History, Fast and Slow

Historians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history, turning it from a jumble of haphazard facts (“just one damn thing after another”), into something measurable, testable and — most importantly — predictable.

That, in short, is the message of Peter Turchin’s provocative new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. A theoretical biologist by training, Turchin came to the study of history late, after decades spent developing mathematical models for interactions between predators and prey. At some point he realized those same models could be applied to the boom-and-bust cycles governing the fortunes of states and empires.

Blessed with tenure, Turchin thus made a risky midcareer move to a different field. Or rather, with the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone, he co-founded a brand new one, which they dubbed cliodynamics. This is meant to be a “new science of history” that exposes the hidden processes driving political instability in “all complex societies.” End Times is at once a primer on this “flourishing” new field, which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a direct application of it to the political landscape of the United States as it appeared in the last quarter of 2022.

Turchin promises at the outset of the book that, by treating history itself as “Big Data,” he and his collaborators can explain why everything that happened in the past happened, and tell us, with reasonable certainty, what will happen next. Tackling the past, present, and future is a big job. As a consequence, the pace of End Times is brisk, the arguments flashy, and the conclusions, for the most part, unsatisfying.

The overall thesis of Turchin’s book is disarmingly simple. History is shaped by interaction between the elites and the masses. When these two groups are in equilibrium, harmony reigns. But when too many people are vying for elite status all at once, things go out of whack, and instability becomes inevitable. At this point, there are only two real ways to bring the system back in line. The first is to turn off the “wealth pump,” Turchin’s term for whatever economic mechanism — technological change, tax policy, or even agricultural overpopulation in the case of medieval France — is at work in a given moment enriching the elites and depressing the relatives wages of the masses. The second is for the elites to physically eliminate one another in a revolution or civil war.

Elite overproduction is thus for Turchin what class conflict was for Marx and asabiyyah, or group cohesion, was for Ibn Khaldun: It is the engine driving history forward. However, over the course of End Times, Turchin never pins down what exactly defines an elite, or whether they come in different or competing forms. Are cultural elites, for instance, distinct from economic elites, or political elites from religious elites? His explanation that elites are “power holders” is not so much clarifying as circular. For Turchin, elites — whether they are English barons, Russian serf owners, or Southern planters — are a natural fact, like gravity or the rain.

Some elites are more dangerous than others, however. Unemployed degree holders, according to Turchin, have been responsible for most social upheavals reaching back to the Revolutions of 1848. The law, a magnet for the politically ambitious, has been a particularly hazardous profession; as Turchin notes, Robespierre, Lenin, Castro, Lincoln, and Gandhi were all lawyers. In his telling, elite colleges have become factories for the creation of counter-elites, waiting to destabilize existing institutions and usurp the role of existing elites. The most dangerous of these by far is Yale Law School, that “forge of revolutionary cadres,” having produced both left-wingers like Chesa Boudin and right-wingers like Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers.

Even if the remark about “revolutionary cadres” is made in jest, it is one of many moments in End Times that leads a reader to question the objectivity of Turchin’s take on American politics. Is the Republican Party really in the process of becoming a “true revolutionary party”? Maybe if you see Steve Bannon as its Lenin. Did “The Establishment” run a “counterinsurgency campaign” to get Trump out of office in 2020? Only if you think the election was rigged.

Some of the problem comes from his sources. Turchin intersperses the book with interviews with voters drawn from different rungs on the American social ladder. There is Steve, a blue-collar guy who thinks liberal elites are driving America into the ground; Kathryn, a Beltway 1-percenter who reads Steven Pinker to reassure herself that life has never been better than it is right now; and Jane, an Upper East Side Trotskyite hoping to bring the system down from the inside — which is why she’s a student at Yale Law.

The problem is that all of these figures are fictional, products of Turchin’s limited political imagination. Shorn of real-life interlocutors, his account of contemporary politics feels like the generic product of an ideological echo-chamber. This has an unfortunate effect on End Times’s predictions. Some of Turchin’s forecasts have already been disproved. Will Tucker Carlson be the “crystallization nucleus” for the formation of a genuinely insurgent, anti-establishmentarian Republican Party? Even a year ago, when End Times was published, that seemed like a stretch, but after Carlson’s firing by Fox News this past April, it seems about equal to my hopes of becoming starting quarterback for the Steelers.

Other predictions in End Times are more ominous, and even harder to credit. Turchin’s historical models predict that America will go through a spasm of political violence in the 2020s bad enough to thin the herd of elite aspirants and thus restore political cohesion, only for the violence to recur in 50 to 60 years. Only if wages can be brought up in the near term can this recurrence of violence can be avoided. However, even if this hypothetical New New Deal were to be implemented, it would not prevent a major internal crisis sometime later this decade.

Is America really on the cusp of a second Civil War? Perhaps, perhaps not, but no concrete piece of evidence presented in End Times would lead you to think so. Turchin has valuable things to say about rising inequality in the United States. But the connection between elite enrichment and popular rebellion is neither reliable, nor predictable — least of all in democracies.

In the absence of clearly drawn historical mechanisms, we have to trust Turchin’s models. But he never lets us see under the hood. For an approach to history that prides itself so much on quantitative rigor, cliodynamics — at least as presented in this book — seems strikingly low on actual data. Not a single graph or chart graces the pages of End Times. A pair of appendices do promise to explain the detailed workings of the databases and computations underlying Turchin’s predictions and pronouncements. But while this annex features a variety of things, including ruminations on Tolstoy, scenes from a science-fiction novel, and a rather charming thought experiment about social scientists orbiting Alpha Centauri, it does not clarify the inner workings of cliodynamics. All it offers are generalities along the lines of “one death is a tragedy … but a thousand deaths give us data” without ever explaining what it is that makes such data useful.

Moreover, some of Turchin’s rougher calculations seem empirically questionable. England and France are said to go through synchronized cycles of unity and disunity of nearly equal, century-long length. England is said to have entered its integrative phase in 1497, after which it “did not have another rebellion for two generations.” But that is true only if one ignores the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, and the other disorders that accompanied the introduction of the Reformation to England. Similar creative accounting crops up throughout the work.

Turchin is singularly ungenerous to professional historians. He rarely cites the work of scholars in the field, preferring to rely on his own summaries of major events or Wikipedia. Instead of crediting major historiographical concepts, such as the Military Revolution of the 17th century, to their original articulators, he refers readers to his own (often, forthcoming) books. At one point, Turchin even expresses his regret that so much precious historical knowledge is trapped in books and articles and — worst of all — in the “heads of individual scholars,” and fantasizes about a future in which spiderbots could automate the process of learning and harvest information directly from experts’ brains. One gets the feeling reading End Times that Turchin would like to do away with the messy business of human analysis and judgment entirely: all of the things that make history, from his perspective, such a frustratingly inefficient discipline.

Peter Brown, one of the great humanists of his age, approaches the question of knowledge production from the polar-opposite stance. Brown is famous for pioneering the study of late antiquity as a period separate from the classical age on one side and the Middle Ages on the other. In his new memoir, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, he traces the gradual formation of his own “historical sense.” In Brown’s telling, the cultivation of this feeling for the otherness of the past is the work of a lifetime. It happens through contact with great texts and powerful intellects, as well as with the physical landscapes in which historical events unfolded. It is also intimately related to a scholar’s origins, and the way their individual descent primes them to experience the past through a specific lens.

Journeys of the Mind begins with Brown’s own past, in Ireland and, for a brief period, in Sudan, where his father worked as an engineer for the railroad. Growing up as a member of Ireland’s Protestant minority sensitized Brown to the power of religion to shape and divide society. Life among his extended Anglo-Irish family, full of people “dressed in shabby tweed coats” who had seen better days, taught him a valuable lesson about the price of serving an empire in decline. Sudan, meanwhile, confronted Brown with an alien landscape, though a barely remembered one; he would later recover it, in part, by reading the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose work on Sudanese witchcraft would prove a crucial inspiration to his own work on the holy men of late antiquity.

Brown structures the book around a series of encounters with his own holy men (and women): charismatic teachers met either in person, or, just as frequently, on the page. Many of these encounters happen at home, with a young Brown perched in a reading chair next to a coal-fired heater nicknamed the “Moloch” or in the reading room of the National Library of Ireland, in Dublin, devouring works by such luminaries as Johan Huizinga and M.I. Rostovtzeff. Book by book, we watch as his conception of whole epochs, especially the long centuries between the conversion of Constantine and the High Middle Ages, slowly takes shape. Many of the great breakthroughs in Brown’s own thought, including the realization that late antiquity was a period deserving to be studied in its own right and not in relation merely to the end of the Roman Empire, come about as a result of this solitary reading, most often of authors writing in languages other than English.

Other teachers Brown knew personally. We get to meet several of his intellectual heroes, chief among them the French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou, and inspirational figures in other fields, like the British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Brown writes of the great Piedmontese historian of antiquity Arnaldo Momigliano who was less a teacher than a supervisor, for to be instructed by him would have been “akin to being taught by a supernova in full explosion.”

We also get to watch an academic career unfold according to a completely different rhythm from what would be the case at present. For Brown, long years of deep preparation in the classics began in earliest childhood. Three years at Oxford constituted a training in medieval history as deep as it was narrow, with a monomaniacal focus on a single set of final exams. A prize fellowship to All Souls College offered seven years of academic freedom, unencumbered by any obligations other than a vague expectation of producing a major piece of scholarship before its end. When it finally arrives, the work in question — a biography of Augustine of Hippo which remains the standard text on the subject — answers all these hopes and more.

Inevitably, this detailed accounting of colleagues, classes, and articles produces some longeurs. Brown spends far too much time on his Irish ancestors and earliest childhood, And only those with a fanatical devotion to the intricacies of the University of Oxford system will be spellbound by his accounts of 1960s’ curricular reform. But these slow patches are made up for by brilliant passages of exploration. Travels in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt brought Brown in contact with worlds of belief — and everyday suffering — akin to the ones he was reconstructing from late antiquity. Occasionally his disinterested pursuit of knowledge is overtaken by political events. Although his travels in the late 1970s exposed Brown to a growing current of political Islam, the outbreak of the Iranian revolution caught him by surprise. But it’s not surprising that he was surprised, for, as he notes, “Historians are often bad prophets”:

Their business is diagnosis. They can sometimes pick up with considerable alertness hints of strain and of unappeased anger. But they seldom commit themselves to a prognosis. They do not know the future course of the malfunctions and ancient grievances that they may have spotted.

It’s good advice, which Peter Turchin and his fellow cliodynamists might benefit from.

One comes away from Journeys of the Mind, though, thinking less about the unknowability of the future than about the sheer quantity of time and effort required to comprehend the past. Like learning a foreign language, historical interpretation takes immersion: immersion in texts, immersion in commentary, immersion in geographical location. And immersion cannot be rushed. Just the linguistic ability required to study late antiquity seems beyond daunting. Over the course of his career, we watch Brown re-learn Greek (left behind at 13), and then progress on through Hebrew, Syriac, Persian (he gets good enough to lecture in it), and more. At Princeton, the rumor was that he knew 18 languages, though even this count wouldn’t include Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language whose study Brown has begun in retirement.

The great lesson of Brown’s scholarship, particularly as it relates to the growth and development of Christianity in a pagan world, is likewise about duration. There is no hidden motor driving history forward, and no mathematical model can show us the way. Fundamental transformations, when they come, are always unexpected. They take time to happen, and they take time to understand.