Asabyia, or the confidence of elite civilizations

Meditations on War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin, and The Muqaddimah by Ibn-Khaldun (a man whose heart was as great as his mind—if you claim the same gifts, go read him ASAP).

Historical empires are a standard method of maximizing human population density. Population is maximized from the center, the capital and/or central cluster of cities, out to the periphery where it is least dense. Ethnic agglomerations differ from empires in that they have (had, they no longer exist for the most part, among our modern urban societies) less well-defined centers, more mobile and diffuse in terms of population density.

The inter-ethnic barrier Peter Turchin describes is a line drawn between two or more expanding waves of population density of different and incompatible ethnicity (compatible ethnicities tend to blend, the denser absorbing the lesser ones, more or less aggressively). Normally, this barrier occurs along the least densely populated peripheries of these groupings. Its low population density is only increased as imperial armies and ethnic raiding parties cross over and/or fortify it. This is a high-lethality area where cultural evolution is accelerated by lethal competition and reduced carrying capacity. The outcome of evolution within this omnicidal Petri dish is a spike of mutual confidence among survivors (Khaldun’s asabiya plus Turchin’s elaborations). Comparatively speaking, this would be a social aberration, similar to bacteria learning how to pump antibiotics from their cells, even though this energy expenditure would be prohibited under normal circumstances of mutual competition with organisms that did not burden themselves with such a task. This social aberration (maximized confidence) permits smaller populations of “barbarians” to overcome/absorb greater, seemingly better organized ones and appropriate their resources (carrying capacity – land), reducing the opponent’s population density and increasing their own.

Though human population density has increased mindlessly throughout history – insofar it was able – this was not an inherent good. Population densities below a certain threshold do not permit effective resistance against denser outside concentrations – even if confidence spikes (as it would, inevitably, in smaller conglomerations competing with other small ones). Beyond a certain threshold, the population density of successful empires exceeds carrying capacity (multiplied by technology as appropriate), confidence is replaced by rational strategizing and moralists begin punishing saints and promoting knaves in their place (see Turchin’s definitions), instead of the reverse, in an attempt to solve this unsolvable problem. This would resemble an out-of-control immune response in an otherwise healthy organism. Both spikes and troughs of confidence would be situational aberrations. At that point, a lesser population density wave, its confidence spiking, attacks and takes over the denser one whose confidence is in trough.

This cycle will be reenacted endlessly until one world community (empire is an inappropriate term, since empires are built to fight other empires/ethnicities and there would be no other such to confront the world community we are talking about here) finds a way to regulate planetary population densities to just below sustainable carrying capacity, each sub-population within its own biosphere. Civilization is a series of clumsy attempts, constantly refined by disaster, to solve this problem. Our central problem is therefore not technological development, nor even peace, but the voluntary self-regulation of population densities to sustainable levels corresponding precisely with carrying capacity times technology properly applied (I might say reverently applied) of indefinite duration. The stabilization of optimal confidence levels, instead of feed-back transitions from spikes to troughs and corresponding military chaos.

There remain several problems: how is confidence boosted and how is it diminished within large human populations? The diminishing part seems easier to resolve. As womenfolk who belong to conquered peoples or declining empires witness their natal families being massacred and social structures destroyed, as they are raped and enslaved by violent strangers, as new periods of hunger and misery replace prior times of sufficient food and relative peace, they will undergo physiological stress factors that will subtly warp their children’s minds, both before and after birth. These affects will be both physiological and behavioral, increasing the number of knavish children and reducing that of saints, producing heightened levels of selfishness, antisocial behavior and social collapse.

Recall that we are speaking of very large numbers of people over great stretches of time. Turchin speaks of this type of transition, from confidence to selfishness, as taking hundreds of years for a full cycle within a given population, several dozens of generations. At any given time, even during the here and now, countless women are abused and their children grow up damaged by this abuse. But under optimal conditions and ideally, a majority of women would remain content (less stressed) and that contentment would reflect a healthier crop of children and greater levels of social cooperation. At least as long as population density did not exceed carrying capacity multiplied by sustainable technology.

How is it, though, that the greatest historic outbreaks of confidence have occurred among relatively minor tribes at interethnic boundaries – a location so lethal that it would seem to optimize the victimization of women and corruption of their children? The only alternative would seem to be the advent of truly wolf-like small societies within this zone: infinitely cunning, brutal and successful in their attacks upon outsiders, yet angelically benign with respect to their own women and children. How this paradox arises (powerful military groups are by nature abusive of their children) I do not know. Perhaps there is a level of social stress and military peril beyond which the increase in wife and child abuse becomes paradoxical, the way massive or continuous dosages of a drug would produce the opposite outcome expected? This topic requires intensive study.

The same can be said of reduced confidence levels in well-fattened old empires en route to decline. What is it about the provision of adequate rations, social order and reduced stress that would reduce confidence levels and replace them with selfishness and destructive social conflict? In short, why would overall peace corrupt civic virtue, while the threat of annihilation would appear to groom it? This topic requires even more intensive study.