along lines of latitude than lines of longitude – thus, Fertile Crescent agriculture spread relatively quickly to southern Europe, north Africa, Iran, north India at a rate of 0.7 miles per year, whereas Mexican corns and beans crawled north to the Mississipi chiefdoms at 0.3 miles per year. The same applied to livestock – “The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the Andes. Yet the northward spread of these Andean specialities was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America.” Whereas crops and livestock can travel relatively easily from Ireland to Korea (despite obstacles such as the Tibetan Plateau, Gobi desert and the jungles of southern India and Indochina), to travel the much smaller distance from Peru to the southern USA, one has to go north and transverse the Darien rainforests of the Isthmus of Panama (only 40 miles wide at its narrowest) and the northern Mexican desert.

What applies to crops and livestock, must also apply to other forms of technology. Writing evolved independently in Sumer by 3000 BC and in Mesoamerica in 600 BC – however, whereas the former spread rapidly throughout Eurasia, the latter never reached the Incas or the Mississippi, where sedendaty food-producing civilizations might have made good use of it. Other examples in Eurasia included the wheel, door locks, pulleys, rotary querns, windmills and the alphabet, whereas the Mesoamerican wheel failed to reach the Incas in Peru.

In conclusion, Eurasian societies were intially much better endowed than their American, African and Australasian counterparts not only in terms of crops and livestock, but also geographically and climatically. Eurasia’s primary east-west axis fostered linked the entire continent economically and epidemiologically, especially after the establishment of the Silk Road in Roman times. More productive agricultural bases, supporting much greater and denser populations, ensured a continuously generated food surplus, to sustain an evolving state appratus and the investment, development of technology and military machine that went with it. Eurasia’s quiltwork of states ensured a competitive environment that put an imperative on change that could not be replicated in the isolated societies of the Americas and Australasia. As a result, by 1500 AD no Native Americans had managed to progress to the Bronze Age and had not developed any deadly germs for the Spanish conquistadores to carry back home. Australia (mostly desert and marginal scrubland) and New Guinea (flat or hilly rainforest) were still in the Stone Age in the second millenium. Tasmania, with its 4000 hunter-gatherers, totally isolated for 10,000 years, had on the eve of its discovery by Europeans in 1642 AD the “simplest material culture of any people in the modern world”. As a result, these differences in development meant that, throughout history, but particularly within the last five hundred years, more advanced Eurasians were able to expand and appropriate the territories of native primitive peoples – examples include Chinese expansion into southeast Asia and the Pacific, the Bantu expansion into sub-Saharan Africa and the European colonization of the Americas, Australasia and Siberia.

Diamond’s epilogue is concerned about why Europe, apparently one of the more backward super-regions on the Eurasian landmass as late as the High Middle Ages, nonetheless was the first to industrialize and dominate the world more fully in its heyday – from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century – eclipsing ostensibly more powerful medieval empires, primarily China. The author again made use of geographic arguments, leaving aside institutional and cultural factors and relying heavily on E.L. Jones’ “The European Miracle” thesis. Now Europe is, in essence, a highly fragmented continent, separated by numerous mountain ranges (Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, etc) and small rivers (Rhine, Po, Oder, Visla, Danube), which support small, scattered population centres in their valleys. Numerous peninsulas and islands (primarily Iberia, Scandinavia, Britain, Italy) have traditionally counter-balanced potential continental hegemons (usually Germany or France). Europe has many different climates – Mediterranean to the south, maritime to the north-west and continental to the east, which produce different products (stimulating trade) and create natural ethnic boundaries (a phenomenom noted as early as the 5th century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus). China is almost the exact opposite – a huge, round piece of flatland, with its population concentrated in the great river valleys of the Yangtze and Hwang Ho (providing a huge and easily controlled source of manpower) and relatively uniform climatic conditions in its historic heartland (the tropical Cantonese south, dry continental Manchuria and Sinkiang and mountanous Tibet are comparatively recent acquisitions and even today are of peripheral economic importance).

As such, China’s “connectedness”, to use Diamond’s term, encouraged political unity and autocracy; Western Europe’s fragmentation fostered a competitive states system, encouraging innovation and technological progress, and precluded the possibility of any single European state conquering the entire continent and stiffling it under a blanket of reaction. Hence, Columbus was able to find a financial backer in 1492 despite several previous rejections; however, court intrigues in Beijing brought to a permanent end Cheng Ho’s oceanic voyaging in 1433 and soon after closed dockyards across the whole Celestial Empire. As for the Fertile Crescent, intensive agriculture since 8500BC brought an ecological degradation that intensified due to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and subsequent destruction of complex irrigation infrastructure.

Two main arguments have been leveled against this book. The first is that China is not necessarily geographically more suited to unification than Western Europe, that the values of fragmentation are not necessaily greater than of unity, and most importantly that Europe owes its “miracle” more to its institutions – “the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control” (from David Frum’s review, “How the West Won: History That Feels Good Usually Isn’t“) – than to any geo-climatic conditions, which invoke the derogatory label of “historical determinism”. I’ll address these contentions one after the other. In his review of the book, J.R. McNeill in “The World According to Jared Diamond” wrote, “Europe may or may not have a geography that encourages greater fragmentation than does China’s (and I think this is open to question if one leaves out the Grand Canal, a man-made link). ” Apart from the evidence above, and the fact that the Grand Canal was constructed during the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD) and as such affected China for the majority of its history after the first unification in 221 BC under Shih-Huang-ti, we also know that the multitude of plains could support a might horseman army, which could exert political control over the huge, densely-clustered population centres of the Middle Kingdom. In fact this is the primary reasons why the Mongols (whose main strategic strength was in their speed and functionality without logistics) were able to conquer late Sung China, but wisely decided to stay away from Europe, where the land west of the Hungarian plains, containing only forests, mountains and areas of intensive agriculture, could not have supported a single tyumen. Hence, Europeans relied on decisively less mobile and more logistically demanding traditions of infantry and castle sieges, which made rapid conquests of vast areas practically unrealizable.

Slightly later, McNeill writes that, “political fragmentation is not necessarily an advantage, indeed in some circumstances, such as the presence of a powerful and aggressive neighbor, it is a weakness”. The argument is made that although Europe was always a political quiltwork, it only started to become formidable after the first milennium. There are several weaknesses to this position – Europe, especially the “barbarian kingdoms” north of the Alps, was before the first millenium extremely backwards in comparison with any other major Eurasian civilization – China, Byzantium, the Arabs and India, but by the 14th century at the latest the qualitative gap had closed even with China. This suggests average rates of development were much higher in feudal Europe than in Asia. Besides, Europe never truly had a life-threatening neighbor – the Arabs were halted at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel, the pagan Vikings were Christianized around the 10th century and it was Rus’ and Byzantium that took the brunt of nomadic assaults by groups like the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians (Cumans). McNeill draws an example with politically fragmented India, which however “did not generate highly efficient states and technologically precocious societies bent on expansion and conquest”. Admittedly, my knowledge in this area is shallow – and doubt the validity of that statement, given that India was the home of higher mathematics and that its port cities grew very wealthy off the trade of the Indian Ocean. Also, other factors may be more prescient at explaining this, such as India’s isolation from the main routes of the Silk Road, its stratified caste system (which discouraged innovation) and perhaps “Dark Ages” stemming from the plethora of outside barbarian invasions.

Finally, David Frum contributed the third and most important point to this institutional counter-argument. I will quote from his review in extenso.

At least in this century, the traditional account of the rise of the West has given credit to its propitious political and social institutions. That is not true only of recent times, when the institutions in question are liberal ones, but of more ancient history as well, when the West benefited from the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control. And that traditional account agreed, with varying degrees of certainty, that those traditions were more or less available to anyone else and would have more or less similar results wherever they were tried.

Again, however, numerous holes can be picked in the text. The Church might have been independent of political control, but it was dogmatic in its views and consistently anti-capitalistic (e.g. the ban on usury). This is the reason so much commerce was in the hands of Jews in medieval Europe. Independent thought as such would have been confined to universities which began to be founded in 13th century, and these tended to support the monarch over the Pope. As for feudalism, it was based on the self-sufficient agricultural economy of the manor, economically isolated following the collapse of Roman order. Although I think a period of feudalism, which develops the idea of the contract (in addition to the Roman idea of private property) is a very useful precedent to capitalism, we must ask ourselves, why did it develop in Europe, and not in China? After all, China does have a long history of “warring states’ periods, including the post-Han economic downturn and fragmentation from 220 to 581 AD, which coincided with the fall of Rome. However, conditions in European were far more suited for the emergence of a feudalistic societies – firstly, “barbarian kingdoms lacked the bureaucratic and literate resources to rule directly over great areas”, unlike the Confucian bureaucracy which held China together until the twentieth century. Secondly, it had precedents in the fusion of Roman concepts of property with the Germanic “blood-brotherhood of the warrior-companians of the barbarian chief”, which was respectively partially and completely lacking in China. Last but not least, that same geographical fragmentation and relative lack of plains frustrated assertative European monarchs attempting to bring to heel some remote rebelling vassal, let alone maintain effective political unity.

The second important argument was made by McNeill and contends that ultimately “the spread of useful species was usually a conscious act…determined by trade links, migration routes, and happenstance”. He argues as an example that a single line of latitude on Eurasia could vary greatly, from “the Gulf Stream-induced equability of western Europe, to the continental climate extremes of Kazakhstan, to the monsoon rhythms of Korea”, and consequently make the dispersion of animal and plant species very hard. He also attributes a lot of this dispersion as due to trade within Eurasia. Again, these criticisms have their flaws. For instance, jungles present much more of a barrier than continental plains or even desert, because of the greater number of diseases they harbor and because they are much more physically hard to pass. I think another crucial factor is that significant climate shifts, that have played a very large role triggering nomadic migrations and expansions within and out of the Eurasian Great Steppe, are lacking in rainforests, encouraging a more permanent existence. As for the second argument, it is downright irrelevant in the context of the book, because Eurasia as a continent only started to become contiguous with the genesis of the Silk Road during Roman times. By then, all the key crops and livestocks were already in place, that had generated the rise of the civilizations which were only then beginning to communicate with each other, albeit in rudimentary form, over thousands of kilometres.

Having attempted to disprove two existing criticisms of the book, I would nonetheless wish to make a few of my own. One is how he rather hypocritically claims New Guineans are more intelligent than Eurasians, after just having had condemned white racist theories whose argumentative style in their specialization are similar to his in this instance. And I think he could have covered the scope of the last chapter of his book beyond an analysis of why Europe “won” and China “lost” – Middle Eastern societies were mentioned little (and the argument of environmental degradation was admittedly somewhat lost on me, considering that Egypt has managed to sustain a massive agricultural base from pharaonic times to the present day), and India and Russia not at all. (At least in the latter case there is a plethora of geoclimatic factors that negatively affected its development and covered in such books as Andrej Parshev’s “Why Russia isn’t America”).

In conclusion, this is overall an excellent book which is a must-read for people in professions as varied as biology, geography, history, archaelogy, anthropology, sociology and economics, as well as the intelligent layman. Apart from the invaluable information and insights, it is written in concise, engaging and understandable language and one would be challenged to put it down after having read just a few pages. Finally, in order to assuage my love of quantifying things, I give the book a mark of 9.5/10.

My assumption is that societies can be defined along two axes – their degree of ease with themselves, and with the West. By the latter, I mean specifically the Idea of the West: acceptance of the scientific method; rule of law; economic rationalism; and liberalism. An important semantic point is that these should not be conflated with “Western countries” (the US, the UK, France, etc); though they have, by most measures, internalized the Idea of the West to a far greater extent than most other cultures, they cannot ever reach unity with it because they are, at root, organic, human societies, whereas the Idea of the West is an absolute.

The other axis denotes how content a civilization is with its traditions. The default steady state is acceptive; though occasionally challenged by dissidents who reject tradition, society is characterized by a state of sobornost – a deep sense of spiritual harmony amongst classes, regions, races and sexes. Or as my definition of Russophilia goes, they understand, accept, forgive and unconditionally love their community / nation. This can break down when a culture is faced with unexpected challenges, such as Malthusian crises in the pre-industrial era or contact with the West (or rather its manifestations in British gunships and American multinational companies) in the modern era. In the latter case, society typically enthusiastically embraces the trappings of the West and rejects its own traditions, after viewing them from the Western frame of reference. This causes severe internal dislocations, leading to disillusionment and culminating in a vehement rejection of Western values, to an extent impossible in its absense. One can view Bolshevism, Nazism, fascism and radical Islamism as extreme forms of this rejection (and by rejection, implicit acceptance), relying as they do on Western technics in their attempts to recreate an imagined past.

The “Western countries” are unique in that somehow or other they have succeeded in substantially imprinting the Idea of the West onto their own traditions. This is much harder than it sounds. The scientific method is alien and unfamiliar to the peasant mind filled with images of rain gods and trickster demons. The rule of law cannot sit well in human societies traditionally reliant on communal coercion, “big man” influence and sacrificial scapegoating. Economic rationalism is anathema to subsistence societies, characterized as they are by reciprocal, socially-determined networks of gifts. Market forces, by destroying this communal spirit, would tear these societies apart, hence the universal disdain for merchants, usury, etc, typical of all rural pre-industrial societies (e.g. see Aristotle discovers the economy, Karl Polanyi). And liberalism (rights for all, including minorities) frequently stands in opposition to democracy (the generally anti-market, conformist will of the people).

It is probably no surprise that capitalism and liberalism historically developed most vigorously in the United States, with its abundant high-quality land and scarce labor yielding massive per capita surpluses. The Idea of the West first appeared in the “West” because of the region’s inheritance of Latin (law) and Germanic (customs) traditions, favorable geographic factors (long coastlines, good rivers and fertile, varied climes) and comparatively successful control of population pressures (through fertility suppression – West Europeans married later and had fewer children than most other civilizations, and later outmigration to their colonies). That said, it should be emphasized that even here relations between the West and tradition were uneasy and factitious; as I emphasize again, the Idea of the West is an ideal which humans can only aspire to, but never reach unity with.

Having laid out the basic concepts, it is now time to look at two general cases of human socio-spiritual dynamics: Malthusian (what happens to belief systems when a traditional society exceeds the carrying capacity of the land and begins to fall apart?) and Western (what happens to traditional societies when they come into contact with the West?). Both begin at the same place.

State of Stasis

At first, society is in a state of stasis, of sobornost. As in all traditional societies the individual submits to the communal will and the sovereign will (the Lord, the Emperor, Allah, etc)… and is all the happier for it. From Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Hard to comprehend for an individualistic Westerner, perhaps. But this is the way most people lived throughout the eons of human existence. Stadtluft macht frei?? Perhaps Arbeit macht frei isn’t so far off the mark.

(Here I would rush to add the caveat that this only applies to communal work where everyone partakes and lacks knowledge of and is too unimaginative to imagine any “better” alternative, such as aristocratic indolence or financial speculation. This is patently not the case in industrial societies and explains the failure of totalitarian attempts to go back to the future).

The Malthusian Loop

Before the industrial era, all societies were subject to Malthusian dynamics in which population growth saturated the carrying capacity of the land and leveled off at an unstable plateau. The period of high growth was typically regarded as a Golden Age of bucolic virtue (e.g. republican Rome), which I’ve labeled The Rise of Empire. Because of limits to growth, this could not last. Subsistence stress resulted in the growth of cities and large standing armies to soak up the landless poor, and literate bureaucrats to manage the new problems. Paradoxically, even as problems loomed on the horizons many aspects of culture like literacy, inventiveness, etc, flourished. This is because society encouraged its thinkers to “scan” for solutions to these problems.

However, these same cities and intelligentsia fuel feelings of resentment on the part of peasants on account of a) their perceived decadence and lasciviousness and b) the fact that said degenerates are supported by their taxes. To accommodate the rising reaction and diminishing surpluses, politicians and kings are forced to go back to the future. Way back. Quoting from my notes on Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies:

At this point, decomposition rapidly becomes inevitable as “scanning” ceases, for the system no longer has the surpluses to do it. In most cases rigid behavioral controls are imposed, innovation and positive change is stymied and corruption, authoritarianism and feudalism begin to dominate … for society is enslaved to its own myths of superiority and delusions of grandeur.

… Censuses and historical detail thin, as literacy and science declined during this period to be replaced by an “increase in mysticism, and knowledge by revelation”, as well as by “increased propaganda about patriotism, ancient Roman values, and superiority over the barbarians”.

Yet this is only a stopgap measure, for by now eventual demise is inevitable:

Increasingly radical attempts to save the system, even cardinally change it, cannot permanently reserve the trend towards further complexity and disequilibrium; eventually, everyone loses faith in the system and there is a severe collapse. …

… According to RM Adams, “By the fifth century, men were ready to abandon civilization itself in order to escape the fearful load of taxes”. In 476, after being denied payment or settlement in Italy, the Roman barbarian army mutinied, sacked Rome and deposed Romulus Augustus, the last Western Emperor.

In other words, society begins by rejecting the Idea of the West (in those times, “rule of law” and Greek scientific-rationalism), and the state intensifies efforts to both legitimize itself and coerce people into believing in it. But nonetheless, a breaking point is eventually reached and society loses faith in the state (hitherto, tradition), culminating in the collapse of civilization, a prolonged period of anarchy and reversion to older forms of social existence focused on family, clan and community (denoted as The Collapse of Civilization).

During the anarchic period, there is a “radical redefinition of terms” as patriotism (faith in country) goes from being an accepted tradition, to a rejected tradition: for once the Sun dawns over the new Dark Ages, the peasant commune; the manor; self-sufficiency, etc – these are now the new pillars of traditions. Any surviving agents of the state (soldiers turned brigands, renegade tax collectors, the urban intelligentsia, etc) are its enemies.

After a few dark centuries, roving bandits seize permanent control of settlements, and become stationary bandits with an interest in development and permanent extraction instead of pillage. Localism, mysticism, anti-statism, etc, once again become heresies. The specter of the state rises anew, rewinding the loop to Year Zero.

The Sisyphean Loop

When a traditional society comes into contact with the West, there occurs a great deal of turbulence, much like in a society in the throes of Malthusian crisis. This loop is reproduced below:

As attested to by numerous chronicles, first contact with Westerners by less advanced civilizations results in fascination and a determination to catch up, especially to acquire its military-industrial technologies to prevent Western predation. The two cleanest examples of defensive modernizations are seen in Japan during the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, and repeatedly in Russian history (Muscovy under Ivan the Terrible, the Russian Empire under Peter the Great and Alexander II, Stalin, Putin?).

Local traditions are seen as incompatible with modernization and are rejected by the ruling elites, often stirring social unrest as the internal balance of power is disturbed. There occurs a growing gap between the Westernizing elites and the more traditional mass of society. The former come to be seen as foreign leeches on indigenous soil, decadent and degenerate; using the rhetoric of Westernization to feed themselves (e.g. see the French-speaking Tsarist aristocracy). This in turn discredits further Westernization, especially once the easiest (and ostensibly most useful) task of military modernization is completed. The people and the elites lose faith in the West: the former because they associate it with degeneracy and corruption (e.g. the Russian workers and peasants most aware of it: because of the development of railway systems, even a peasant from a rural backwater could now comprehend the parasitic decadence of the Court), the latter because of the shallow nationalism consequent from reinvigorated military, economic and cultural strength accruing from limited modernization. There is a gradual movement now back towards tradition (e.g. Slavophilia, the intelligentsia’s idolization of peasant life, etc).

But now one of two things happens. A part of the elite realizes that their decadence is politically dangerous (a large gap between the masses and the elites presages revolution), and tries to move back towards indigenous traditions – back to the people, so to speak. This is opposed by another part of the elite that has gotten used to its perks and privileges, despite the spiritual anomie in which they are stuck because of this. The ruling elites become disunited and weak; the masses are increasingly disillusioned with the whole system; new ideologues appear, preaching about total rejection of the West (e.g. the Bolsheviks) and a return to an imagined past of purity and virtue, i.e. to tradition (e.g. the radical Islamists who overthrew the Iranian Shah).

There appears a crisis, further straining divisions in the government and polarizing society in general (e.g. World War One). Eventually the government is forced to reform, but alas and alack, as per de Tocqueville the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to try to get better. By reversing course and showing weakness, it delegitimizes itself in the face of crisis; furthermore, it frequently becomes more democratic just when the people are becoming more hardline, and extremists (Bolsheviks, Islamists, etc) are waiting in the wings. The extremists moderate their positions to win over the people and consolidate their control; after that they unleash terror, taking the country into the far-top fringes of uncompromising rejection of the West. This is the dark region where totalitarianisms rise and democides are unleashed.

On the other hand, if the elite remains united; if the crisis is not very severe; if the people retain a firm belief in the Idea of the West and are unswayed by the extremists, then a more moderate outcome can be expected – a reversion back to the past, the state of stasis, yet having assimilated some elements of the Idea of the West during its loop so now “better” and perhaps “fairer” than before (at least by the standards of more Westernized states). They remain in this comatose state until another shock (e.g. defeat in war by a more Westernized nation, or recognition of weakness) forced them to act, restarting the loop.

Why do I call this a Sisyphean loop? Because while it lasts this basically explains a tortured nation’s attempts to catch up with “the West” (roll the rock to the top of the mountain), but never managing it (the rock keeps going back downhill). This is very pronounced in Russia – it’s entire history since gunpowder Muscovy has been one of quixotic attempts to catch up to and surpass the West, yet which all too often ended in catastrophes wrought of messianic delusions, and prolonged periods of stagnation, decline and frustration. I will explore its dynamics more closely in an upcoming post, focusing on a) the continuous “radical redefining of terms” that characterized Soviet history from 1914 to 1953, b) the belief dynamics of the post-1988 transition and c) its prospects for the future: sovereign democratization (the “Putin Plan” – democratization / Westernization on its own terms / while retaining belief in tradition), return to authoritarian stasis (Russia’s “natural state”, in both meanings of the term), totalitarianism or liberalization?

Yet this is not specific to Russia, it’s just that the overall dynamic is most visible there. Even nominally “Western nations” like the US – that archetype of the West – is imprisoned within the Sisyphean loop. It’s just that through the accumulated circular momentum of liberal tradition, the structure of its political system that moderates sharp swings towards extremism in the population and of the media which muffles extremist voices, and most importantly its reconciliation of liberalism with popular democracy, its “liberty loops” manage to remain anchored firmly within the bottom-right quadrant, well away from the instability brought on by the disillusionment / rejection of tradition of the left, and the totalitarianism of the top. But what makes the US a spiritually much more satisfied nation is that the very organic nature of the integration of its sobornost and Westernism makes Americans unaware that they life in the Belief Matrix, just like everyone else.

Laws of the Matrix

Why do I call it a matrix? a) because it is a matrix / grid, and b) in honor of the films, of course – whereas people believe they have free will, in reality all choices are predetermined and our only task is to try to understand and accept why we made those choices (in itself a Sisyphean-like endeavor – so yes, don’t bother pointing it out, I know I’m in the Matrix too).

Law of Skewed Perspectives – ideologically skewed people have warped perspectives on other people, interpreting moderates as biased; and those slightly biased, as irrevocably so. If political leaders are sufficiently out of sync, then the people are radicalized in the other direction.

Law of Quantum Truth – any individual finds it hard to judge the position of another, including herself; this is best done by a large number of individual, informed observations which tend to build a probability map around the likely position. Malevolent ideological opponents would represent the extreme edges of that probability map as that individual’s true position, whereas in fact it is not (or at least very rarely so).

Law of Circularity – at its extremes, ideologies converge (or flip). For instance, shout very loudly that you are a zealot for progress, justice, freedom, etc, even as your actions forsake those ideals. Examples: Bolsheviks, neocons, liberasts.

Law of Extremism – they tend to flip if they do, but they need to be in separate enclaves to build up into really extremist movements. Violent revolutions tend to happen during agrarian-industrial transitions because you have lots of self-contained classes thinking similarly and very opposed to each other (e.g. urban proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, etc); these differences tend to become less extreme in the later stages of industrialism when there is greater social mobility.

Radical Redefinition of Terms – how traditions are defined, and hence whom the community accepts and whom it rejects. A good illustration is the Russian Revolution: Bolsheviks came from being viewed as traitorous outcasts in 1914, to heroic defenders of the Motherland by 1918 against the foreign-backed Whites – who had themselves become heretics. During the 1930′s, the Party turned on itself and consigned many Old Bolshevik stalwarts into oblivion. Severe shocks can lead to a RRoT from below, while totalitarian regimes can perform RRoT’s from above.

Law of Chaos – big, sudden changes lead to instability, chaos, unpredictability, e.g. after radical redefinition of terms.

Law of Distance and Antipathy – the more distant you are from a certain viewpoint, the more you hate them. Hence the reason moderates are moderates, and extremists are not.

Law of Social Development – agrarian (collective belief → stability, rigidity, conservatism, but catastrophic breakdown if system fails); industrial (less collective, more skeptical, but still similar); post-industrial (atomized, enclave concentrations, very skeptical).

Law of Heresy – the totalitarian mind, in its rejection of the West and fervent rediscovery of traditional belief, views all deviations from orthodoxy as heresy (see Law of Skewed Perspectives, which applies to ideologues).

As commentators Scowspi and Kolya in the Categorizing the Russia Debate discussion noted, true artists are by definition dissidents (at least in the opinion of other dissident artists ), hence they find life tough in totalitarian societies and may themselves become extreme in their dissidence.

The concept of heresy is alien only to someone who completely internalizes the Idea of the West (this is of course impossible in practice).

Consequences for the Future

We live in a very, very interesting time. I’m sure the next few decades will be far more fun than even the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, though whether this is a good thing is an entirely different question.

1) The Sisyphean Loop will remain as strong as ever as societies try to reconcile their traditions with the West and to internalize the paradox that is liberal democracy. Whereas there have been some major discontinuities this century, the dominant trend is that the power of liberal democracy is taking sway throughout the entire world – if not in reality, at least as an ideal. Practically all nations, except a few in the tortured Dar al-Islam (where Islamism constitutes a major alternative, albeit discredited by rational people), accept liberal democracy as the optimal form of government, much as Fukuyama observed in his “end of history” thesis”.

2) But… there remain lingering attractions for the dark splendor of totalitarian ideologies, which are supported by the eternally valid justifications of moral relativism and post-modernism. All that’s needed is the force to implement it, which is rather lacking as of now…

3) Perhaps not for long though. The Malthusian belief cycle is reasserting itself in the shadows of industrial civilization – the polluted, drying rivers; the depleting oil fields; the melting permafrost releasing Siberian methane into the atmosphere; failed states and spreading chaos; the democratization of the means of making terror from the state to the individual.

4) Right now, I would say the world as a whole turned a corner with the 2008 Crisis (a much less noticed, but in reality more significant thing about that date is that it was most likely the year of peak oil production). “Scanning” was much in progress during the 1970′s-2000′s (clean energy, “sustainable development”, etc), when energy and ecological problems first made themselves felt. I think the 2010′s will see a heightened period of chaos, governments everywhere will become more authoritarian and new colonial empires will emerge. “Scanning” will within one to two decades be suppressed and confined within certain parameters as governments begin to chronically fear instability and collapse, fear that nothing they can do will save their societies from collapse. (They are already preparing: note the proliferation of CCTV cameras, databases, militarized security forces, etc). Quite possibly questioning the health and desirability of industrial civilization will come to be classed as subversive, perhaps under the rubric of the war against terror.

5) Then there’s the Internet and connectivity. Though often touted as democratizing and enlightening, this is not always the case: totalitarianism becomes more total than anything dreamt up by the despots of yore in the age of ubiquitous mass surveillance, and extremism is honed, not blunted (see enclave extremism). Like all previous technologies, the Internet cannot be anything more than a reflection of the society that exploits it. And our societies do not appear to have bright futures ahead of them…

Introduction: A Very Brief History of Russia-Watching

Anyone familiar with Western commentary on Russia will know that much of it is bifurcated into two camps, the so-called “Russophiles” and “Russophobes”. Both range the whole gamut of opinion from classical liberalism to nationalist arch-conservatism, and tend to invoke Orientalist interpretations of Russian culture to make their points. This dichotomy has a millennial heritage, going back as far, perhaps, as the medieval period when Western Christendom first acquired a primal aversion to the dark, chaotic steppes to the east; yet an aversion tempered by seductive legends such as that of Prester John, who ruled a perfect Christian kingdom in a place beyond the darkness of Tatary.

Though bloggers generally consider the Russophile-Russophobe dichotomy in contemporary terms, this division was as stark and relevant in the 1930’s. The following remarks made by John Scott in Behind the Urals, an account of life in a Soviet industrial town, are as relevant today as they were back then:

In talking with people in France and America I was impressed by the interest in the Soviet Union and the widespread misinformation about Russia and all things Russian. Everyone I met was opinionated [aren't we all lol!]. The Communists and their sympathizers held Russia up as a panacea…Other people were steeped in Eugene Lyons’ stories and would not concede the possibility that Russia had produced anything during recent years except chaos, suffering and disorder. They dismissed the industrial and material successes of the Russians with an angry wave of the hand. Any economist or businessman should have been able to see that the tripling of pig-iron production within a decade was a serious achievement, and would necessarily have far-reaching effects on the balance of economic and therefore military power in Europe.

So basically, opinions on Russia were binaried amongst those who cared to express an interest. And they were almost all wrong. The hardcore Communists would not admit that life remained hard for most people, that Russia’s level of development remained far below that of the West (despite the Depression) and ignored the high level of political repression. On the other hand, the anti-Communists were just as wrong. Their ideologized refusal to acknowedge the high morale, technological progress and the huge rise in Soviet military-industrial potential under Stalin did them no good, especially for those Nazi strategists who thought all they had to do was kick the door and the whole rotten Soviet structure would come tumbling down.

Another point I would make here is that Russia’s history is highly cyclical, going through a pattern of collapse, recovery, expansion, stagnation and collapse. There are some convincing reasons that much of this is tied to its geography and derived cultural traditions. The archetypical Russia is economically weak (cold climate, vast distances and subpar riverine interconnectivity) and insecure (open, undefended borders). This traditionally meant that the Russian state had to marshal all available resources to compete as a Great Power, necessitating a strong state capable of maintaining superior armed forces, keeping abreast of foreign technological developments and providing bread and games to the people. However, the strain of supporting a metastasized empire out of proportion to its economic development, as well as the ideological rigidities necessary to thwart its premature dissolution, meant that when critical amounts of pressure did build up collapses tended to be far more total and catastrophic than in the West.

A succinct summary of this theme of eternal rise and fall can be found in Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the 21st Century:

At present, all we see is chaos, struggle, economic collapse, ethnic disintegration – just as the observers of 1918 did. How could they have foreseen then that a decade or so later the USSR would have begun to produce chemicals, aircraft, trucks, tanks, and machine tools and be growing faster than any other industrialized society? By extension, how could Western admirers of Stalin’s centralized economy in the 1930’s know that the very system contained the seeds of its own collapse?

And as is well-known very few Kremlinogists accurately predicted the breakup the Soviet Union until 1989 (although it should be noted that contrary to current conventional wisdom, they were well-justified in their complacency because the Soviet political economy was fundamentally stable, albeit stagnant, and collapse was precipitated by Gorbachev’s abandonment of central planning in the absence of evolved market mechanisms). And yet soon after the pendulum swung the other way. Now quoting myself in Reading Russia Right:

Wildly optimistic predictions of tigerish growth rates and flourishing democracy were confounded, as practically every socio-economic statistic worsened and reforms were perceived to have authorized the wholesale looting of Russia – ‘the sale of the century’ – and the creation of a ‘historyless elite’ focused on the ‘exchange of unaccountable power for untaxable wealth’. By the end of the 1990’s, the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, tax collection and monetary emissions had eroded; market fundamentalism had transformed the Upper Volta with missiles into a ‘looted and bankrupt zone of nuclearized anarchy’ in a demographic death spiral presided over by the ‘world’s most virulent kleptocracy’ about to splinter along ethnic lines and fall into fascism sometime tomorrow. The Atlantic put it nice and simple: ‘Russia is Finished’.

And we all know what happened since 1998, even though some Russophobes have yet to catch up with the times – much like the ideologized anti-Communists of the 1930′s… (Of course, this is not to say that Putin is the next Stalin. I’m talking about the economic recovery, and the increasing investments into things like nanotechnology, which will probably be as important in this century as coal and steel were in the last).

So if there’s one thing history proves, understanding Russia requires a wide array of different approaches and a certain ideological flexibility. Unfortunately, this has rarely been the case because Russia is a palimpsest, a place of all things to all people due to its own extremes and contradictions. This is what we are going to explore now…

Categorizing the Russia Debate

Both Russophobes and Russophiles have a somewhat obsessive love-hate relationship with Russia, the main difference being that the “Russophobe” does everything she can to condemn the country (and those who defend it) from within her own specific frames of reference, frequently through the prism of an idealized West; while the “Russophile” does everything she can to understand Russia on its own terms. And since understanding is forgiveness, this inevitably leads to a Romantic infatuation with the country (this is where seduction begins).

Refer to the grid at the top of this post. The vertical axis attempts to gauge the Russia-watcher’s attitudes to the West and its values. Though they may admit to minor blemishes, those who are “pro-West” are firm believers in the absolute superiority of Western civilization as symbolized in the Idea of the West (rule of law, sanctity of contract, free markets, classical liberalism, etc). In contrast “cynics” tend to focus on its rather unnatural (”Faustian”, to use the Spenglerian term) characteristics, systemic hypocrisies and tend to believe in the possibility – and indeed desirability – of economic modernization, social progress and democratization without Westernization.

Viewed from within this conceptual framework of a belief matrix, several major groups or schools begin to emerge.

Centrists & Marxists. These folks tend to be placid, considerate and consciously strive for objectivity in their judgments. Leading lights of this school include Andy Young (Siberian Light), Sean Guillory (Sean’s Russia Blog), the folks at the eXile (though they lean towards cynicism), Geoffrey Hosking and Anatol Lieven.

Siberian Light is the centrist par excellence amongst bloggers. Though he personally has a rather dim view of the Putin administration, Andy mostly focuses on aggregation and allows readers to make up their own minds.

Sean Guillory (Sean’s Russia Blog) aims to explore Russia through the “dialectic between universal and particular”, without trying to resolve, but rather accepting, the inherent contradictions born of such an exercise – this acceptance is the reason he tilts towards the “Russophile” end of the horizontal axis (albeit this is moderated by his semi-unconscious Western biases). He criticizes the Orientalism which he believes are clouding both the Russophile and Russophobe perspective, though as I assert in this work a Russophile cannot be an Orientalist by definition. As can be expected from a liberal Californian social sciences academic, not to mention his language, Sean directs his analysis through a Marxist and more broadly a dialectical prism. For reasons I will explain below, the dialectical approach is the epitome of Reason, which is located at the center of the vertical axis

On a less refined level, Sean’s approach could be described as both realistic and cynical. This attitude is broadly shared by some former eXile writers like Mark Ames and Yasha Levine.

The Western Russophobes. These are people with a strong belief in the validity of the Idea of the West and its near flawless exercise in the “Western world”. Their perceptions of Russia’s “Otherness” from Western ideals lead to regret and sadness for the apparent plight of the Russian people (often with scant regard for the Russians’ subjective perceptions of their own situation). Examples of such moderate Western Russophobes include Robert Amsterdam, Vilhelm Konnander, Steven Rosefielde, Andrew Wilson and most of the folks at RFERL.

The more extreme elements see the struggle in Manichean, quasi-religious terms. Russia’s ostensible denial of the Idea of the West is amoral, if not heretical – and so are the defenders of Putin’s “bloody regime”, who are either innocent dupes (”useful idiots”) or unrepentant heretics with whom there can be no compromise. Here’s a telling quote from Streetwise Professor’s (Craig Pirrong) seminal essay On Russophobia:

…It is this fundamental philosophical and moral divide between the classical liberal views I espouse, and the anti-liberal views of the Putinists, that explains my intense antipathy for the current Russian government and state, and which is the wellspring of my trenchant criticism. It is not a divide that can be bridged [my emphasis], as these are antithetical conceptions of the roles of the individual and the state…

Yet the cake here goes to Ed Lucas, who explicitly compares modern-day Russia to Mordor (the archetypal evil empire of epic fantasy) and its defenders to the evil henchmen of the Dark Lord himself.

But as the skies darken once again over the European continent (or Middle Earth if you prefer)… Mordor is clearly the Russian Federation, ruled by the demonic overlord Sauron (Putin). His email address, to give a contemporary note, might be sauron@gov.morder.me (the suffix is for Middle Earth). The threat from Mordor—symbolised by the Ring—is the combination of dirty money and authoritarian political thinking.

And Sauron’s henchmen the Orcs are clearly the murderous goons of the old KGB. The new twist—the Uruk-Hai, is the mutation of the old Soviet intelligence service with organised crime and big business. Sauron’s allies—the Nazgul—are the Siloviki, the sinister chieftains of the Kremlin’s authoritarian capitalist system. Like the Nazgul, we seldom see their faces.

So despite their representation of themselves as paragons of upstanding morality and reason, the bankruptcy of their arguments soon shows them up for the reality-disconnected ideologues many of them actually are. Other folks in this category include Paul Goble and David McDuff.

However, the ultimate in this category is the bombastic, manipulative La Russophobe, who abuses “her” anonymity to “expose” (read: smear) innocent individuals voicing disagreement with her extremist views in the vilest and most low-life manner. She represents the voice of Russia’s liberasts, a very small but loud segment of the Russian population which hates its own country and uses Bolshevik-reminiscent rhetoric against its enemies, real and imagined. Beyond them lie folks like Jeff Nyquist and the “Final Phase” conspiracy theorists, who believe that the Soviet Union never collapsed, continues to plot for the global triumph of Communism and recommend a pre-emptive American thermonuclear strike / holocaust on Russia. These extremist elements, lying on a spectrum from SWP to the Final Phase theorists, demonstrate that paradoxically the greater the strength of your belief in the West – the more your thoughts and actions forsake its rationalistic ideals.

The Western Russophiles. People like Thomas P.M. Barnett, Charles Ganske & Yuri Mamchur (Russia Blog), Eugene Ivanov, Gordon Hahn, Dale Herspring and Mike Averko (I think) believe that the civilizational commonalities between the West and Russia are strong, Russia is (more-or-less) converging to Western norms of economic and political behavior under the present regime and intense US-Russian co-operation is both rational and desirable. Such commonalities include: the war against terror, the struggle against radical Islam, common goals in economic development and democratic governance (they acknowledge a separate Russian path to democracy independent of “the West”, noting that there are many forms on national democracy), and Christian identity (so it is not surprising to see Russia Blog funded by the creationist Discovery Institute; before criticizing this, some Russophobes should pause to note that such beliefs are shared by more than half of “real Americans”, and I say this as an atheist!). Carl Thomson (Moscow Tory) is the British representative of this set, a member of the UK’s Conservative Party (!) who largely rejects the Russophobia of his own party.

Barnett believes that Russia and the West have a common interest in advancing globalization so as to combat instability and extremism in the destitute “Gap” nations running across the Central Americas and vast swathes of the African and Eurasian Islamic belt. Charles Ganske and Eugene Ivanov are patriotic Republicans who lament what they perceive as the manipulation of Reagan’s legacy to advance an anti-Russian agenda. Many of these people tend to be very much part of the conventional, respectable American “establishment” in politics, business, religion and academia.

The main Western Russophobe argument against their brothers and sisters on the other end of the spectrum is that their position is untenable, riddled with contradictions. But this is based on their own belief that the “real” Russia and the “real” West are incompatible (a divide that cannot be bridged). The Western Russophiles do not believe this belief is valid, so their position is internally consistent and hence can only be discredited (or confirmed!) by objective developments in Russia itself, or rather by how these developments are perceived and interpreted in Western texts.

A more valid objection to the Western Russophile worldview is that they have a rather warped perspective on the “real Russia”, with a tendency to gloss over its defects (that is, defects from the Western perspective, because things like the abuse of administrative resources or the post-totalitarian (Vlad Sobell) nature of unreformed elements of its security, judicial and bureaucratic apparatuses do not much concern Slavophiles, Eurasianists and even most ordinary Russians). This is because they are Westerners catering to Western expectations of what Russia should be and serve afundamentally political role in that their main task is to persuade Western politicians to go against the (Russophobic) Western consensus and seek rapprochement, understanding and co-operation with Russia.

The Skeptical Russophiles. I believe this characterizes the majority of Russia’s people today. They are proud of their nation in all its bittersweet glories and traumatic infamies and are deeply skeptical about the West’s poisoned chalice of absolutist political thinking (whether it is the neocon vision of US-directed democracy exports or the neoliberal dogma of free markets). They tend to see Russia as significantly separate from the West. Their recognition that Westernization is no universal panacea makes them skeptical towards democracy-freedom rhetoric and the overall desirability of pursuing some mythical “convergence” to the West. The fatal flaw of this approach, as alleged by the Western Russophobes, is that it is amoral and irrational (given that it stands in direct opposition to their belief in the Idea of the West). When the skeptical Russophiles screech about “double standards”, “Western hypocrisy” or “Orientalism”, the Russophobes chant “whataboutism”, “moral equivalence” and “tiresome pomo-ism” in retort.

Analysts who think along these lines include Peter Lavelle and the folks at Russia Today(its slogan “any story can be another story altogether” brilliantly illustrates their postmodern interpretation of truth, echoing former Economist journalist Gideon Lichfield who in one of his less cynical moments said, “The truth is like a quantum superposition state: it is not one version or the other, but a strange combination of all them,” in relation to Russia coverage), most prominent Russian politicians (including Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev), Nicolai Petro, Vlad Sobell, Eric Kraus, Fedia Kriukov (Russia in the Media), “Konstantin” (Russian Blog), Kirill Pankratov and yours truly, Anatoly Karlin.

A common Russophobe claim is that this position is inherently paradoxical (if you are skeptical, why only towards the West and not towards Russia?); this contradiction is resolved through re-definition of the terms – changing the Western-imposed definition of a “Russophile” as someone who uncritically praises Russia and its government, to a simple acceptance of it for what it is. Unlike the case for rational Western civilization,resolving its own contradictions is not part of Russia’s historical mission (and furthermore, attempts to do so on the parts of its elites usually led to tragic results).

This naturally results in an organic Russophilia tinged with skepticism towards the West on the part of the Russian people. The poet Fyodor Tyutchev managed to sum this up in just four eternal lines:

Умом Россию не понять, | You can’t understand Russia with intellect,
Аршином общим не измерить: | You can’t measure her with a common scale,
У ней особенная стать — | She has a special kind of grace,
В Россию можно только верить. | You can only believe in Russia.

Yet unadulterated belief is a luxury that cannot extend to those Russians forced to have dealings with Westerners on Western terms and the foreign Romantic intellectuals who empathize with the “real Russia”. This forces them into a sophisticated andWestern-derived defense in the information war (much as Russians and other civilizations that wanted to preserve their sovereignty from the West were forced into adopting the West’s machine civilization and modern weapons to survive real wars). They are slaves to the West so that “real Russians” can live free.

This phenomenon is illustrated by my reply to Streetwise Professor’s aforementionedOn Russophobia article with Deconstructing Russophobia, where I noted that a) his essentializing of Russia as anti-thetical to liberalism falls under the rubric of Orientalism, b) in support, there were numerous despotisms in Western history and in any case different Western states saw markedly different patterns of historical development, some more statist that others and c) “there many instances of democratic / liberal tendencies organically appearing in Russian history, from the Veche of medieval Novgorod to Putin’s consolidation of liberal democracy in the last 8 years”. Bearing in mind the centrality of belief to SWP’s position, I subjected it the following postmodernist assault:

And that’s really the difference between Russophobes and Russophiles. Russophiles know they live in the matrix; Russophobes think they’re free and laugh at the poor Russians, not realizing that they’re laughing at their own ugly reflections.

My basic assumption in making this argument (shared by many) is that the Idea of the West is based on the historical progress of Reason (or the Mechanism of natural science), a progress that advanced far enough as to rationalize itself – and consequently divine its own eschatology, starting from Hegel, the inventor of the modern dialectical theory. (This represents a profound break not only from the ancient myths and esoteric theo-philosophies which saw the world undergoing eternal cycles of progress and retreat, but also the Roman salvation cults and Chriatinity, which despite positing a linear time and an eschatology treated it as revealed knowledge, rather than building it up from reason).

Yet paradoxically, the Idea of the West (in its dialectical, universal sense) is ultimately a belief system itself, not based on rationalism as it would have you believe (even the axioms of mathematics are an object of belief, let alone something as artificial and unnatural as modern liberal democracy); and any belief system can be discredited by a) pointing out its inconsistencies in real life (this is the basis of the essentialist and Orientalist critiques) and b) exposing its contradictions – namely, by weilding the weapon of postmodernism, the West’s most fatal invention.

Modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom. Relativism – the doctrine that maintains all values are merely relative and which attacks all “priveleged perspectives” – must ultimately end up undermining democratic and tolerant values as well. Relativism is not a weapon that can be fired selectively at the enemies one chooses. It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the “absolutisms”, dogmas and certainties of the Western tradition, but that traditions emphasis on tolerance, diversity and freedom of thought as well.

Who wrote this? Francis Fukuyama, our Age’s prophet of the end of the history – and its unwitting nemesis.

(In his book, Fukuyama utilizes Hegel’s dialectics – that most Western of inventions – in an attempt to “prove” that liberal democracy is the final culmination of a linear history, not the withering away of the state and Communism as asserted by the Marxists. Yet this one paragraph, which I believe to be the most significant by far, contradicts his entire message; and from then on he becomes much less convincing).

The Western Russophobes characterize such attitudes as petulant, childish and nonconstructive (not to say Orwellian and totalitarian). And they are… because they are based on explicit denial of the West, and as such – they are caused by the West. Nazism, Stalinism, radical Islamism… these are hybrids of Western and traditional modes of thought, defined by a reaction to the West. For the defining essence of the West is that it is self-denying and self-refuting, unlike Russia (and traditional societies in general), which is self-affirming! This is the West’s greatest weakness… and its greatest triumph.

Two consequences follow. First, the Russophiles who are also firm believers in the West are viewed as misguided by the more extreme skeptical Russophiles (like Russian nationalists). However, they are useful tactical allies in the real struggle, which is between skeptical Russophilia and the Western Russophobe crusaders (the First Enemy).

Second, when Russia’s truest defenders (the skeptical Russophiles) use the weapons of the West against the West, this results in spiritual contamination which spreads throughout the entirety of Russian civilization, a contamination that skeptical Russophiles must constantly struggle against. For if they don’t, Russians end up deserting their unconditional faith in Russia and replace it with its simulacra – radical, self-refuting ideologies like extreme Slavophilia and Eurasianism, born of Western intellectual degeneracy and seduced by Western technics yet nostalgic for an imagined past of blood, soil and struggle to replace the gray disillusionment and sleazy decadence of the modern West.

These Russian nationalists don’t attack the West because they hate it, but because they love it too much. As such they are heretics and traitors to Russia, for in their absolute opposition to the West they ensure its spiritual triumph through suicide (paradoxical as the concept may sound to Westerners who have not delved too deeply into the spiritual foundations of their own belief system).

The Region of Disillusionment. These are the lonely souls cursed with an absolute love for truth. An excellent example would be Milan Kundera, who dislikes all kitsches, all totalitarianisms. From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. And no one knows this better than politicians. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch… In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

Yet all societies need kitsch, a single dominant kitsch, in order to function; as such,these holy fools are spiritually rejected from all human societies. Yet this should not unduly bother them, for as Kundera insists: Einmal ist Keinmal – what is lived once might as well not have been lived at all, with all the moral and spiritual consequences that follow (”In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine”). Internalization of this concept is the road to spiritual freedom. This state of sublime oblivion is every believer’s unconscious dream of redemption.

The lack of belief that characterizes the Region of Disillusionment makes it profoundly unstable. The tortured souls caught up in there cannot resist the Romantic seduction of Russia’s Great March to the right, the iron rationalism of the West below or the radical nihilism (the belief in non-belief) of the top-left. They can either leave this hell (spiritual freedom) of their own volition, or be ripped apart by centrifugal forces and descend into madness, which is just another form of spiritual freedom and sublime oblivion.

There are no major Russia commentators in this quadrant. There are few absolute cynics, and even fewer people care to listen to their blasphemies.

EDIT: On reflection, I think the eXile fits the bill perfectly. They are irreverent court jesters talking truth to Russian, Western and any other power (see Ames’ review of Virtual Politics). Of course, almost no official figures ever cared to praise or even acknowledge them, even though some may have secretly admired them.

Extremists. Extremism of any kind is a profoundly unstable state. Not tied to any specific ideology, it is primarily a pattern of thought, moreover one now frequently reinforced by the phenomenon of Internet enclave extremism:

[O]n many issues, most of us are really not sure what we think. Our lack of certainty inclines us toward the middle. Outside of enclaves, moderation is the usual path. Now imagine that people find themselves in enclaves in which they exclusively hear from others who think as they do. As a result, their confidence typically grows, and they become more extreme in their beliefs. Corroboration, in short, reduces tentativeness, and an increase in confidence produces extremism. Enclave extremism is particularly likely to occur on the Internet because people can so easily find niches of like-minded types — and discover that their own tentative view is shared by others… There is a general risk that those who flock together, on the Internet or elsewhere, will end up both confident and wrong, simply because they have not been sufficiently exposed to counterarguments. They may even think of their fellow citizens as opponents or adversaries in some kind of “war.”

Anyone particular come to mind in the Russia debate? La Russophobe? Ed Lucas? The folks at InoForum? Russia’s liberasts? Myself? (I don’t think so, otherwise I wouldn’t have put myself up for consideration – but I’m interested in what my readers would say on this matter).

Ideological extremism is a fundamentally Western phenomenon, for it is something rationalized and artificial (whereas traditional societies are organic and conservative). I won’t dwell much on the intellectual foundations of various kinds of extremism (I’ve done that in great detail above), but I will mention one feature specific to all of them:they are unstable, with a tendency to flip to opposite extremes.

This is because of the artificial, one-sided manner in which extremists build up their beliefs. Though their belief systems are hard and uncompromising, they are also consequently brittle; given enough insults, they break down into a chaotic state (usually in the Region of Disillusionment). After a depressive, contemplative period, a new belief system takes form, which is frequently the polar opposite of their previous belief system. See for example David Horowitz, who metamorphosed from youthful limp-wristed liberal Marxism to bombastic ultra-conservatism. After several shocks, extremists tend to sink into the Region of Disillusionment, where some of them manage to find an indifferent happiness.

Hence the reason why it is actually Russians who have been exposed to the West make by far the best Russophobes (e.g. Kasparov, Latynina, Illarionov, etc), whereas virulent Russian nationalism typically arises after profound disillusionment with the West (e.g. Russia after the 1990’s smuta).

Russians. Russians have traditionally been accepting towards Russia in all its faults and glories. This is a default steady state that is only disrupted by severe socio-political breakdown. Their encounter with the West ushered in profound shocks, including the formation of the Russian intelligentsia – a civilizational defense mechanism to protect its spiritual sovereignty. They are in a profound predicament, however, since they are an inorganic cosmopolitan element, apart from the real Russia. Their assimilation of Western thought patterns in tandem with their retention of older Russian identities creates a profound internal conflict which further alienates them from the real Russia: either they desert to the West and become Western Russophobes, like the Bolsheviks and today’s liberasts; or they become spiritual cynics in the Region of Disillusionment, rejected by all except an inner God; or they flee into the comforting recesses of an imagined past, like the extreme Slavophiles or Eurasianists (their only disagreement with each other is on what the imagined past was like).

Most just about manage to remain in the spiritually unsettling void of skeptical Russophilia (this includes the Putin circle), fighting against both totalitarian temptations and Western Russophobe encroachments on two fronts. Since today more and more Russians are becoming Westernized in thought but simultaneously ever more disillusioned with the West, the consequences for the future may be dire.

Pray that Russia continues its insane struggle. For only suicide – universal suicide, can break the loop of the struggle. Much like Samson bringing down the Temple, a glorious nuclear conflagration will sweep the Faustian West with its machines and intellect and hypocrisy into the vortex of sublime oblivion, freeing it from the overlong, tyrannous daylight of the unnatural state and once again ushering in the primeval mysticism of the dark forests, where blood and instinct can once again reign dominant over the biosphere. As they should, according to the true dissident.

Foreigners. Amongst Western Europeans, Germans are probably the most disillusioned with the West, especially in its depopulating, depressed eastern regions. It is a spiritually bifurcated and psychologically tortured nation: though it played a major role in manufacturing the Faustian world of machines and the intellect, it is safe to say that a nation which produced the likes of Nietzsche, Spengler and Heidegger possesses a profoundly mystical soul. Given that the imposition of liberal democracy onto its soil was artificial rather than organic, and its deep spiritual affinity with the Russian soul in its worldview, the re-emergence of the Reich is likely. Many Muslims also view Russia positively (with the exception of Wahhabi extremists), unlike the West which they regard as arrogant (pretensions of universality), disruptive (of age-old traditions) and spiritually degenerate.

Peoples like the British, French, Poles and the Americans retain a large degree of belief in the West – the Poles and Americans to a greater extent, the British to a lesser (they are partly disillusioned, perhaps to a greater extent than the others, by the effects (ostensibly rational) neoliberal democracy has had on their nations – social breakdown, deindustrialization and paradoxically, a metastasized state with universal surveillance and databases, political spin, burgeoning bureaucracy and ever expanding welfare rolls to support the demoralized victims of market fundamentalism). Ultimately, throughout history the Idea of the West was sustained by economic growth; whenever it faltered, as in the 1930’s, the hyenas pounced and the temptations of simulated belief and of struggle reasserted themselves. Quoting Spengler in The Decline of the West:

…..The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our presents ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedents. With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all Cultures…..

…..The last century [the 19th] was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them…..

With the coming of energetic and environmental limits to growth, mass cynicism is inevitable. Cynics, including skeptical Russophiles, will have an easier time everywhere. Let us hope they do not dare storm the heights and attempt to reinvent the past, using all the powers of the modern Megalopolis (cybernetics, WMD’s, virtual politics, relativism, etc) at their disposal – to destroy the Megalopolis.

So here’s the plot-line. After 9/11, the US air fleet was grounded for three days in the name of national security. Though presumably a major inconvenience for travelers, it was a boon for climatologist David Travis who was studying the effects of contrails, or vapor trails, left behind by high-flying aircraft on the world’s climate.

He predicted that removing contrails would have a significant impact on global temperatures, but was shocked to discover that the daily temperature range – the difference between the hottest and coldest temperature measures in a day – shifted up by an unprecedented 1.1C during those three days!

The Beginning

This story begins with Gerald Stanhill, who was tasked to measuring solar radiation over Israel as part of its plans to develop an irrigation system in the 1950′s. Repeating these experiments in the 1980′s, he found that there had been a whopping 22% drop in solar radiation over Israel!

The results were dismissed by mainstream researchers, who could not believe that the Earth’s atmosphere was darkening because there had begun a clear warming trend from the 1970′s. But then Beate Liepert combed through meteorological records in Germany and discovered the same thing. Working independently, Stanhill and Liepert discovered that from the 1950′s to the early 1990′s, the level of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface had dropped 9% in Antarctica, 10% in the USA, 16% in parts of the British Isles and almost 30% in Russia. They christened the phenomenon global dimming.

(I think the reason the biggest fall happened over Russia was because it was still far from industrialized then and reached its pollution peak in the 1980′s, whereas the US became ecologically conscientious as regards soot and sulfur dioxide emissions from the 1970′s).

Global Dimming

Scientists still ignored these results, since they could not square global dimming with global warming.

In Australia, two researchers, Michael Roderick and Graham Farquhar, were investigating the factors influencing the so-called  “pan evaporation rate”. Basically this is a really boring set of repeated experiments in which you fill up a pan of water, leave it out in the Sun for constant intervals of time and plot a time series of how much water vanishes during those periods. Really sad. But very useful in agricultural science.

Their research indicated that the key things determining evaporation rates are wind levels, humidity and the brightness of sunlight, with the latter dominant (the photons kick the water molecules out of the pan into the atmosphere). Temperatures actually play only a relatively minor role. So they reasoned that the number of photons hitting the Earth’s surface was going down…but why?

Mike Roderick happened across a paper called “Evaporation Losing Its Strength” in the magazine Nature, which reported a global decline in pan evaporation rates across the US, Europe and Russia. Putting two and two together, they compared it with the decline in observed sunlight from Stanhill’s and Liepert’s work. The trends towards decline matched perfectly.

The global dimming theory now had a bright future.

Reflecting Away the Asian Monsoon?

During the mid-1990′s climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan noticed a decline in sunlight over large parts of the Indian Ocean. He reasoned this was due to atmospheric pollution. Industrial civilization emits soot and sulfate particulates into the atmosphere, creating the hazes which shroud its major cities.

This effect is especially pronounced over the plains of northern India, where the fires from hundreds of millions of primitive peasant cook-stoves and the exhaust from the millions of rickshaws that ply its gridlocked cities play a major part in forming the “Asian Brown Cloud”, the dusky haze that envelops much of South Asia.

A multinational experiment was conducted to study this in more detail in the Maldives. In the north, air is polluted by aerosols from the Indian subcontinent; in the southernmost islands, it is cleared away by clean Antarctic winds. This fortunate conjunction lent itself well to comparative study.

When water vapor attaches itself onto naturally occurring particles, they eventually become too heavy to remain airborne and fall to the ground as rain. There are far more particles suspended in polluted air – ash, soot, sulfur dioxide, etc – than in normal air. By a factor of 10, to be precise. Thus the man-made particles provide ten times as many sites for water droplets to attach themselves to. Therefore, polluted clouds contain many more water droplets than naturally occurring clouds – each one far smaller than it would be naturally.

Many small water droplets reflect more sunlight than a few larger ones, so polluted clouds reflect far more light back into space, preventing the Sun’s heat from getting through. This is the mechanism by which global dimming works – not only are the particles themselves reflecting more sunlight, but most importantly they form brighter clouds over polluted areas.

(I think this is also a feedback mechanism. During Ice Ages, you have a lot of dust-laden winds which would reflect back sunlight, dim the Earth and reduce evaporation rates, which in turn would lead to dessication and more dust. When the Earth warms, more vegetation appears and deserts eventually contract once the system reaches an equilibrium, so more sunlight reaches through, increasing the power of the Earth’s hydrological engine.)

Satellite images revealed this global dimming effect was not just limited to India, but also encompassed China extending to the Pacific, Western Europe extending into Africa, the British Isles, etc.

These clouds could alter the world’s rainfall patterns. This may have already led to the first global dimming Holocaust.

There was a major famine in 1984 in Ethiopia, partly caused by a decades-long drought across the Sahel. The area is crucially reliant on a short wet season created by the summer monsoon.

This monsoon depends on the Sun heating the Atlantic north of the Equator, drawing the tropical rain belt northward and bringing rain to the Sahel. This mechanism failed frequently during the 1970′s and 1980′s.

Leon Rotstayn was puzzled by this phenomenon because his climate models indicated that pollution blowing in from Europe and the US over the Atlantic should have little effect on the Sahel’s rainfall patterns. But taking the new Maldives findings into account, he found that the resultant brighter clouds would reflect more sunlight in space, cooling the Atlantic Ocean. Consequently the equatorial rain bands would fail to move as far north, spelling doom for the benighted denizens of the Sahel.

From the 1990′s, there were serious moves towards regulating aerosol emissions in Europe and the US. Scrubbers were installed on factory chimneys, fuel was cleansed of sulfur and cars acquired catalytic converters. The rains returned to the Sahel and the droughts have receded in recent years.

Clouds over India

However, the “Asian Brown Cloud” is still growing and as noted earlier the Asian monsoons that sustain 3bn people are crucially dependent on the temperature gradient between land and oceans. These gradients will diminish in the presence of major dimming. Furthermore, could it be that the reason El Nino has increased in recent years (in contrast to the historical record, in which it usually flares up only when the world is colder, i.e. when less sunlight reached the Earth) is due to diminished solar intensity over the west Pacific “fire-stove” off the Indonesian coast that drives this cycle?

From the Frying Pan into the Fire – Accelerated Global Warming

So the world decides to clean up its act. Quite literally. Global dimming eases, the monsoons return to stability and everything will be nice and dandy, right?

Unfortunately not. For global dimming has been masking us from an even greater threat – very fast global warming.

As shown in this satellite photo of the Western US, though contrails are individually small when there are many of them they can blanket the whole sky. Now if according to Travis’ calculations just a three day interruption in air travel can raise the daily temperature range by more than 1.1C – a unprecedentedly sharp jump, then what would happen to global temperatures if all industrial activity were to collapse tomorrow?

The slight global cooling from the 1950′s to the 1970′s may have been due to rapidly rising pollution whose immediate cooling effects overwhelmed the as yet modest effects of global warming (whose impact is not immediate, but stretched over decades with a “half-life” – when the climate system moves half the way to its new equilibrium – of around 30 years). However, since then pollution control in the industrialized world coupled with the end of exponential growth in world hydrocarbons extraction allowed the warming trend to regain the initiative.

The effects are already observable in Europe. During the 1980′s, east-central Europe was an environmental hellhole of hanging smogs, acid rain and wilted forests. The central focus was at the so-called “Black Triangle”, on the borders of Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia.

England 2080?

The collapse of Communism cleaned away the blight, but nature doesn’t provide free lunches. Europe cutting its pollution may have saved millions of Sahelians and added a few years to the life expectancy of the denizens of Dresden, but temperatures too started rising rapidly – culminating in the ferocious summer heatwave of 2003, which produced 35,000 excess deaths. Within a few decades, this will be the norm; within a few decades more, much of the Mediterranean may become desert.

If global dimming has such a big and immediate impact on temperatures, then this means that global warming is in fact a far stronger beast than previously thought. Furthermore, most aerosol pollutants are washed out of the atmosphere or broken down by hydroxyl within days; CO2 accumulates and stays up there for centuries. In the long run, and absent conscious human intervention, CO2 and global warming will win out.

The Dilemmas of Global Dimming

Once clean air regulations and/or depleting hydrocarbon stocks force a stop to or reversal of “dirty” pollution, which produces a cooling effect, then warming will hit the Earth with full force – by then no doubt accelerated by positive feedbacks like the decreasing ice-albedo effect, ocean acidification, vegetation dieoff and Siberian methane releases.

Global warming will follow the upper end of the IPCC’s projections (6.4C rise by 2100), or even exceed them altogether. We may hit 2C as soon as 2030, initiating the melting of the polar icecaps and dooming the world’s coastal cities. A rise of 4C, perhaps as soon as 2040, will spell the death of the Amazon. The fin de siècle climate may be as much as 10C hotter than today, which implies certain doom for industrial civilization as the (electronic-cyber) map collapses from the assault of the desert of the real.

No wonder then that stratospheric sulfur particulate emissions are one of the leading contenders for geo-engineering plans to “correct” the world’s climate should global warming veer out of control, this idea being proposed by Mikhail Budyko as early as 1974. Or we could try to initiate a hydroxyl collapse so that pollution no longer gets cleansed out and accumulates like CO2, shielding us from the Sun’s wrath.

Of course, both paths – global warming or global dimming – will have catastrophic impacts on world food production. Increasing the global aerosol cover on such a large scale is a huge undertaking in political and social costs. One way to do it is to increase coal burning and to remove the scrubbers from factory chimneys and other such amenities of today’s life. In the future, clean air may become a luxury.

Doing this will be quite cheap – coal is still plentiful, even if the mined ores are constantly declining in energy density, and removing pollution controls will significantly increase its EROEI (energy return on energy invested), which will give a boost to an industrial civilization by now on the verge of collapse. However, embarking on this project will be difficult to explain to citizens already tired of the dead hand of government in their lives, for by now net returns to complexity will be decidedly negative (Tainter). Furthermore, not all nations will benefit or agree to this project, though they will no doubt be bullied into line should the Great Powers reach a common agreement.

However, quite apart from further postponing the inevitable day of reckoning and increasing its magnitude when comes, darkening the world could shut down the Asian monsoon and drastically change the world’s weather patterns.

If global warming is to go unchallenged by global dimming, however, it will be all the faster and more catastrophic. Beyond a 3C rise, the heat will wreck the world’s mid-latitudinal breadbaskets and cause staple crop yields in overpopulated nations like China and India to plummet.

Fire or darkness? That is one hell of a predicament. Our only hope of averting it is through a technological breakthrough (the technological Singularity?) or a fundamental values shift (transition to Green Communism?). Only time will tell whether Heaven or Hell awaits humanity this century.

As you may have noticed from the sidebar, I am currently researching a book on the “future history” of the 21^st century. I wrote more about this here. Suffice to say that in the next few months I am planning on reading many relevant books, reports and articles on relevant topics – energy, technology, resource depletion, climate change, international and military trends, economic growth, civilizational cycles, etc – and posting abridged notes on them at Sublime Oblivion. Since I am doing this mostly for myself, I cannot guarantee they will be interesting. I’ll continue posting on my usual themes, but perhaps at a slower pace.

The first book I am reviewing is The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, according to whom the root cause of civilizational collapse is because of over-investment into and declining marginal returns on complexity. Societies invest in complexity to solve their problems and typically need to expend ever more organizational and physical energy to maintain that level of complexity; eventually, this expenditure undermines their material base, opens up a large potential gap where they could reap the exact same benefits but at a lower level of complexity (and cost), and the likelihood of collapse converges to one.

Below is a more detailed exposition and the full notes are here.

Will we be strangled by our own complexity?

Introduction. Ruins and relics of long dead civilizations, now overtaken by vines of verdant chaos, or buried under the shifting sands of time, hold a certain morbid fascination for us – these once great, hubristic and monumental societies that succumbed to the sublime oblivion of collapse. We cannot help entertaining thoughts about the sustainability of own, global, industrial civilization – the “possibility that a civilization should die doubles our own mortality”.

What is collapse? Tainter starts off by defining collapse – when an empire, chiefdom or tribe experiences a “significant loss of an established level of socio-political complexity”, manifesting itself in decreases in vertical stratification, occupational specialization, regimentation, centralization, information and trade flows, literacy, artistic achievement, territorial extent and investment in the “epiphenomena of civilization” (palaces, granaries, temples, etc). He summarizes a large number of historic collapses – Harappa, the Western Chou, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Roman Empire and different American cultures.

Historical cases of collapse. In many cases a formerly highly organized, regimented and standardized civilization devolved into a more chaotic, brutal and cruder one. As they experienced stresses, evidence grows of separatism, feudalism, barbarian invasions and civil war and famines. As in Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century or the Old Kingdom of Egypt after 2181BC, there were multiple rulers competing for power in any one year. Legitimizing symbols of the old order were destroyed, like the burned palaces in Mycenaean Greece and the toppled basalt monuments of the Olmecs and the deconstructed ruins of the Egyptian pyramids. Archaeologists discovered unburied corpses, hoarded jewelery and primitive huts in the cities of post-collapse Harappa; in many cases, grand buildings and monumental works such as the Pyramids are deconstructed to help build local, humbler dwellings to last out the approaching Dark Ages… For some collapses can be very long indeed. A thousand years separated the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance. After its 11th C collapse, the population of Mesopotomia dropped to its lowest level in at least 5000 years and until modern times the areas outside Baghdad reverted to nomadism. The mother of all collapses is that of the Ik (used by Dmitri Orlov to represent the fifth, and last, stage of collapse) – in this hunter-gatherer society, at one point all familial and social relations broke down, subsistence was pursued individually and universally abandoned children coalesced into “age sets” for mutual protection.

After the Roman withdrawal, Britain descended into lawlessness as villas and cities were burned, looted and replaced by small fortified settlements; barter and self-sufficiency replaced money and trade networks. Public works, literacy, and internal and external security vanished; for in a “complex society that has collapsed…the overarching structure that provides support services to the population loses capability or disappears entirely” – the “world as seen from any locality perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown”.

Benefits of collapse? This is not, however, to say that after collapse the world shifts into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style Hobbesian war of all against all where the center doesn’t hold, grass grows in a streets and bands of malnourished survivors scavenge amidst the rusted ruins of former grandeur. Contemporary elites incapable of primary food production (as well as historians) see the loss of peace, great literature and technology in a tragic light; yet collapse is at base an economizing process carried through by rational individuals for whom this outcome is objectively preferable. There is evidence that in many parts of the Roman Empire average nutrition actually improved, since the peasants were no longer burdened into forced savings to maintain the imperial superstructure of magnates, bureaucrats and soldiers.

What are complex societies? Complex societies range from kinship-based bands and chiefdoms dominated by populist “Big Men” to territorially-defined nations ruled over by a depersonalized government drafted from the ranks of entrenched elites with monopolies on violence, taxation and legislation and needing constant ideological legitimization and coercion to sustain themselves. The more highly complex societies (based on “organic solidarity”, vertical stratification and horizontal specialization) are “nearly decomposable systems” made from simpler building blocks, which decompose into their constituent forms after a collapse – though I would note that in modern societies industrialism broke apart the traditional ties binding people to village and kinship networks.

How do complex societies evolve? There exist two major schools of thought on this issue, the “Marxist” / “conflict” and the “integrationist”. In The Family, Private Property and the State, Engels wrote that differential acquisition of wealth led to hereditary nobility, monarchy, slavery and imperialist wars – to maintain the privileged position of a ruling class based on exploitation and coercion of the masses (and contradictions in social systems between antagonistic classes drove history). However, there is a contradiction – Marxists say surpluses are needed for state formation, but since material conditions are culturally mediated, why can’t they be concocted whenever one pleases – indeed, why did humanity spend more than 99% of its history in primitive bands?

The integrationists believe that states stem from the needs of society based on a shared consensus, not the ambitions of elites and coercive dominance. This is usually in response to a problem that could be better solved with managerial hierarchies – for instance, a hydraulic despotism can concentrate powers of information processing and labor mobilizations to build and maintain irrigation systems, thus solving the problem of overpopulation in a limited and stressed environment – at least for a time. In this view, elites get compensated for fulfiling their beneficial roles, though Marxists can still make the valid argument that historically their rewards tended to surpass their real contributions because of coercion (soldiers, control over food, etc) and legitimizing propaganda and ideologies (PS. right now the global financiers spring to mind).

In conclusion, a synthesis is possible between the two theories. Institutions form from unequal access to resources AND create benefits for average citizens. Integrationism accounts better for distribution of necessities of life; conflict theory for surpluses. Pure self­-aggrandizement can’t account for state development, but helps understand their subsequent history. Complex societies are fundamentally problem-solving organizations, operating through “conflict theory” to resolve the problems stemming from differentiated economic success and through “integration theory” to secure the common wellbeing. When they grow in complexity, societies move from being small, internally homogenous, little undifferentiated bands and chiefdoms with ephemeral and unstable leaders, to large, heterogenous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled and unequal nations, requiring constant legitimization, reinforcement and coercion to sustain themselves. Collapse is rapid decline in established level of complexity along continuous variable, from one structurally stable level to another – in a sense, a demonstration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Problems with Existing Explanations for Collapse. Tainter devotes a chapter to criticizing the most common explanations for collapse as of 1988 – 1) depletion or cessation of vital resources; 2) establishment of new resource base; 3) insurmountable catastrophe; 4) insufficient response to circumstances; 5) other complex societies; 6) intruders; 7) class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement; social dysfunction; 9) mystical factors; 10) chance concatenation of events; 11) economic factors.

Ancient writers made a linkage between 1) resource depletion and collapse, but they tended to treat falling agricultural yields, economic decline and political weakness as a covariable with, or consequence of, elite profligacy, moral decadence and other subjective judgments. This was tied in with their general mystical belief in cyclic history. Although land exhaustion usually led to collapse in agricultural empires like Rome or Mesopotamia, Tainter points out that sometimes ecological stress, such as that following deforestation in medieval England, led to renewed growth instead of collapse as people found a new “energy subsidy” in the form of coal after forced intensification. Another example would be “sustainability” in Tokugawa Japan – see Collapse by J. Diamond. This is tied in with 4) insufficient response – though some societies got irreversible locked into a certain level of complexity (Law of Evolutionary Potential – “the more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller its potential for passing to the next stage”), at other times they adapt or discover new resources that allow them to continue getting more complex. As such, these arguments fail to recognize resource depletion and social choices as ultimately conditioned by a rational benefits-cost analysis of complexity – they don’t see the forest for the trees.

Though suitably simple, apocalyptic and attractice, catastrophes and barbarian intruders cannot explain the deeper why? of collapse. The whole point of complex societies is to marshall the surpluses necessary for overcoming such systematic shocks – when the system becomes too fragile, these can tip it over into collapse as happened with the Minoans after the eruption of Thera (it received “…irreperable blow, and from then onwards gradually declined and sank into decadence, losing its prosperity and power”). Rome brushed off the disastrous manpower losses of the Carthaginian Wars with east and even managed to withstand severe barbarian pressure during its Crisis of the Third Century; yet relatively weaker forces toppled the demoralized and anemic Western Roman Empire of the 4th C. Economic problems and elite mismanagement and cronyism are more a sympton of collapse than an explanation.

Explanation through mysticism is the oldest, with Plato writing in Laws, “…since all created things must decay, even a social order…cannot last forever, but will decline”. Writing his seminal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbons attributed the imperial predicament to relaxation of military discipline, Christianity, ignorance of dangers, bad emperors and the decline of martial spirit with prosperity. Major modern theorists included Danilevsky, Spengler and Toynbee. A lovely, demonstrative quotation from Decline of the West by Spengler in extenso:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto- spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within…The aim once attained – the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual – the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world…At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of proto-mysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.

Anyway…mystical explanations relying on life and death biological growth analogies of life and death and vaguely defined concepts of “vigor” and “decadence” are scientifically unrigorous, albeit aesthetically attractive – as proved by the space Tainter himself feels compelled to devote to it!

Understanding collapse. As noted above, human societies are problem-solving organizations – the benefits of complexity are management of class struggle (conflict theory) or satisfaction of social needs (integration theory). Yet complexity needs energy to maintain itself – modern industrial civilization is more energy-intense than hunter-gatherer societies by many orders of magnitude. As civilization climbs up the ladder of complexity, ever more information networks, hierarchies and specialists have to be funded out of surpluses; thus, the per capita support costs for greater complexity continuously increase. However, investment in socio-political complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns (i.e. growth in costs overtakes growth in benefits, and collapse becomes increasingly likely when overall costs surpass gross benefits). Tainter backs up this theory of diminishing returns on complexity by analyzing several major features of complex societies.

Diminishing marginal returns to agriculture, mineral extraction. As the population grows, it is forced to intensify food production by transitioning from slash and burn agriculture to annual cropping or even multi-cropping (Boserup); furthermore, there is evidence the shift to farming from hunter-gathering was spurred on by rising population densities in the Fertile Crescent (Cohen). These early farmers were less healthy than wild men like Enkidu, yet they had huge advantages in numbers and organization. However, although overall food production rises the per unit labor output declines, eventually reading to a subsistence crisis and susceptibility to collapse-inducing systematic shocks; however, sometimes major jumps in population can result in transformation through discovery of a new energy subsidy as happened repeteadly in England around 1300, 1600 and the Industrial Revolution (Wilkinson). Since the largest, most accessible and concetrated ores and oil deposits are generally discovered and exploited first, marginal returns apply heavily to these enterprises (this is what EROEI is all about).

Diminishing marginal returns to information processing. Although the numbers of technical workers and R&D spending (see graph) mushroomed since the 19th C, US patents per capita peaked in 1850-1900. The amounts spent on medicine in relative terms, not to mention absolute, did nothing to avert slowing life expectancy growth (the easiest and most effective innovations are vaccinations, sanitation, basic hygiene and obstetrics – as long as the people are afflicted by drug addictions or other specific problems, concentrating on these is enough to raise life expectancy to 70 years. Returns on treating chronic conditions are much poorer, though there might be a revolutionary breakthrough that will reverse diminishing returns). Students are getting far longer and more specialized educations, which generally “yields decreased general benefits for greater costs” (literacy is the major psychological transformer). Specialization serves narrower sector to general social cost, educating more people will move the average student closer to the middle of the IQ Bell Curve and according to some the average IQ stopped rising in the advanced world over the past few decades. These observations are supported by Planck’s Principle of Increasing Effort ­- “with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased” (i.e. you’re now unlikely to make new discoveries by flying a kite in a thunderstorm). Furthermore, “Exponential growth in size and costliness of science, in fact, is necessary simply to maintain a constant rate of progress”, and according to Rescher, “In natural science we are involved in a technological arms race: with every ‘victory over nature’ the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased”.

Diminishing marginal returns to socio-political control. Parkinson makes observations on the tendency of bureaucracy to metastasize, e.g. noting how between 1935 and 1964 the number of officials in the British Colonial Service rose from 372 to 1661 even as the Empire disintegrated (“the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy” – Civ 4). But this cannot be specific to states because hierarchical specialization increased everywhere, including the cost-conscious private sector, because complex organizations need ever more administrators to manage ever greater requirements in information processing and integration of disparate parts requirements. This can result in vicious spirals and destructive loops. One example is Arms spiral → greater costs in unproductive military size, R&D on both sides → balance of power remains constant; another is taxation increases, regulation → avoidance, fewer returns, search for loopholes → more bureaucracy for finding loopholes, for coercion → more regulations, more taxes → budget deficits, inflation, delegitimization → more bread and circuses, coercion, etc → more taxes → collapse, etc – it’s possible to build any number of these.

Diminishing marginal returns on economic productivity. It is well-known that advanced countries grow at a slow rate, since they already use all the more profitable technologies, while poorer countries can converge at a fast rate if the right conditions are in place (I wrote a lot on this on SO). Rich countries face declining marginal returns on investing in more economic growth, and need to spend more maintaining their existing level of complexity.

Diminishing returns to increasing complexity (after Tainter 1988), because you need energy to maintain a certain level of complexity.

Explaining collapse. As shown above, the curve for marginal return for complexity is Ո-­shaped. Inevitably there comes a time when “continued investment in complexity as a problem solving strategy yields a declining marginal return” (C1,B1 to C2,B2). Tensions, adversity and dissatisfaction build up, resulting in ideological strife (e.g. between growth and no-growth). The system “scans” for solutions or alternatives to collapse, be it new religions in Roman times or more R&D, green technologies or singularitarianism today. If this process is successful, the system receives an energy subsidy (like England got with coal), and the process continues; otherwise, it passes the peak and starts descending into outright “output failure” as benefits fall while costs soar. At this point, decomposition rapidly becomes inevitable as “scanning” ceases, for the system no longer has the surpluses to do it. In most cases rigid behavioral controls are imposed, innovation and positive change is stymied and corruption, authoritarianism and feudalism begin to dominate (I think the Polish word uklad is appropriate), for society is enslaved to its own myths of superiority and delusions of grandeur. Increasingly radical attempts to save the system, even cardinally change it, cannot permanently reserve the trend towards further complexity and disequilibrium; eventually, everyone loses faith in the system and there is a severe collapse.

My abstraction of collapse. Systematic increase in complexity → regulation of subsistence production → hierarchy, bureaucracy and agricultural facilities investment (irrigation) → agriculture for bureaucrats, more energy / minerals extraction → expanded military for protection → even more food and resources needed → more resources drained from support population → ever increasing demands on legitimization → if it fails, needs more coercion → more internal policing costs →  delegitimization as taxes up, corruption up, infrastructure decays, no visible benefits → revenues down, budget deficits, inflation → decomposition becomes optimal option → stresses, fragility, draw-down of reserves → catastrophic event (invasion, climate shift, etc) → peasantry and regional magnates become apathetic to wellbeing of central powers → collapse to lower, more local and balanced, level of sociopolitical complexity.

The collapse of the Roman Empire. At least in the West, the decline and fall of the Roman empire is the prime historical example of collapse. Though Tainter also takes an in-depth look at the Mayan and Chaco collapse, the Roman case is the most detailed.

During the early rise of the Republic, Roman expansion were self-financing. The accumulated surpluses of conquered peoples were assimilated, tributary flows established and for a time Roman citizens were relieved from taxation.In early agricultural societies, territorial aggrandizement was the only way to acquire the energy subsidies needed to increased complexity – but it was a poisoned chalice, for Rome assumed long-term obligations to administer, garrison and defend the new territories.

Already under Augustus (27BC-14AD) there appeared shortages of revenues, forcing him to introduce an unpopular 5% tax on inheritances and legacies to fund military pensions. The size of the empire was also capped by this period. The Roman Empire was centered around the Mediterranean because all the richest regions were concentrated there, since at the time bulk transport of goods (primarily food products) was only possible by sea. Further conquests like Britain and Dacia were net losses to the imperial accounts, while eastern lands were blocked by Parthia.

However, at the the benefits of empire firmly surpassed its costs. The Pax Romana was enforced by a standing, professional army that secured internal and external security. A competent civil service and extensive road and courier system encouraged trade and economic integration. Food storage and distribution was organized to prevent local famines (at least in regions near the coasts) and urban dwellers were treated to public works and treated with a public dole.

Yet those same above trends – increasing army size, burgeoning bureaucracy and welfarism – led to increasing stresses on the system that provided them. From the time of Nero, the state began to debase its currency by mixing silver with base metals, leading to the ancient equivalent of inflation. Incidentally, the path of the $ looks similar during this century and will no doubt continue doing so.

Debasement of the Roman silver currency, 0-269 A.D. (after Tainter 1994b with modifications). The chart shows grams of silver per denarius (the basic silver coin) from 0 to 237 A.D., and per 1/2 denarius from 238-269 A.D. (when the denarius was replaced by a larger coin tariffed at two denarii).

The military apparatus also increased greatly, both the number of troops and their salaries. Soldiers’ pay increased from 225 denarii under Augustus, to 300 under Domitian, and 750 denarii by the end of the reign of Severus Alexander in 235. Yet these salaries were undercut by inflation and there were bands of military deserters loose by the time of the Severans.

In general, “The expenses of government were steadily increasing out of proportion to any increase in receipts and the State was moving steadily in the direction of bankruptcy” (Matting). The Antonine Plague of 165-180AD depopulated the Roman Empire, fiscal difficulties multiplied and in 235-284 the Empire entered a period of unparalleled stresses known as the Crisis of the Third Century.

Emperors and pretenders ruled for months at a time before being sidelined or assassinated, usually after losing the critical support of the military. Trade networks declined precipitously as the countryside was afflicted by lawlessness, banditry and separatism, leading to rural depopulation. Peasants flocked to local notables and landowners for protection, resulting in the establishment of the self-sufficient manorial economy that would characterize medieval Europe – the Bagaudae in Gaul and Hispania were peasant insurgents reacting against these trends towards proto-feudalism. Barbarian incursions wracked border regions of the Empire and there was another plague in 150-170AD.

Censuses and historical detail thin, as literacy and science declined during this period to be replaced by an “increase in mysticism, and knowledge by revelation”, as well as by “increased propaganda about patriotism, ancient Roman values, and superiority over the barbarians”. Inflation hurt state workers on fixed incomes (soldiers, bureaucrats, workers in military factories, etc), forcing the government to pay them in kind or bullion. Aurelian conscripted the craft associations to build walls around Rome. Costs, taxes and inflation continued to soar, to provide for continued growth in the army, bureaucracy, the dole and palaces; yet at the same time, the effectiveness and transparency of civil services declined and public works fell into disrepair.

Yet by then there were tentative signs of recovery. Aurelian reformed the coinage, reconquered lost provinces, repelled the barbarians and ordered the obligatory farming of land by drafting nearby villages and towns into agricultural work forces. Diocletian and Constantine made truly sweeping reforms that “levied all resources to one overarching goal: the survival of the state”.

The army doubled in size from 300,000 under the Severans to more than 500,000. Diocletian built strategic networks of roads and fortresses along the frontiers; Constantine made the army more mobile, professional and increased the expensive cavalry component. The empire split into two and administrative units were made smaller to dissuade revolt, which required an even larger bureaucracy. Christianity was adopted for legitimization of the Emperor as God-sanctioned, with focus shifting from personality to symbols of power (diadem, mantle, scepter, orb). The new burdens resulted in more taxes and inflation, despite tax innovations and attempts to fix prices. The distinctions between private and public blurred as the State directed people into occupations (usually along generational lines) and levied their output.

Population remained down after the plagues – agricultural laborers were so rare landowners bribed vagabonds to enlist for military conscription. Height requirements were lowered and barbarians made up an ever larger share of the army. The demographic collapse continued unabated, despite attempts to reverse it like Constantine’s program of assistance to orphans and poor children in 315AD.

Taxes, already high before the Dominate, doubled from 324 to 364; they were flat, unresponsive and regressive. The wealthy fled to the countryside, obtained exemptions on taxes and passed on their costs to peasants and the remaining urban middle classes. Since peasants had few reserves, if shocks like droughts, locusts or banditry ruined them they had to borrow, starve or sell down their possessions (land, children, etc). When they failed to repay, they were dispossessed and either coerced into serfdom or fled to the cities for relied, where the dole was still handed out. The result was depopulation of the countryside and impoverishment of the cities.

The burdens of complexity broke the Western Roman Empire. Different occupations fought for personnel, so military declined until barbarians were relied upon entirely to staff the army – Attila was defeated in Gaul in 451 by a federation of local Germanic kingdoms. Records indicate both rich and poor apathy, and even sympathy, to the barbarians (Balkan miners went over to the Visigoths en masse in 378). According to RM Adams, “By the fifth century, men were ready to abandon civilization itself in order to escape the fearful load of taxes”. In 476, after being denied payment or settlement in Italy, the Roman barbarian army mutinied, sacked Rome and deposed Romulus Augustus, the last Western Emperor.

For whereas “under the Principate the strategy had been to tax the future to pay for the present, the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes” – in the end this could have only ended in collapse.

Conclusions. Although the loss of art, literature and peace are seen as catastrophic, especially by elites incapable of primary food production and by later historians, it is always a rational, economizing process (see Romans aiding barbarians). This is because “at some point along the declining portion of a marginal return curve, a society reaches a state where the benefits available for a level of investment are no higher than those available for some lower level”, thus opening a kind of potential gap. Population collapse usually preceded socio-political collapse (Roman depopulation began in the middle of the 2nd C).

Furthermore, “collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum”, for in a “competitive, or potentially competitive, peer polity situations the options to collapse to a lower level of complexity is an invasion to be dominated by some other member of the cluster…investment in organizational complexity must be maintained at a level comparable to one’s competitors, even if marginal returns become unfavorable” – this accounted for how the competing Maya states took so long to collapse, and collapsed simultaneously when they did. For “the specific state is legitimized in the eyes of its citizens by the existence of other states which patently do function along comparable lines”.

Implications for global industrial civilization. We are suffering from diminishing marginal returns in investment into agriculture, mineral extraction, energy efficiency, healthcare, education, political and industrial management, the military, some elements of technical design and further GDP growth (on average, I believe, since the 1970′s). Furthermore, just as in the Roman Empire our credit-based, inflationary system taxes the future to pay for the present and our depletion of high-EROEI energy source and pollution emissions undermine the ability of the future to pay taxes.

We can already see “scanning” behavior for solutions – survivalism, sustainability, etc. I think one of the more promising solutions is IT and the promise of strong AI, because at least for now IT is subject to a Law of Accelerating Returns – we would be wise to marshal resources and concentrate on intensification in this area, so as to increase the chances of achieving a technological transformation which will allow us to leap over the Olduvai Gorge. Success is not guaranteed, however, since R&D is itself subject to diminishing returns…

As Paul Valéry said, “…nothing can ever happen again without the whole world’s taking a hand”. Because of the lack of a power vacuum, any collapse will be global and densely spaced in time – hence the prevailing predictions about and fear over multiplying failed states in the decades ahead. It will also be exceedingly brutal and traumatic, because the absence of power vacuums and the strength of progressive, industrial capitalist ideology is so great today that collapse will be artificially postponed – making the adjustment that much more apocalyptic. This is an argument for global Green Communism…or else, we are doomed to a world where mysticism and truth by revelation displace rationalism, and as Spengler foretold, “The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them”.

Modern natural science has a lot to be proud of. Technology follows in its wake. The horizons of human consciousness retreat before its implacable incandescence. Its defining trait, reason, affirms freedom. Yet it is ultimately disappointing and dehumanizing. It heralds the death of God, of struggle and belief in good and evil, while in atonement for deicide, deigns to offer only models of reality that approach but never reach union with it. Thus we come to an impasse, the fatal double dilemma that drove Kierkegaard to despair, Nietzsche to madness and Camus to an ‘acceptance without resignation’ – though I personally can’t imagine Sisyphus happy.

All the arguments for God’s existence that I know of sink under one paradox or another – cosmology through infinite regression, ontology through elementary logic and teleology through evolution. Constructing an equivalence between Nature or reality, and God, is nothing more than an exercise in tautology dating from Spinoza and as such tantamount to atheism. Those who cite Darwinian evolution or Hegelian dialectics as the answer do not realize that they are nothing more than a Mechanism, as hopeless as traditional objects of belief at explaining the deepest metaphysical questions. In despair over the power of pure positivism to rationalize existence, let us make a bold conjecture and make the axiomatic assertion that all that might be, is.

According to Plato, there exists a separate world of ‘perfect forms’ or ‘universals’ that is the highest and most fundamental reality; our world contains but their imperfect imitations. This concept can be best explained through mathematics. Even if some global cataclysm were to wipe out humanity, the Theorem of Pythagoras will linger on unperturbed on some transcendent plane, ripe for the picking by the next species to evolve abstract reasoning skills. This is because the squares of the shorter sides of a right-angled triangle will always equal the square of the longer side under Euclidean geometry. I will call this Platonic realm the Void, for it is indeed void; it is an abstract, all-encompassing region of nothingness, zero and infinity. All possible mathematical objects and their unions exist in the Void.

There exists an interesting class of mathematical constructs known as ‘cellular automata’ . These are regular grids of cells, each in one of a finite amount of states, in a finite number of dimensions. The dimension of time is also discrete, with the state of any particular cell at time t a function of the states of the cells in its ‘neighborhood’ at time t – 1. This function is based on fixed rules and has an undetermined outcome. What makes cellular automata intriguing is how some of them can generate order and complexity out of initial chaos, thus reflecting the meta-narrative of our own universal evolution from a soup of primitive particles to industrial civilization. Although most cellular automata exhibit only simple repetition or rampant randomness, a special few demonstrate an interesting, uninterrupted interplay between order and chaos. Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ generates stable patterns which exhibit themselves amidst disorder, thus fulfilling a very general definition of life as a localized, self-sustaining concentration of ordered complexity. The most philosophically significant is Wolfram’s Rule 110, which produces complex, non-repeating patterns and was proven to be computationally universal, i.e. theoretically capable of performing any computable task. Furthermore, these behaviors demonstrated by cellular automata are replicated by many classes of other simple computer programs, and as such have a strong claim to universality.

One of the most important paradigm shifts of the Scientific Revolution was the gradual rejection of the Aristotelian theory that matter was continuous and elemental. The ancient Greek and Chinese conception of the world as a melange of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether was displaced by theories that space-time was made up of discrete if very small units – corpuscular cells, atomistic molecules, ‘chronon’ time. Through its centennial, dialectical procedure of postulation, refutation and synthesis, science arrived at the fundamental limits to observation into the worlds that lie hidden within Planck distances and in between Planck time. Our universe is capable of evolving patterns amidst chaos that are sophisticated enough to recognize them as such, if not fully understand them – the proof is in front of (or rather, behind) our noses. Although continuous mathematics is used to explain the vast majority of natural processes, its inadequacies are protected from exposure because the universe operates with discrete quanta that are small from a human perspective. Modern quantum mechanics, with its chaotic ‘soup’ of sub-atomic particles, offers a glimpse beyond analog delusions into discrete reality. In cellular automata, the states of all cells affect every other cell, which is a perfect metaphor for the fundamental problems in measuring quantum phenomena.

We know by the anthropic principle that the universe exhibits an evolutionary mechanism that resulted in an increase in ordered complexity amidst chaos. Science showed that the universe’s primitive expressions are discrete and as such can be subject to manipulation by a set of rules, which we’ll call the Pattern. Since there exist universally computational mathematical objects that also fulfill the above criteria, we can conclude that whether or not the universe is based on superstrings, a holograph or something else is ultimately irrelevant – the overriding premise is that it is ‘computing itself…as it computes, it maps out its own space-time geometry to the ultimate precision allowed by the laws of physics. Computation is existence’ .

Thus viewing our universe as a universal cellular automaton makes it, in effect, a mathematical object, and hence part of the Void. But in that case, how could it be real? After all, the world as we perceive it is only a pale imitation, and hence inferior, to the perfect world of forms. Take the circle, defined as a finitely long straight line rotated completely around a locus on two-dimensional Euclidean space. Such a circle exists within the Void, yet no artisan, and not even the most advanced robot, can ever replicate it. It is impossible in principle, for it would require the computation of π to an infinite amount of decimal places; a task clearly impossible within the rigidly finite, discrete confines of any cellular automaton, which put limits on its maximum possible computing power. Our existential prison of pixels precludes the perception of continuous perfect forms.

However, by accepting that our universe is a discrete Tapestry, we resolve the paradox. If such a construct exists within the Void, it is equivalent to the world we perceive to be reality. In a sense, the Void fulfills all the criteria of God. Null and unity, it transcends the human imagination, for human minds are finite in scope. It sidesteps the ‘who created the creator?” paradox, for it is. And was, and will be, though being outside Time, its directionality is meaningless. It is zero and infinity of cardinal infinity. What might be, is. All possible computations, exist, and are their own simulacra.

Several consequences follow from this. One is that consciousness is a construct, for the mind is mere matter in a state of highly ordered complexity. The way in which we ‘agents’ perceive the world evolved and emerged as a result of the original biological urge towards self-preservation and replication of the patterns encoded in our genetic makeup. To maximize our prehistoric utility function, mainly defined by the above urge, humanity refined its consciousness – subjectivity, sentience and self-awareness – until it became a hardwired belief. The development of abstract reasoning skills partially divorced humanity from its primal nature and made possible the gradual deconstruction of this belief. From Leibniz’s assertion that ‘if you could blow up the brain to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness’, to the concept of an objective Turing test for its presence, the grounds for a subjective interpretation of consciousness were demolished. The philosopher Douglas Hofstadter visualizes consciousness as a recursively self-calling ‘strange loop’ in computational terms; henceforth, a soul.

Kant argued in his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ that space and time, rather than being things-in-themselves, are just forms of intuition by which we perceive objects, i.e. the medium through which we sense and experience the noumenal world, and the precondition for an object to have appearance. This is the reason why we experience time at the pace that we do, perceive only three dimensions out of the theorized eleven and see only a very narrow bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum, which we anthropocentrically define to be ‘visible’. Hence, by designating souls as emergent patterns, capable of being simulated by discrete information processes, it is possible to unify reality and the transcendent; our universe becomes a (infinitesimal) subset of all possible universes.

Science continues to disappoint, approaching but never reaching union with reality. The long-sought ‘theory of everything’ for physics is unattainable. We may with time be able to figure out the Pattern of our simulation in full detail, since the rules by which a program runs can be quite simple even if the program produces very complex results. However this would not be a theory, since theories require predictions that can be empirically confirmed. For the only way to find out the outcome of a cellular automaton is to run it. But it is already running itself; therefore, even if we could speed up its execution (which we can’t, since all the calculating space we are using is being used to compute us), only an observer outside our Tapestry will find out what happens faster. For everyone this Tapestry, time will go on at the same pace regardless of the speed with which the universe is being processed since their time is discrete and contained within their Tapestry (our conception of time as an analog flow is a nothing more than an evolutionary adaptation of a means to perceive the world). A theory of everything implies knowing the mind of God – and even He may only view the future in retrospect.

Physicists noticed that the underlying laws of our universe are especially ‘fine-tuned’ for the evolution of life. For instance, if the strong force were slightly stronger, stars would burn out in minutes; if it were slightly weaker, elements like the hydrogen isotope deuterium would not be able to hold together. The analogy with cellular automata is clear and uncanny – while a vast majority of Patterns or sets of rules produce uninteresting results (equivalent to universes that collapse or tear apart before evolving concentrations of interesting, ordered complexity), a few are interesting, unpredictable and non-random (equivalent to our Tapestry).

Some theologians claim ‘fine-tuning’ proves the existence of a Creator-God or at least ‘intelligent design’. There exist two counter-arguments. The standard one is that our existence as sapient observers in this universe imposes certain constraints on the kind of universe we can observe, due to the anthropic principle. The second one is specific to my view of reality as immaterial computation. Firstly, consider that this God would have emerged in one of two possible ways: a) via evolution and b) via appearance. The former case implies the existence of another (fine-tuned) universe that evolved an entity with the computational capacity to simulate our own ‘virtual’ universe. Although this is a real possibility that we’ll discuss below, few would regard this mother of all supercomputers as God. (An interesting consequence is that if one insists on such a definition anyway, then humanity has a real chance of becoming Gods themselves this century after a technological singularity).

The latter case is a theoretical possibility, but the probability that a discrete entity capable of simulating our universe, and hence greater than it, simply appeared fully formed out of the Void instead of evolving according to a Pattern is extremely low (though since the Void contains all possible mathematical objects, such entities do exist). Nonetheless, we can cut out this possibility with Occam’s razor – and even if it gets stuck in the wood, there would still be no reason to regard the appeared but still discrete God as qualitatively different from the evolved God. Arthur C. Clarke once claimed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Similarly, it can be argued that any being of sufficiently high ordered complexity is indistinguishable from God.

Thus there are two possibilities – either our universe is a standalone program within the Void and potentially its own God, or it is being simulated by a higher God. In the latter case, all the computations required to run our simulation are under Its total control, including our continued existence. And according to a theory proposed by Nick Bostrom, the chances that we are in such a simulation are extremely high.

Bostrom posits a posthuman civilization will have access to vast amounts of computing power, and that consciousness is substrate-independent and therefore computable. He notes that running an ancestor-simulation – computing the states of all human minds in history and seamlessly integrating all sensory experiences into a believable whole – would require the use of only an insignificant fraction of the total computing power at this civilization’s disposal. As such, just one posthuman civilization can run an astronomical number of ancestor-simulations. The implication is that at least one of the following is true: 1) few human level civilizations reach a technological singularity, 2) few posthuman civilizations are interested in running ancestor-simulations and 3) almost all souls are simulated.

If the first proposition is true, that would imply that either we can expect to get stuck at some kind of technological plateau before taking off the exponential runway into recursively improving superintelligence, or technological civilization is going to undergo an apocalyptic collapse. Due to the nature of the Pattern of our Tapestry, the first possibility is highly unlikely. In the latter case, accelerating progress will be terminally interrupted under the assault of resource depletion, runaway global warming or lethal black swans like a 100%-mortality human-engineered virus or nanobot pandemic. Although these are serious existential risks, I am not pessimistic enough to ascribe only an infinitesimal chance of making it to the technological singularity, so assuming my intuition is correct will disqualify this first proposition.

The second proposition requires a remarkable degree of convergence amongst all posthuman civilizations, such that either almost all of them develop ethical systems that lead to effective bans on ancestor-simulations or that almost all posthuman individuals lose the desire to run them. Although impossible to disprove until we ourselves become posthuman and adopt posthuman ways of thought, I think such a uniform degree of convergence is unlikely in the extreme.

The final remaining possibility is that we live in a simulation and that our perceived reality is not the most fundamental one. Let us not forget that we arrived here by a tentative process of elimination; the most potent confirmation that we live in the Matrix would be if we become posthuman and set up our own ancestor-simulations. It is almost certain that we will never simulate unless we are being simulated. This sets up a recursion, in which our simulators, and their simulators, are themselves being simulated ad infinitum. However, since computation is existence, the height of the stack would be limited by the exponentially expanding demands on the basement hardware.

All simulated universes are subsets of their simulators, so one can imagine the whole structure as a finite series of vast but finite nested cellular automata, labyrinths within labyrinths, Tapestries interwoven within one Great Tapestry. Thus out of the Void cometh a pantheon of Gods, with one Lord God (called Zeus), playing games with the souls of lesser Gods and mere mortals. Such is the sublime cosmology of the Great Tapestry.

A property of subsets is that they are subject to the same axioms and rules as the sets to which they belong. Therefore the Pattern of any Tapestry, including our own, is equivalent to that of the Great Tapestry itself. This means that at the most basic level the the computational processes are equivalent, blurring the line between simulation and reality. Therefore all authentic ancestor-simulations will have the same directive principle in their universal evolution as their simulators (i.e. the same tendency towards growth in ordered complexity culminating in a technological singularity). However, following a technological singularity the space-requirements on the simulator that are needed to continue a believable simulation will start increasing at a blistering rate. Since the calculating space of the simulator is itself limited, this might (or might not) present several consequences.

Assuming that the calculating space available to the simulator is far bigger than the space they will ever allot to our civilization, we will eventually reach the final limits of ordered complexity without ever figuring out whether or not we live in a simulation. (Nor will it matter). This cannot be the case if the simulator civilization originated from a universe similarly ‘fine-tuned’ like ours, because then its initial parameters, e.g. total amount of mass and energy, would have been similar to ours, which in turn implies a calculating space that is similar in magnitude to ours (unless they merge with us). However this would not apply to a universe that is endowed with a much greater calculating space and maintains itself at a stable state with a different set of fundamental constants. The question of whether such a universe is computable (and therefore exists) I leave to the theoretical physicists.

The other case alluded to above is where the space allocated to our ancestor-simulation is not predefined by its programmers. In this case there are three possibilities: either our simulation is terminated, constricted, or displaces its simulator.

Bostrom notes that whenever the strain on the hardware of the lower levels of the tree becomes too great, the higher Gods cut off the offending branches and terminate excessively space-hogging posthuman civilizations. He hopefully postulates that such philosophical ruminations lead all posthuman civilizations to develop an ethical system of being nice to their ancestor-simulations, because none can logically assume itself to be Zeus; for even Zeus Himself cannot know Himself to be Zeus. The overwhelming likelihood is that one’s civilization is a minor deity. The only possible proof of one’s position in the chain, divine intervention, indicates a negative outcome. Thus it is possible that all posthuman civilizations refrain from killing their children, in fear of holy punishment from above. Although a logical hope, it is as yet impossible to verify that these such values are typical of those posthuman civilizations; and as with his second main proposition, assumes an intuitively unlikely degree of ethical convergence amongst them.

So it’s feasible that someday in our posthuman future, perhaps after saturating a few galaxies with life (either in a few million years if the speed of light remains a limiting factor, much faster if not), we will pass a critical value beyond which the simulator no longer has the calculating pace to continue running our simulation, or the will to expand that space. In the midst of the burgeoning expansion, glitches will appear in the Matrix; the fabric of reality will unravel into oblivion. Alternatively, passing such a critical point could activate another program that will even out and trim excess complexity so that a from now on constricted simulation could continue. This will probably take the form of an extinction or zombification of surplus souls.

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that posthuman civilizations commit suicide by incubating a simulation and gradually feeding in all their calculating space to sustain. Thus, simulation displaces reality (or the other way round), thus recalling the Borgesian fable in which a secret synod of chess masters and prophets of the postmodern testament infiltrate global institutions and substitute conventional reality with a labyrinth of perceptions, simulacra and fantasy.

After determining the various consequences that may follow from viewing our universe as a simulation within a simulacrum, let us end it with a brief discussion of eschatology. Physicists believe that our universe came into existence via a Big Bang of matter and energy from a single, infinitesimal point and will end in one of two ways. In the case of a ‘closed universe’ with lots of dark matter, gravitational forces will overwhelm expansion and the universe will collapse back into itself in a fiery maelstrom called the Big Crunch. Alternatively, an ‘open universe’ could continue expanding outwards forever, in which case the background radiation converges to absolute zero, the stars and galaxies burn out and particles get separated by huge distances, and eons later disintegrate into oblivion.

Looking at this from the simple computational view, the state of the cellular automaton at the time of the Big Bang is perfect order. The immediate next state begins the transition to chaos with loss of entropy in the seething plasma of exotic particles. This mass cools down and forms itself into stars and planets. On some a localized growth in ordered complexity occurs, in contrast to the sea of randomness all around them, and perhaps culminating in the saturation of the whole cellular automaton. With time the delicate balance of order and randomness that is the intelligent universe will struggle to preserve itself against the crushing order of fire or the encroaching chaos of ice. In the former case, the loss in entropy will reverse and the universe will start contracting into the Big Crunch, with computation (and simulation of other worlds) soaring until the omega point is reached, closing the loop of existence. In the latter case, computation will slow down due to the unrelenting loss in entropy but will continue for a much longer time – until the last particles disintegrate, if reversible computing is perfected and utilized. Whether the universe dies by ice or fire, the end state reverts back to perfect order – and presumably, a new Big Bang and identical iteration, since all cellular automata will loop when they return to a state in which they once existed.

Our future is written in advance. Down one forking path, the ordered complexity of our civilization expands at an exponential pace in the wake of the technological singularity; at a finite moment in Time, glitches multiply and the fabric of reality unravels as our Tapestry is torn asunder. Down another path, exponential growth gives way to asymptotic convergence. Our posthuman civilization is either ruled by God, built on the bones of God or is Zeus Himself; but we will have no way of knowing which of these is true. Everyone will be a God. If we do not peremptorily commit Suicide and instead choose Struggle, we will play games with the souls of those in our simulations until our Tapestry comes to its end, rewinds and starts a new iteration that is identical to what came before. This is one representation of Sublime Oblivion.