Predicting History
History isn't over. Despite loud proclamations twenty years ago that the end of the Cold War marked "the end of history" and the beginning of a time when everything would essentially be stable and the same forevermore, that hasn't happened, and it won't. The one thing we can be certain of about the future is that it will be different from today.
That's why I find the flailing everywhere from Time Magazine to the internet baffling -- the idea that the borders of the United States could change is simply incomprehensible! Why? The borders of nearly every other country in the world have changed in the last century. Half of the people reading this entry, the half who live in Europe, have experienced the borders of their country or those of neighboring countries changing in their lifetimes. Why in the world would it be incomprehensible that it might happen to me? Am I somehow more charmed than selenak or bwinter? Somehow so special that something that happens all the time -- new constitutions, new borders, new governments -- is impossible? Inconceivable? As Inigo Montoya says, "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
History is happening now, and history is change.
But that change is not without pattern. Historians as far back as Hegel in the 19th century have remarked on the predictable patterns of history, sometimes ascribing them to the hand of God or to outdated theories of economics, but the answer is simpler than that. When A usually causes B, and B usually causes C and C usually causes D and D usually causes A, you have a cycle. It's not supernatural. It's not ideological. It's simply cause and effect.
For example, a totalitarian government makes enemies. There is dissent. So they crack down, offending and injuring more people. Who then dissent. So there is more dissent, hence more crackdowns. More people are angry. More people defy the rules. There are more crackdowns, harsher punishments. That hurts more people and convinces more people that the government is bad, so there is a revolutionary movement born. And the government has created the resistance they feared. This happens over and over and over again, because most of the time A causes B and B causes C and C causes D. The only way you break this pattern is when an individual deliberately chooses to do something other than D -- example in point, Gorbachev.
The pattern at work here is a large one, one that takes generations to play out fully, and hence is difficult for anyone to see happening in full in their lifetime. The pattern is this: states grow, amassing more wealth and power and annexing more territory. As a result, they develop regionalization, often in the form of a more developed original area and hinterlands. Rome and Italy. Alexandria and the Chora. Moscow and Russia in the 19th century. London and Britain. The rising urban area invents things and makes things using raw material from the provinces. However, in order to maintain this, there must be a continual supply of raw material, of new things. And so there is expansion into new territory, creating new markets and new sources of supply. Empire is born. Nations acquire far flung possessions. Rome acquires Gaul and Greece. Russia acquires Mongolia. Britain acquires India and Australia.
But it is not possible to expand infinitely into new markets, because markets are not infinite. And eventually each capital area reaches a level of population saturation where it is unable to feed itself and depends on a fragile and complicated web of infrastructure to provide basic services like water and food that are easily disrupted, and that when disrupted are disastrous. Millions of people depend on very fragile systems and would literally starve if those systems were disrupted for three or four weeks. Moreover, systems reach capacity, including governmental systems. Stretched beyond capacity, the quality of government diminishes. Systems that work fine for four hundred people or four hundred thousand cannot handle forty million. They break.
And what happens is decretion. Large nations divide into smaller ones. We've seen this twice in the twentieth century, with the British Empire and the Soviet Union. When a state reaches such a size that it is ungovernable and its infrastructure is insupportable, it decretes. A causes B. When capacity is exceeded, when vulnerable infrastructure becomes untenable, when quality drops, decretion occurs.
We see every one of these warning signs in the US today. Our 18th century systems cannot meet the needs of the 21st century. The megapolis along the northeast coast is incredibly fragile and will be decimated by a major disaster. (And no, Sandy wasn't a major disaster. Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane, something that happens every two or three years in the southeast. It may have been the storm of the century where it hit, but compared to Katrina it was a thundershower. An actual major storm will kill tens of thousands.) Our economic expectations are based on dominance in markets that do not exist, and barring another massive war in Europe will not exist.
Moreover, our governing systems have reached gridlock based on actual equal splits in votes. The size of government we actually need to handle the second largest population under one flag in the world is more than we're willing to pay for, and exceeds efficiency. It is not possible to deliver services to hundreds of millions of people as easily as it is to deliver services to a couple of million. It requires a vast and inefficient bureaucracy. And yes, I am for services. But the models of successful socialized medicine, for example, require a much smaller population. Finland or France does not have the population, the size, or the diversity of the US. It's like being a teacher -- a good teacher can teach twenty children well. Can he or she teach sixty equally well? There is a reason that we have multiple elementary schools in the same town -- because smaller schools work better. There is a reason we have multiple hospitals rather than one MegaHospital -- because smaller hospitals deliver better care. If a doctor has 300 patients, he or she knows them all. If he or she has 30,000 patients, they're just names if that. The quality of care cannot be the same. The quality can only be improved by reducing the size of each system.
We will decrete. That is historically inevitable. There is no American Exception, that we are the only nation in the world immune to history. What we have to decide is how. Our challenge is to channel the flood, to make conscious decisions about how we are going to chart our future in ways that are humane and peaceful. Like Gorbachev, we can see the writing on the wall. But he, an individual, chose how to respond to the crisis of his time. Solidarity in Poland was not Prague Spring or Budapest in 1956 -- because he as an individual chose to respond differently. He did not choose to use nuclear weapons on breakaway republics or on European nations leaving the Soviet systems. He did not choose to use military force.
We are not victims of history. We are its masters. We choose how to respond to the crises of our time. A leads to B and B leads to C -- but we decide if we want C to lead to D or not. We don't get to choose the vast trends, the massive tides that shape our time. But we choose how we as a people respond. And that's power.
That's why I find the flailing everywhere from Time Magazine to the internet baffling -- the idea that the borders of the United States could change is simply incomprehensible! Why? The borders of nearly every other country in the world have changed in the last century. Half of the people reading this entry, the half who live in Europe, have experienced the borders of their country or those of neighboring countries changing in their lifetimes. Why in the world would it be incomprehensible that it might happen to me? Am I somehow more charmed than selenak or bwinter? Somehow so special that something that happens all the time -- new constitutions, new borders, new governments -- is impossible? Inconceivable? As Inigo Montoya says, "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
History is happening now, and history is change.
But that change is not without pattern. Historians as far back as Hegel in the 19th century have remarked on the predictable patterns of history, sometimes ascribing them to the hand of God or to outdated theories of economics, but the answer is simpler than that. When A usually causes B, and B usually causes C and C usually causes D and D usually causes A, you have a cycle. It's not supernatural. It's not ideological. It's simply cause and effect.
For example, a totalitarian government makes enemies. There is dissent. So they crack down, offending and injuring more people. Who then dissent. So there is more dissent, hence more crackdowns. More people are angry. More people defy the rules. There are more crackdowns, harsher punishments. That hurts more people and convinces more people that the government is bad, so there is a revolutionary movement born. And the government has created the resistance they feared. This happens over and over and over again, because most of the time A causes B and B causes C and C causes D. The only way you break this pattern is when an individual deliberately chooses to do something other than D -- example in point, Gorbachev.
The pattern at work here is a large one, one that takes generations to play out fully, and hence is difficult for anyone to see happening in full in their lifetime. The pattern is this: states grow, amassing more wealth and power and annexing more territory. As a result, they develop regionalization, often in the form of a more developed original area and hinterlands. Rome and Italy. Alexandria and the Chora. Moscow and Russia in the 19th century. London and Britain. The rising urban area invents things and makes things using raw material from the provinces. However, in order to maintain this, there must be a continual supply of raw material, of new things. And so there is expansion into new territory, creating new markets and new sources of supply. Empire is born. Nations acquire far flung possessions. Rome acquires Gaul and Greece. Russia acquires Mongolia. Britain acquires India and Australia.
But it is not possible to expand infinitely into new markets, because markets are not infinite. And eventually each capital area reaches a level of population saturation where it is unable to feed itself and depends on a fragile and complicated web of infrastructure to provide basic services like water and food that are easily disrupted, and that when disrupted are disastrous. Millions of people depend on very fragile systems and would literally starve if those systems were disrupted for three or four weeks. Moreover, systems reach capacity, including governmental systems. Stretched beyond capacity, the quality of government diminishes. Systems that work fine for four hundred people or four hundred thousand cannot handle forty million. They break.
And what happens is decretion. Large nations divide into smaller ones. We've seen this twice in the twentieth century, with the British Empire and the Soviet Union. When a state reaches such a size that it is ungovernable and its infrastructure is insupportable, it decretes. A causes B. When capacity is exceeded, when vulnerable infrastructure becomes untenable, when quality drops, decretion occurs.
We see every one of these warning signs in the US today. Our 18th century systems cannot meet the needs of the 21st century. The megapolis along the northeast coast is incredibly fragile and will be decimated by a major disaster. (And no, Sandy wasn't a major disaster. Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane, something that happens every two or three years in the southeast. It may have been the storm of the century where it hit, but compared to Katrina it was a thundershower. An actual major storm will kill tens of thousands.) Our economic expectations are based on dominance in markets that do not exist, and barring another massive war in Europe will not exist.
Moreover, our governing systems have reached gridlock based on actual equal splits in votes. The size of government we actually need to handle the second largest population under one flag in the world is more than we're willing to pay for, and exceeds efficiency. It is not possible to deliver services to hundreds of millions of people as easily as it is to deliver services to a couple of million. It requires a vast and inefficient bureaucracy. And yes, I am for services. But the models of successful socialized medicine, for example, require a much smaller population. Finland or France does not have the population, the size, or the diversity of the US. It's like being a teacher -- a good teacher can teach twenty children well. Can he or she teach sixty equally well? There is a reason that we have multiple elementary schools in the same town -- because smaller schools work better. There is a reason we have multiple hospitals rather than one MegaHospital -- because smaller hospitals deliver better care. If a doctor has 300 patients, he or she knows them all. If he or she has 30,000 patients, they're just names if that. The quality of care cannot be the same. The quality can only be improved by reducing the size of each system.
We will decrete. That is historically inevitable. There is no American Exception, that we are the only nation in the world immune to history. What we have to decide is how. Our challenge is to channel the flood, to make conscious decisions about how we are going to chart our future in ways that are humane and peaceful. Like Gorbachev, we can see the writing on the wall. But he, an individual, chose how to respond to the crisis of his time. Solidarity in Poland was not Prague Spring or Budapest in 1956 -- because he as an individual chose to respond differently. He did not choose to use nuclear weapons on breakaway republics or on European nations leaving the Soviet systems. He did not choose to use military force.
We are not victims of history. We are its masters. We choose how to respond to the crises of our time. A leads to B and B leads to C -- but we decide if we want C to lead to D or not. We don't get to choose the vast trends, the massive tides that shape our time. But we choose how we as a people respond. And that's power.