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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
November, 2003
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's edition contains a review of Stephen Blaha's book "The Lifecycle of Civilizations".
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to
anyone you think might be interested.
Marc Widdowson
P.S. Sorry for the multiple copies of the last newsletter. Internet problems meant I wasn't sure whether the button
press (to send the newsletter) had been registered, and so I tried it several times. As you found out, the button
presses were being registered after all!
2. REVIEW: THE LIFECYCLE OF CIVILIZATIONS BY STEPHEN BLAHA
This is a very interesting book and it has some important lessons for us, but overall I don't think it represents
the right route to a formal theory of history. Of course, you have to start somewhere and I don't want to detract
from the author's achievement. He is obviously very intelligent, and his mathematical approach is ingenious.
Blaha's starting point is the theory of civilisations which Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) described in his mammoth
work "A Study of History". The main theoretical ideas that Blaha extracts from there are the notion that
civilisations typically last 1000 years, and Toynbee's crucial observation that civilisations exhibit a "three-and-a-half-beat"
pattern.
According to Toynbee, civilisations go through three-and-a-half down-up cycles (or rout-rally cycles as Toynbee
has it). The general pattern is for the civilisation to go through an initial growth phase, then to experience
a 'breakdown' leading to rout-rally-rout-rally-rout-rally-and-final-rout. Blaha recognises in this the pattern
of a damped harmonic oscillator. He therefore suggests certain considerations about resistance to cultural change
which lead to the equation for a damped harmonic oscillator. He then adjusts the parameters in his theory to ensure
that they lead to 3.5 beats before the oscillation dies out, and to ensure that the overall time from start of
the initial growth phase to the last oscillation is 1000 years.
Much of the rest of the book involves applying this pattern in various ways. He shows how it fits the known events
of historic civilisations. He also speculates about extraterrestrial civilisations that might have different values
for the parameters and also what would happen if a change in human lifespan led to older, more conservative populations
which would be more resistant to culture change (thus increasing the amount of damping on the harmonic oscillator).
Once the initial theory has been established, the book gets a bit repetitive. Nevertheless, his approach offers
considerable food for thought, and there are several areas in which one can see that it is ripe for development.
What oscillates in Blaha's theory is something he calls 'societal level'. He never really defines this but when
he gets close to doing so, in a rather hand-waving manner, it seems to be a measure of something like the mood
of the civilisation, which swings from optimism to pessimism. He explicitly denies that it represents anything
like power or wealth, let alone population size or territorial area.
Blaha's theory therefore has only one variable (plus time), and this apparently corresponds to something a bit
like the dark age theory concept of 'social cohesion'. This is the most fundamental criticism of Blaha's approach.
It has been recognised for several centuries that human societies are actually described by THREE key variables,
i.e. the political, economic and social. Maybe, as a first approximation, you can condense these into one variable,
but in the long run you will never properly understand the dynamic of society unless you recognise the separate
existence of all three societal dimensions.
The vagueness with which Blaha defines societal level means that he has a lot of leeway in fitting historic events
to the curve. This is another criticism of his approach. It is too easy to stretch the facts to fit the theory,
i.e. in deciding what facts to quote and how to interpret them. For example, a great defeat for a civilisation
can be placed at the crest of the wave (on the basis that the crushing defeat marks the beginning of the downwave)
or it can be placed in the trough of the wave (on the basis that the crushing defeat is indicative of how low the
civilisation has sunk). Blaha does both in order to suit different circumstances.
He is also selective. For example, he mentions the Gothic victory over Rome at the battle of Adrianople (AD 378)
because it comes at the beginning of what his graph suggests should be a down-wave for the Roman empire. But he
conveniently overlooks the disaster of Cannae (216 BC), which would come in the middle of what his graph shows
to be an up-wave.
Blaha says that historic events seem to fit the curve 'extraordinarily well', but this is not surprising because
it is arguable what the curve actually represents and Blaha changes his interpretation from diagram to diagram.
For example, when he discusses the interaction of an extraterrestrial civilisation with an earth civilisation,
he seems to treat societal level as indicative not of mood but of something like technological sophistication (i.e.
the alien civilisation is said to be at a higher societal level just because it has a higher technology).
Despite my criticisms, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested like me in theoretical models of history.
It should stimulate ideas and drive us on to develop improved theories.