My reading of the month is Unearthly Powers by an Oxford historian Alan Strathern. It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

There is much that I like in the book. Strathern avoids the ideological extremes that preoccupy today’s humanities, such as an aversion to essentialism and teleology, and the prioritization of the emic over the etic (if you have no idea what these mean, no worries, it doesn’t affect what comes below). I like his defense and practice of the comparative method in history, and his willingness to engage with questions of large-scale causation. But the most interesting and thought-provoking, to me, was the core argument of his book, stemming from the distinction that he makes between two forms of religion, which he calls “immanentism” and “transcendentalism”.

As a true scholar, Strathern defines these two forms using very precise technical language, listing ten characteristics of the first and fifteen characteristics of the second. But let me try translating the main ideas into human language.

Immanentism is really about the supernatural side of religion. It’s about gods, angels and demons, spirits, and departed ancestors. Its focus is on how these “metapersons” can be induced to avoid harming one, or harnessed to advance one’s interests. Thus, as Strathern argues, it’s primarily about power: ability to avoid bad outcomes and to achieve good ones in the here and now. Morality is local and unsystematized, or even not an important part of religion. The focus is on ritual, propitiation, and sacrifice, including human sacrifice. As a vivid example of the latter, and a great illustration of what immanentism is about, recollect how following a dire military defeat Romans during the Republican Period on several occasions buried alive two pairs of foreigners in the Forum Boiarum to propitiate the gods and to protect the city from invaders.

Transcendentalism is about salvation, liberation, or enlightenment—“escape from the mundane reality” as Strathern puts it. Variants include entrance into the paradise or escaping the endless rebirth cycle. Transcendental religions are profoundly moralizing. Ethical norms are codified and arranged into lists of prohibitions or injunctions, as in the Ten Commandments of Christianity or the Five Precepts of Buddhism. Religious specialists are highly organized and gain great power and potential autonomy from the state institutions. Interestingly, all transcendental religions repudiate blood sacrifice.

Of course, these are “ideal types” and there are many gradations in between. Immanentist religions can have transcendental elements. Furthermore, the switch to a transcendental religion may be rapid (often happening as a result of conquest or ruler conversion), but usually not complete, and the result is often a synthesis between a transcendental religion and the local varieties of immanentism. In fact, a central thread running through Strathern’s book is the uneasy coexistence between transcendentalism and immanentism, with transcendentalism periodically “back-sliding” and needing a revival or reform movement to purify it of creeping immanentism.

Because I have become involved in the debate about the Big Gods theory (see What Came First: Big Gods or Big Societies? Round Two), I was particularly interested in the profoundly different approaches to morality in immanentist versus transcendental religions. Strathern’s book made me look at the whole question of the role of supernatural beings in sustaining cooperation in large-scale societies from an entirely different angle. So here’s how my current thinking goes.

Morality in small-scale societies is sustained by face-to-face interactions. Everybody watches each other and imposes sanctions on non-cooperators ranging from mild ones, like gossip and ridicule, to severe ones, like expulsion and capital punishment. Morality is not systematized—there is no explicit list of rules, because everybody learns them the way children do. Religion is immanentist. Some spirits and deities may care about morality and even punish the bad and reward the good, but the main focus is on manipulating reality to avoid negative outcomes and to achieve positive ones. For example, the spirit of the hunted deer needs to be propitiated so that this hunt and the next one are successful.

With the rise of centralized societies, chiefdoms and archaic states, at first things don’t change dramatically. Morality is still local, which creates problems for integrating these larger-scale societies, because people coming from different local groups don’t cooperate well with each other. The nature of supernatural agents change in that they become more hierarchical, reflecting the social arrangements in the real world. But the main focus of religion is still on power, not goodness.

And then there is an abrupt (on an evolutionary time scale) rise of transcendental religions, more commonly known as World Religions or Axial Religions, because they appeared during the Axial Age. The proponents of the Big Gods theory emphasize the supernatural aspect of world religions. Ara Norenzayan argued that because “watched people are nice people” in large-scale societies the role of watchers is taken over by gods (see Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”?).

The Watcher by Kurt Huggins.  Source

But after reading Unearthly Powers I now think that this supernatural part is really a side issue.

First, the supernatural aspect varies quite a lot between Axial religions. It’s quite prominent in the Middle Eastern monotheisms (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.), but not so in the South Asian religions (Buddhism, Hinduism) in which the main moralizing force is karmic retribution. As many scholars of Buddhism emphasize, karma is not really a supernatural thing. It’s simply the operation of cause and effect. You kick a ball and it rolls away. You do really bad things, and you get reborn as a frog. No supernatural watchers or punishers are needed. And the supernatural content is almost entirely absent in Confucianism, which many scholars don’t even consider to be religion.

Second, the main watchers and punishers are not supernatural beings but very human people. They include neighbors, agents of the state, and, especially, the clerics. An amusing illustration of how the real-life “Eye in the Sky” operates is provided by the viral video of the Chinese drone operator chiding an elderly woman who failed to wear a mask during the coronavirus epidemic.

A very non-supernatural Eye in the Sky

Third, people who grow up in societies with fully moralized organized religion internalize the rules of morality. Many behave morally even when not watched and there is no possibility of punishment.

To conclude, when I first read Ara Norenzayan’s book, I was quite impressed by its main argument, and wrote a positive review (see From Big Gods to the Big Brother). But the more I learn about the evolution of religion in past human societies, the more skeptical I become. It’s a really neat hypothesis, but, as happens in science, beautiful theories are often slayed by ugly facts.

Question: What was the word for “two” used by people living in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (modern Ukraine and Southern Russia) 5,000 years ago?

Answer: *dwóH₁

This is how historical linguists reconstruct “two” in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (see Indo-European vocabulary on Wikipedia). And now evidence accumulates that PIE speakers belonged to what archaeologists call the Yamnaya culture. Sure, there is still a bit of a controversy lingering about some aspects of this reconstruction, but recent aDNA evidence, in my opinion, has quite decisively put a wooden stake into the heart of  the alternative Anatolian hypothesis. Of course, nothing in science is 100% certain (if you want certainty, your best recourse is Divine Revelation). But to me, 99% certainty is good enough.

At a very fundamental level, historical linguists can reconstruct the PIE vocabulary with a high degree of certainty because language change is an example of cultural evolution. Or, as Darwin could have said, it’s ”descent with modification.” Many aspects of language change slowly and in a remarkably law-like manner. For example, I never studied German and don’t intend to do so formally. But I’d like to learn the language as I will be spending a lot of time in Austria in the next five years. So I listen to announcements on the bus and eavesdrop on other passengers. When walking in the streets of Vienna I play the game “figure out the the meaning of this word” (on a street sign or advertisement). The game goes like this: if the first letter in a German word is “z”, try substituting it with “t”; if “t”, with “d”, “d” with “th” and so on. Replace a “b” in the middle with “v” (see here). In many cases you will recover a word that is remarkably like its English equivalent. For example, the mysterious “Diebe” after substitutions becomes “thieve”–thieves!

Back to the PIE. It is absolutely remarkable that we can reconstruct how a word sounded 5,000 years ago—and remember, the Yamnaya people had no writing!

Historical linguistics is clearly the best developed case-study of phylogenetic reconstruction in cultural evolution. But why stop with language—what about religion? My good friend and colleague David Sloan Wilson has long argued that we should use the methods of evolutionary science in the study of religion (read his great book, The Darwin’s Cathedral). Religions evolve. Early Christianity evolved from Judaism. It then split into different branches: Monophysites, Arians, Chalcedonians, …, with Chalcedonians splitting later into the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic branches. Indic religion gave rise to Hinduism and Buddhism, with the latter splitting into Hinayana and Mahayana branches.

Of course, it’s not only descent with modification; different languages and religions also borrow elements from each other. The tree model of linguistic evolution needs to be supplemented by reticulations connecting different branches. And so do trees of religions (reticulations denoted with broken lines):

These ideas have been much on my mind during the past year. With the publication of our Nature article on moralizing gods the Seshat project has broken new ground—we are now testing evolutionary theories of religion. Some critics charged that we are trying to do the impossible. Texts and records become sparse as you go back in time. And once you go to the time before writing, they maintain, you cannot say anything about religion.

But that’s clearly wrong. If historical linguists can reconstruct the sounds of languages that disappeared well before writing was invented, why shouldn’t we able to do the same with religion? In fact, it is already being done.

I just finished reading a remarkable book by one of Seshat contributors, Patrick Kirch, co-authored with Roger Green. In Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia, published in 2001, Kirch and Green develop the phylogenetic model and apply it to cultural evolution in the Pacific Ocean before the Europeans arrived there (note: the Polynesians never developed writing!). They use a “triangulation method” in which historical linguistics, archaeology, comparative ethnology, and biological anthropology are integrated for the purpose of historical reconstruction. And I would add that in the eighteen years since they published the book, we have acquired an additional powerful source of information: ancient DNA.

An integrated approach is key. For example, historical linguistics is not great at timing when different languages split (it is now clear that glottochronology is much more difficult than initially thought). But archaeology fills this gap by telling us when people arrived at different islands. And so on. Where one avenue of reconstruction fails, another comes to rescue.

Kirch and Green use the phylogenetic model to yield extraordinary insights into the world of Ancestral Polynesians: which islands they inhabited before colonizing most of the Pacific, what they ate and how they prepared their food, how their material culture and socio-political organization evolved, and how their rituals and beliefs about gods and ancestors changed with time.

From their reconstruction it is clear that such fundamental concepts as mana and tapu were well-established in Ancestral Polynesia, but they also have undergone additional evolution in different branches occupying different archipelagos in the Pacific. The deification and ritual supplication of ancestors was also virtually universal.

Of particular interest is their reconstruction of what they call “an elaboration of the pantheon” which particularly affected the Eastern Polynesian societies. First to be added to the single Proto-Polynesian god, *Taangaloa (* indicates reconstruction) was a god of war, *Tu(q)u. Later four more named gods were added to the pantheon. These innovations were accompanied by an elaboration of the ritual. As an example, Kirch and Green suggest that an important innovation during the Proto Central-Eastern Polynesian phase was *tiki (“carved human image”).

Central-Eastern Polynesians (CEP) are of great interest to us, because one of the regions that we code in the Seshat World Sample-30 is Hawaii, which belongs to this branch. Although Kirch and Green don’t directly address the moralizing aspects of the Polynesian religion, Patrick Kirch has been very helpful in answering questions about moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) that members of the Seshat project posed to him.

According to our informal and very tentative reconstruction (which still needs more expert advice!), there are clear MSP elements in Hawaiian religion. In particular, the kapu system (tapu/tabu in other Polynesian languages), which denotes what is sacred or forbidden (for more information, see this article on Wikipedia), included injunctions against deceit, theft, and murder. But these moralizing elements were of secondary concern compared to ritual infractions. Furthermore, offenses against kapu were primarily policed by human agents (chiefs and their retinues), rather than by supernatural agents (spirits and gods).

Our survey of Hawaii’s “sister cultures” (Maori, Rarotonga, Tahiti, Tuamotu, and the Marquesas) suggests that even these, relatively weak, MSP elements were largely absent in other CEP branches, with a possible exception of the Marquesas, where theft and murder also could be subject to supernatural punishments (but with the same limitations as in Hawaii). The idea of punishment/reward in the afterlife appears to be universally absent in all Polynesian cultures.

This survey raises a number of intriguing questions. Are MSP elements, which we see in Hawaii, a relatively recent innovation? Note that Hawaii was settled by colonists from the Marquesas. It is perhaps significant that MSP elements in the CEP are found only in these two cultures.

All of this is quite speculative—remember that I often use my blog as a platform for airing new ideas and soliciting comments and critique. What we need is the application of the phylogenetic model to this question by specialists on Polynesian culture (of which I am, most assuredly, not one). Careful reconstruction using the triangulation method of Kirch and Green could be complemented by more quantitative Bayesian phylogenetic models that have been developed by such cultural evolutionists as Ruth Mace and Russell Gray. In fact, Gray’s group recently (in 2015) published a Bayesian analysis of moralizing religion in Austronesia (a broader linguistic grouping that includes the Polynesians). I am in contact with the first author of the article, Joseph Watts, about the details of their data and analyses.

In conclusion, Polynesia (and, more broadly, Austronesia) is a great “polygon” that has served us well in developing a variety of approaches for reconstructing cultural evolution of prehistoric societies. But it’s not the only one. Take Indo-Europeans. Jean Haudry in 1993 compared oath formulas from a number of Indo-European languages (Old Norse, Russian, Sanskrit, and Persian) and found that they share the image of the perjurer struck by his own weapon. Was this MSP element present in the PIE culture? There is a great potential for employing the phylogenetic model to reconstruct not only past languages, but also elements of past religions. And this potential has hardly been tapped.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am not only a scientist, but also a scientific publisher. I founded and indie imprint Beresta Books in 2015 to publish academic and popular non-fiction books that do not fit comfortably within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The main, but not exclusive, focus of this imprint is on Cliodynamics, a transdisciplinary area of research after which this blog is named.

My primary motivation in launching Beresta was the changing relationship between academic publishers and scholars, which became increasingly exploitative after 2000. At the same time the rapidly evolving landscape of publishing created an opportunity for small independent publishers to challenge the dominance of the big, traditional publishing houses. Here are some of the posts I wrote on publishing in the past five years:

My Venture into the World of Indie Publishing

My Indie Publishing Venture: the Saga Continues

Ages of Discord: My Third Independently Published Book

Indie Publishing ≠ Self-Publishing

Well, I am happy tor report that on Dec. 8 Beresta has published its fourth book:

Seshat History of the Axial Age

You can read about the prehistory of this book in a blog post by the editors Jenny Reddish and Dan Hoyer.

The first three books published by Beresta were books authored by myself. But as I wrote two years ago, my plan was always to branch out into publishing books written by others. I don’t want to become a commercial publisher. Instead I’d like to continue publishing books in Cliodynamics, Cultural Evolution, and similar disciplines. Think of Beresta as a boutique scientific publisher, focusing, basically, on whatever I think is worthy of publication–what I find interesting and well-written.

Seshat History of the Axial Age (SHAA) is the first book for which my main role is as publisher, not author (I did contribute to the last, concluding chapter, but that’s all).

Now a few words about what else I learned in producing this book as publisher. Mostly, the process went smoothly, because I have already done this three times before. The great advantage of previous experience is that I have gathered a talented crew of specialists on whom I know I can rely, including a typesetter, an indexer, and a graphic designer. A new team member is an artist who drew the illustration for the cover, inspired by a relief detail from Achaemenid royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rustam, Iran. I think she and the graphic designer, who placed the drawing in the cover design, did a wonderful job:

Visit the artist’s website

Finally, about the future plans for Beresta Books. SHAA is only the first offering in the newly minted Seshat Histories series. Soon to follow are Volumes II and III dealing with the rise and spread of moralizing religion and the practice of human sacrifice. And I started working on my own book, tentatively titled Evolution of Complex Societies: Theories and Data.

About the name: ‘Beresta’ (birch bark in Russian) was used in medieval Russia as paper is used today to scribble notes for sending to a friend or business partner. The Beresta logo is styled after the Russian letter “B” as it was inscribed on a piece of birch bark with a few strokes of the stylus.

In my previous post, Historians and Historical Databases, I discussed how the Seshat Databank would be impossible without a close collaboration with historians and other humanities scholars. Today I want to give a specific example of how this collaboration works.

For those who have not followed the Big Gods controversy closely, last Spring the Seshat project published an article in Nature, Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History. The article generated a ton of positive press (as is usual for a Nature article), but it also elicited critique from some, including supporters of the Big Gods theory. We have responded to these critiques on the preprint server SocArXiv (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xjryt; https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/t8hgu).

The heart of a departed is weighed against the Feather of Ma’at Source

But the Nature paper was only the first of many planned articles investigating the role of religion, morality, and other factors in the evolution of social complexity. We have recently completed a further wave of analyses using more detailed data on moralizing religion, and testing additional theories explaining the evolution of Big Gods. The new analyses confirm our original headline finding (that Big Gods come after Big Societies) and also explore additional dimensions to this complex topic. Before we submit it a journal, however, we want to get feedback from all interested parties, including our critics.

To make the whole process extra transparent, we have posted all related documents online. The main article is on SocArXiv: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2v59j/, and it is accompanied by supplementary online materials that include the data and the analysis scripts. Our aim is to achieve maximum transparency and critical engagement—everyone who wants, can critique and comment on each phase and reanalyze the data.

But we are also breaking new ground in this project. In addition to posting data and programs, we have invested a huge amount of effort into clarifying where the data come from. And this is where the collaboration with humanities scholars become critical. Most of the work during the past several months was devoted to building “analytic narratives” underlying the Seshat data.

Analytic Narratives are formalized verbal accounts focusing on several (in our case, many) in-depth case studies. The goal of this methodology is to employ the specialized knowledge possessed by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars, who have the understanding of the particular, for the purpose of testing theories that may apply more generally. General theory (which focuses on moralizing religion in our case) imposes structure on verbal accounts by specifying which aspects of past societies we would like to get information on. But within this framework, scholars are free to explore variability between different societies, different continents, and different eras. The aim is to reflect in the document evolving interpretations and persisting controversies. Such qualitative nuance provides a much needed counterbalance to the “hard” quantitative data, which by their nature strip it away.

For those interested in looking “under the hood”, the current draft of this document is posted here:

http://seshatdatabank.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MSP_Narratives_CurrDraft.pdf

Keep in mind that it is very much work in progress—some chapters and sections contain much more text and references than others. There are several reasons for this, the main being that there are societies for which we haven’t yet been able to recruit experts. Our approach in such cases is to “prime the pump” by including an initial description, based on the reading of available sources and then invite expert feedback and elaboration on this initial text.

As I stressed in my previous post, the success of Seshat critically depends on close collaboration with professional historians and other humanities scholars. By adding Analytic Narratives to the spectrum of products from the Seshat project we aim to deepen this collaboration and, more generally, to contribute to a dialogue between humanities and sciences. The richness and quality of Seshat results will also be enhanced. I am very keen to see how this will develop in the near future.

In recent days there was much discussion by historians on Twitter of the proper and improper uses of historical knowledge in testing social science theories. It was initially prompted by the publication of a Science article last week on historical Church exposure and global psychological variation. Most of it was quite negative (I am still reading the article and its voluminous appendices, so I reserve judgment). Some of this negative reaction spilled over to Seshat as a result of Laura Spinney’s publishing yesterday a “long read” on Cliodynamics and the Seshat Databank in the Guardian. But such criticism can only come from those who know nothing about how Seshat works.

The Seshat Project is a collaboration between historians, archaeologists, and social scientists. Historians play key roles in all phases of building the Databank. Two out of five members of the core group have PhDs in History. Historians are involved in the workshops in which we develop conceptual scheme for translating knowledge about past societies into data; they consult Seshat research assistants and check Seshat data, and they fully participate in writing the resulting articles. Seshat articles typically have dozens of authors (in two cases over 50), most of them historians. Seshat would be impossible without such intense collaboration between scientists and humanities scholars. You can read more about how Seshat operates in “An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank,” in press in Journal of Cognitive History (SocArXiv Preprint).

Collaboration between scientists and humanists requires a lot more work than other interdisciplinary projects. The “two cultures” are often motivated by different research interests and goals, and use very different methodologies and languages. This is one of the reasons why Seshat spent such a long time in gestation (the project was launched in 2011, but the first article fully utilizing Seshat data was published only in early 2018). Our multi-authored articles go through innumerable iterations before the co-authors, coming from very different research traditions, can arrive on mutually intelligible and agreeable texts. This is a stiff price, but well-worth paying.

Seshat goals also reflect the diversity of motivations of the project participants. As a scientist I am primarily motivated by using the rich knowledge, possessed by the scholars of the past, in testing scientific theories about how human societies evolve over time. But over the last three decades I read and enjoyed thousands of books and articles by specialist historians and archaeologists, who delve into the intricate inner working of past human societies. Such knowledge is fascinating to me because of its intrinsic worth, irrespective of whether we capture it in the Databank.

Initially I thought that only a small fraction of historians would be interested in the Seshat data. I am happy to report that I was wrong. In fact, most historians we approach get involved. The degree of involvement varies. Some help us with identifying good general sources and answer a few questions. Others write detailed narratives and code datasheets with hundreds of variables. Most find a comfortable level of involvement somewhere in between.

Furthermore, many historians are interested not only in studying a particular society, or a segment of it, at a particular time (which is a very worthwhile and important), but also care about comparative history. Seshat allows one to start in a particular society at a particular time and focus on a particular aspect of it, and then “travel” back and forth in time, or in space, or in the conceptual space of different variables. It’s like “comparative history on steroids.”

Thus, Seshat is not only a vehicle for testing scientific theories, it is also a great informational resource both for the scholars of the past and (eventually) for general public. We are currently working on implementing features in the Databank that would make travel in time, geographical space, and conceptual space effortless. And Seshat publications are not limited to articles in scientific journals. We also produce “Analytic Narratives”, formalized verbal accounts focusing on multiple in-depth case studies. The first such narrative, Seshat History of the Axial Age, will be published in early December, and two more are in the works.

In closing, I want to reiterate that Seshat is far from being a threat to History. Seshat depends on the work of countless professional historians who are contributing to a remarkable store of knowledge about the human past. It also builds on and expands comparative history, which has been what historians have done ever since Polybius and Ibn Khaldun. Seshat also allows us to test various theories about the functioning and dynamics of past societies proposed by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and economists. By doing that, the Databank increases our understanding of how present-day societies work. And perhaps it will even enable us to change our societies so that they could deliver better human well-being. The last is not certain, but we will not know whether it is possible until we try.

Last week I visited Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) in Utrecht, where I gave a talk about my research results and plans for the Ages of Discord project. Several people on Twitter asked to see the slides, and so I am posting them on this blog.

First, here’s an abstract of the talk:

A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord
Peter Turchin
Complexity Science Hub Vienna, and University of Connecticut

Social and political turbulence in the United States and a number of European countries has been rising in recent years. My research, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and resilience to internal and external shocks. Here I look beneath the surface of day-to-day contentious politics and social unrest, and focus on the negative social and economic trends that explain our current “Age of Discord.”

Second, the slides are posted as PDF here.

Third, you might be interested in two articles that provide more detail on our research plans:

Turchin, Peter, Nina Witoszek, Stefan Thurner, David Garcia, Roger Griffin, Daniel Hoyer, Atle Midttun, James Bennett, Knut Myrum Næss, and Sergey Gavrilets. 2018. History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience. Cliodynamics 9: 124–139.

Turchin, Peter, Sergey Gavrilets, and Jack A. Goldstone. 2017. “Linking ‘Micro’ to ‘Macro’ Models of State Breakdown to Improve Methods for Political Forecasting.” Cliodynamics 8: 77–99.

As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we find such “secular cycles” (see more in our book Secular Cycles).

What was a surprise for me was to find that pre-state societies also go through similar cycles. Non-state centralized societies (chiefdoms) cycle back and forth between simple (one level of hierarchy below the chief) and complex (two or more hierarchical levels) chiefdoms. But now evidence accumulates that even non-centralized, non-hierarchical societies cycle. The work by archaeologists, such as Stephen Shennan, showed that various regions within Europe went through three or four population cycles before the rise of centralized societies (see, for example, his recent book The First Farmers of Europe).

These cycles were quite drastic in amplitude. For example, last month at a workshop in Cologne, I learned from archaeologists working in North Rhine that population declines there could result in regional abandonment. Several hypotheses have been advanced, including the effects of climate fluctuations, or soil exhaustion. But there is no scientific consensus—this is a big puzzle.

One hypothesis, which, for some reason, doesn’t get much attention, is the role of warfare in all this (I’ve written about this curious bias in this post and others). For example, a recent, and otherwise excellent article by Hofmann et al. on the rise and collapse of Tripolye mega-settlements (Governing Tripolye: Integrative architecture in Tripolye settlements) doesn’t mention words “warfare” or “war” even a single time! I’ll return to this article in a bit.

To fill this theoretical gap, I am starting a project in which we will model the rival hypotheses, including the one focusing on warfare, and will do a systematic empirical test of their predictions using data on several Neolithic populations.

But back to the Tripolye article. Hofmann et al. integrated the data coming from high-resolution magnetometry surveys (it never ceases to amaze me how rapidly archaeological methodology is advancing) of 19 mega-settlements and discovered that they all had large communal buildings. Here’s a map from the article of one well-studied settlement, Maidanetske:

The big red square with numeral 1 appears to be the main meeting/ritual building. There are 12 more intermediate size buildings, which are much larger than residential houses, and were also “integrative buildings” where joint decision-making meetings could take place (followed, it goes without saying, by feasting). What is particularly interesting is that we have a three level hierarchy here:

1. Usual houses (around 3,000 of them, implying total population in excess of 10,000)

2. Mid-level integrative buildings (12 of them), probably used to govern each district

3. Top level integrative building to govern the whole settlement.

At least, this is the reconstruction by the authors, which makes a lot of sense to me.

What is particularly interesting is the dynamics between 4100 BCE, when these giant settlements formed, and 3600 BCE, when they collapsed. It is schematically depicted in this figure from the article:

The mega-settlement was formed by a number of groups moving together. Each of the groups probably occupied a separate district with its own integrative building, and then they added the top-level meeting hall to work out the issues affecting the whole community. Later, however, mid-level meeting halls disappear, and only the top-level integrative building remained. And soon after that the whole settlement collapsed.

The authors argue that “the non-acceptance of this concentration of power and the decline of lower decision-making levels might be a crucial factor for the disintegration of Tripolye giant-settlements around 3600 BCE”. Perhaps. But this conclusion leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

First, why did the different groups move together in the first place? From almost any point of view, except one, this was a really poor decision. Such crowding together resulted in serious problems with sanitation and disease. Additionally, farmers had to waste a lot of time traveling to their fields, because such huge settlement required a lot of land to support it. The only reason for such population concentration that makes sense to me is collective defense.

There are many signs pointing to warfare as the primary mover behind the rise of Tripolye mega-settlements. The Tripolye people constructed elaborate defenses with not just one but two concentric rings of ditches. Another indicator of external conflict is burned houses. Of course, wooden houses can burn as a result of an accident, but note the green-colored “houses burnt (settlement 1)”. These houses are outside the ditch, and quite spread out. Enemy action is more likely as the cause of burning then accidental fire leaping from house to house. Finally, the authors note that the size of mega-settlements increases as one travels in the southeastern direction, and thus towards flatter steppe region, where defense is more difficult.

The second question is that at the end of the mega-settlement period, the population didn’t simply disperse out; there was a very substantial population collapse. Again, what was the reason for this? In historical periods the usual answer is pervasive endemic warfare. Not only war kills people, its effect on demography is even more due to the creation of a “landscape of fear,” which doesn’t permit farmers to cultivate fields, so that the local population gradually starves, has fewer babies, and is further diminished by out-migration. Such landscape of fear is not easily detectable archaeologically, because few people die violently (they keep to fortified settlements and are afraid to venture out).

As I said earlier, this internal warfare hypothesis is just one of possible explanations for the Neolithic collapses. We will get better answers by comparing model predictions to the data, and it looks like Tripolye would make a great case study in this research.

Scott Alexander wrote two reviews of my work on the structural-demographic theory: Book Review: Secular Cycles and Book Review: Ages of Discord. The first one, on Secular Cycles, is quite positive, but the tone of the second review is a bit uneven–generally positive, but with some notes of critique and suspicion. His suspicions of the data and theory in Ages of Discord (AoD), however, are misplaced. Still, I would be the first person to admit that AoD is a highly technical and, thus, difficult book — full of models, formulas, tables, and graphics. I am constantly thinking about a popular version of AoD, but I haven’t yet figured out how to lay it out for the general public (I am also currently completely occupied with the analysis of Seshat data). Here I offer a few thoughts in response to issues raised by Alexander.

While what follows may sound critical of his review, I emphasize (and reiterate at the end) that I greatly appreciate the amount of time and effort he invested into reading and digesting my books.

First, Alexander starts the review of Ages of Discord with on overview of empirical patterns and only much later gets to theory. This is not how AoD is organized and, as a result, he ends up confusing himself and, I think, readers. AoD is only the latest installment in my work on structural-demographic theory (see Chapter 7 and 8 in Historical Dynamics published in 2003). By the time I wrote AoD, structural-demographic theory has matured to the point where one could (and I did) make predictions about novel cases. AoD, thus, is mainly an empirical test of predictions for the USA between 1780 and 2010. It is true that the US has gone through only 1.5 secular cycles in its history, but my identification of these cycles is not based on just these 1.5 “points”. The case of the US is an “out of sample prediction”, as it is known among the analysts.

Predictions were listed in Table 1.1 of Secular Cycles, published in 2009. I devoted two chapters at the beginning of AoD to extending the structural-demographic theory to industrializing societies and refining the predictions for the US. These two chapters, however, have very significant mathematical component. By his own admission, mathematics is not one of Alexander’s strong suits, which is probably why he jumps into data right away. But by doing this, his review fails to give justice to the logical structure of AoD.

Second, Alexander does some “spot-checks to see whether the data are any good”. This is somewhat strange — all data sources are listed in AoD, does he think that I have falsified them? Naturally, he concluded that “Turchin’s data all seem basically accurate.”

Next, in an attempt to check whether I “cherry-picked the data series that worked”, he looks at a variety of random indicators, for example, treasure bonds. Here again, by missing the theoretical part he doesn’t do justice to AoD. The variables I focus on all follow from general theory. There are fundamental variables in the theory that drive the dynamics (immiseration, elite overproduction, state strength, and socio-political instability) and there are “proxies” — variables closely correlated with the fundamental drivers. Then there are variables about which the theory is silent. Treasure bonds in no way are part of the theory, and I have no idea whether they would correlate with anything important, so I never looked at them.

There are also variables that are affected by fundamental ones, but are not part of the feedback web (they don’t affect the main drivers). For example, homicide rates. We expect that popular immiseration and elite overproduction would result in social pressures for instability, and one surface indicator of that could be growing homicide rates. I discuss homicide data in both Secular Cycles and AoD. However, one should keep in mind that there are many other factors, apart from structural-demographic ones, acting on this class of variables. Thus, we do not necessarily expect a perfect correlation. In fact, while structural-demographic pressures continued to grow during the last four decades, homicide rates actually declined during the 1990s. One possible explanation is that incarceration rates have quadrupled over this period of time. But the more important point here is that homicide rates are not a fundamental driver in the theory.

A particularly strange indicator that Alexander looked at is the USD/GBP exchange rate. I have no idea why he did that. Once again, in my research on structural-demographic dynamics I do not trawl through the thousands of time-series available on the web to look for correlations. Such trawling inevitably will yield correlations, but with high probability such correlations will be spurious.

Third, one has to be careful with data on meaningful indicators, and examine its provenance. In his first review (of Secular Cycles), Alexander starts by showing “Chinese population over time.” He doesn’t specify the source, but I recognize it — it’s McEvedy and Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Unfortunately, this resource is quite dated. Furthermore, it smooths out a lot of cycles in the data. Compare it with this chart (for provenance, see Historical Dynamics):

Quite a difference! Not everything in this graphic is solid, but the main point I am making is that one simply can’t grab the first available chart; it’s important to give thought to data sources and to understand their limitations.

Fourth, you cannot take on faith various opinions — myths is not too strong a word — propounded by social scientists; they have to be evaluated critically. This is particularly true of economics, because economists have an enormous vested interest in propounding theories that would please various powers-that-be. I’ve written about it in several of my blog posts, e.g.

I am often asked, after my talks or on social media, to pass a judgment on the stability, or lack of it, of a particular country. For example, looking across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, one sees a lot of parallels with the crisis we are currently living through in the US. The rise of populism, increasing fragmentation of the political landscape—do these similarities reflect deep structural trends below the surface? Such questions can only be answered with a proper structural-demographic analysis.

A research team based in Moscow’s Higher School of Economics recently published such an analysis in Cliodynamics. The article by Ortmans and colleagues brings a wealth of quantitative data (with over 30 figures) to inform our understanding of social pressures for instability in the UK. And it shows that similarities between the UK and the US go deep below the surface events.

As I explained in Ages of Discord, one of the most important factors in the structural-demographic analysis is the balance between the supply and demand for labor. The American economy has been operating under the conditions of labor oversupply since roughly the 1970s. The main causes were immigration, the entry of massive numbers of baby boomers and women into the labor force, the export of jobs overseas, and a few others (see a series of blogs I wrote on this).

Ortmans et al. show in their article that the UK developed the conditions of labor oversupply also during the 1970s, and for very similar reasons. The shift from labor undersupply to oversupply in the UK is clearly visible in the data on unemployment rate. While before 1975 the unemployment rate stayed below the four percent level, after 1975 it never declined to that level again:

Charts in this post are by the author, using data from the Ortmans et al. article

Labor oversupply is only one part of the story. To understand the “extra-economic” factors we need to go even further back in time than the 1970s.

In the United States persistent socio-political instability, peaking in c.1920, resulted in an adoption of an unwritten social contract between the labor, the capital, and the state which ensured that workers would get their fair share of the economic growth (see Chapter 10 of Ages of Discord for details). This social contract unraveled during the 1970s.

In the UK the timing of the shifts in the social norms and institutions that regulate labor-capital relations was very similar. The first shift is vividly represented by the rise of the Labour Party, which really took off after 1910:

Source: Wikipedia

The second shift was signaled by the rise of Reaganomics in the US and Thatcherism in the UK, which resulted in determined attacks on trade unions by governments and employers, epitomized by Reagan’s victory over the Air Traffic Controllers and Thatcher’s breaking of the National Union of Mine Workers. As a result, the participation of British workers in trade union has been declining since the peak of the early 1980s:

As workers and their institutions lost political power, they similarly lost economic power. This trend is quantified by the “relative wage”—median (typical) wage divided by GDP per capita, which tells us what proportion of gains from economic growth goes to the workers. Until 1975 relative wage fluctuated around a constant level, but between 1975 and 2015 it declined by roughly a third:

Other UK structural-demographic variables (economic inequality, elite overproduction, mass-mobilization potential, and intraelite conflict) also followed trends that were very similar to those in the US (see Ortmans et al). What accounts for such a remarkable degree of parallelism between the two countries? Note that such synchronized structural-demographic dynamics are not a foregone conclusion. Although all countries in the world are affected by the same global trends, which tend to make their internal dynamics to converge, there are many internal reasons, most importantly, differing histories and cultures, that work against such synchronization. As an example, France, just across the English Channel from the UK, also an economically developed liberal democracy, resisted the trends that we saw in the UK (and the US). In particular, economic inequality in France stayed roughly constant until recently, although in the US and the UK inequality has been growing for nearly 40 years.

Ortmans and colleagues offer an answer—the rise and rapid triumph of neoliberalism, which happened during the same period in both countries. It would be interesting to make a formal test of this hypothesis. If we can develop a quantitative measure of the influence of neoliberal ideas over the minds of various governing elites in European countries, then would it correlate with the increased economic inequality and other structural indicators? This would be a very interesting project.